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Johns Hopkins researchers have uncovered a protein "partner" commonly used by breast cancer cells to unlock genes needed for spreading the disease around the body. A report on the discovery, published November 5 on the website of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, details how some tumors get the tools they need to metastasize.

A newly discovered gene that is essential for embryo survival could also hold the key to treating and potentially controlling chronic infections such as HIV, hepatitis and tuberculosis.

The gene, called Arih2, is fundamental to the function of the immune system – making critical decisions about whether to switch on the immune response to an infection.

The CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) has developed a sensor to detect undetonated explosives on the sea floor. It is based on technology used to find mineral deposits underground.

The sensor was developed as part of a project with US Government agency, the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) and US-based research organisation Sky Research.

In a commentary to be published in the Dec. 12 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, two Johns Hopkins faculty members predict an ever-diminishing role for government and drug company funding of basic biomedical research and suggest scientists look to "innovative" kinds of private investment for future resources. Current negotiations in Washington over sequestration and the so-called "fiscal cliff" provide an opportunity to fundamentally rethink the funding of biomedical research, they say.

This release is available in Spanish.

An insect growth regulator is one of the latest technologies U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists are adding to their arsenal to help fight house flies that spread bacteria to food.

New combinations of medical imaging technologies hold promise for improved early disease screening, cancer staging, therapeutic assessment, and other aspects of personalized medicine, according to Ge Wang, director of Virginia Tech's Center for Biomedical Imaging, in a recent paper that appeared in the refereed journal

Durham, NC – The question of how life began on a molecular level has been a longstanding problem in science. However, recent mathematical research sheds light on a possible mechanism by which life may have gotten a foothold in the chemical soup that existed on the early Earth.

Like a homeowner prepping for a hurricane, the bacterium Bacillus subtilis uses a long checklist to prepare for survival in hard times. In a new study, scientists at Rice University and the University of Houston uncovered an elaborate mechanism that allows B. subtilis to begin preparing for survival, even as it delays the ultimate decision of whether to "hunker down" and withdraw into a hardened spore.

A study led by academics at the University of Bristol's Intelligent Systems Laboratory and the School of Journalism at Cardiff University have used Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to analyse 2.5 million articles from 498 different English-language online news outlets over ten months.

The researchers found that:

An international team of scientists have observed the behaviour of various groups of cetaceans in the Strait of Gibraltar and Cape Breton in Canada belonging to the Globicephala melas species, which are also known as long-finned pilot whales. These results show that these whales use synchronised swimming when they identify the presence of an external threat.

Routine smear tests have considerably reduced the number of cases of cervical cancer, but despite intensive screening 250 women in Sweden still die from the disease every year. Researchers at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have developed new methods of minimising the number of missed cases and making diagnosis more reliable.

While some people experience great benefit when visiting churches, mosques and similar holy sites, she notes that others get a similar reward from crop-circle tourism. Enthusiasts refer to the circles as "temporary temples".

A specialist on religion, Kalvig has been researching this subject in recent years and published her findings in Aura 3/11 – a Nordic journal for academic studies of new religiosity.

Her approach has rested on participatory observation, including walking barefoot in fields with crop circles, and investigations of the phenomenon on the internet.

Over a decade after sequencing the human genome, it has now become clear that the genome is not mostly 'junk' as previously thought. In fact, the ENCODE project consortium of dozens of labs and petabytes of data have determined that these 'noncoding' regions house everything from disease trait loci to important regulatory signals, all the way through to new types of RNA-based genes.

It all started with a crab apple tree.

Two years ago, a 71-year-old Indiana man impaled his hand on a branch after cutting down a dead tree. The wound caused an infection that led scientists to discover a new bacterium and solve a mystery about how bacteria came to live inside insects.

On Oct. 15, 2010, Thomas Fritz, a retired inventor, engineer and volunteer firefighter, cut down a dead, 10-foot-tall crab apple tree outside his home near Evansville, Ind.