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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Researchers from Purdue and Colorado State universities have discovered that the fungus responsible for thousand cankers disease, a lethal affliction of walnut trees and related species, has a rich genetic diversity that may make the disease more difficult to control.

Anesthesia, long considered a blessing to patients and surgeons, has been a mystery for much of its 160-plus-year history in the operating room.

Some plants form into new species with a little help from their friends, according to Cornell University research published Oct. 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study finds that when plants develop mutually beneficial relationships with animals, mainly insects, those plant families become more diverse by evolving into more species over time.

In a potential breakthrough against ovarian cancer, University of Guelph researchers have discovered how to both shrink tumours and improve drug delivery, allowing for lower doses of chemotherapy and reducing side effects.

Their research appears today in the FASEB Journal, one of the world's top biology publications.

INDIANAPOLIS -- Researchers have identified two proteins that appear crucial to the development -- and patient relapse -- of acute myeloid leukemia. They have also shown they can block the development of leukemia by targeting those proteins.

The studies, in animal models, could lead to new effective treatments for leukemias that are resistant to chemotherapy, said Reuben Kapur, Ph.D., Freida and Albrecht Kipp Professor of Pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

The research was reported today in the journal Cell Reports.

Plants all over the world are more sensitive to drought than many experts realized, according to a new study by scientists at UCLA and China's Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden. The research will improve predictions of which plant species will survive the increasingly intense droughts associated with global climate change.

The research is reported online by Ecology Letters, the most prestigious journal in the field of ecology, and will be published in an upcoming print edition.

ATLANTA--Activation of the innate immune system with the bacterial protein flagellin could prevent and cure rotavirus infection, which is among the most common causes of severe diarrhea, says a Georgia State University research team that described the method as a novel means to prevent and treat viral infection.

The team's findings are to be published in Science on Nov. 14.

The Obama Administration's Clean Power Plan, released in June 2014 and seeking public comments until December 1, aims to reduce carbon emissions from existing power plants by 30 percent (below 2005 levels) by 2030. Under the rule, states are required to develop plans to meet specific standards devised by the EPA. In the latest edition of Science, economists from the University of Chicago, Stanford, Yale, Harvard, MIT and the University of California-Berkeley and Davis have come together to give their take on the plan.

A new screening platform using cells grown directly from tumor biopsy samples may lead to truly individualized treatment strategies that would get around the problem of treatment resistance, which limits the effectiveness of current targeted therapy drugs.

Previous research has shown that infanticide by males is widespread in many mammal species, but most commonly occurs in those species where females live in social groups dominated by one or a few males.

Outsiders will fight dominant males for access to the females. When a rival male takes over a group, they will kill the infants of previously dominant males to render the females 'sexually receptive' again, so that they can sire their own offspring. This may be the main cause of infant mortality in some species, such as Chacma baboons.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - For many, global public health seems like an abstract and distant problem - until the Ebola virus is diagnosed among people in our midst.

Though no one would call the Ebola pandemic a good thing, it has presented an opportunity for scientists to alert the public about the dire need to halt the spread of infectious diseases, especially in developing and densely populated areas of the world.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- MIT engineers have transformed the genome of the bacterium E. coli into a long-term storage device for memory. They envision that this stable, erasable, and easy-to-retrieve memory will be well suited for applications such as sensors for environmental and medical monitoring.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - For many, global public health seems like an abstract and distant problem - until the Ebola virus is diagnosed among people in our midst.

Though no one would call the Ebola pandemic a good thing, it has presented an opportunity for scientists to alert the public about the dire need to halt the spread of infectious diseases, especially in developing and densely populated areas of the world.

Researchers at the University of Leeds have made a new synthetic anti-cancer molecule that targets two key mechanisms in the spread of malignant tumours through the body.

A study published in the journal PLOS ONE today reports that the synthetic molecule JK-31 blocks the signalling of a "growth factor" chemical that promotes the creation of networks of blood vessels to feed tumours.

West Lafayette, Ind. (November 13, 2014): Scientists with the U.S. Forest Service and Colorado State University examined a fungus native to North America, the native beetle that carries it, and their host tree and found something surprising: Geosmithia morbida and the walnut twig beetle co-evolved and, while the beetle/fungus complex was once the equivalent of a hang nail for a black walnut tree, it has become lethal.