Body

The best way to survive the ill-effects of climate change and pollution may be to simply sleep through it.

According to a new study published in The American Naturalist, mammals that hibernate or that hide in burrows are less likely to turn up on an endangered species list. The study's authors believe that the ability of such "sleep-or-hide" animals to buffer themselves from changing environments may help them avoid extinction.

ITHACA, N.Y. – Anyone who has ever battled a stuck zipper knows it's a good idea to see what's stuck, where and how badly -- and then to pull hard.

A Cornell research team's experiments involve the "unzipping" of single DNA molecules. By mapping the hiccups, stoppages and forces along the way, they have gained new insight into how genes are packed and expressed within cells.

What is it with false confession? It seems crazy on the face of it, to take the blame for a crime you didn't commit. Yet experts have found that while some innocent confessors are mentally disturbed attention seekers, or taking the fall for someone else, most innocents who confess do so under stress, as an act of surrender, during a high stakes, high-pressure police interrogation. According to one estimate, fully a quarter of convictions later overturned by DNA evidence involved a false confession.

ALEXANDRIA, VA, January 28, 2009 – Motor control exercises, when performed in conjunction with other forms of therapy, can significantly reduce pain and disability in patients with persistent low back pain, according to a new systematic review published in the January issue of Physical Therapy (PTJ), the scientific journal of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA).

We all have goals and desires, but unfortunately, they are not always achieved. For example, a fouled basketball player tries for a free throw shot, but misses. It may be obvious that he wanted to make the shot, but the outcome did not match that goal. As adults, we are able to tell the difference between people's internal goals and the behaviors they influence. When do we gain this ability? Are infants able to "see" the hidden reasons behind certain actions? That is, can an infant tell that the basketball player intended to make the free throw shot, even though he missed?

Berkeley -- Taking a hint from the text comparison methods used to detect plagiarism in books, college papers and computer programs, University of California, Berkeley, researchers have developed an improved method for comparing whole genome sequences.

With nearly a thousand genomes partly or fully sequenced, scientists are jumping on comparative genomics as a way to construct evolutionary trees, trace disease susceptibility in populations, and even track down people's ancestry.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Recent studies suggest that human breast cancer risk is increased by outside exposure to the hormone progestin, such as during hormone replacement therapy. Now, a University of Missouri study suggests that PRIMA-1, a small molecule drug that targets the most common mutated gene, p53, in human cancer cells, has potential as a novel chemotherapeutic treatment for progestin-accelerated human breast cancer.

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – In a paper published in the journal Nature this week, Rutgers researchers Joachim Messing, Rémy Bruggmann, and a team of international collaborators have described the genome of sorghum, a drought-tolerant African grass. The findings could one day help researchers to produce better food crops for arid regions with rapidly expanding human populations, such as West Africa.

Ordinary cells have the ability to replace lost organs in plants—a function previously thought to be limited to stem cells—researchers at New York University's Center for Genomics and Systems Biology and Utrecht University in the Netherlands have found. The findings, which suggest that some roles of stem cells in organ regeneration may be shared by other types of cells, are published in the latest issue of the journal Nature.

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.-- Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and several partner institutions have published the sequence and analysis of the complete genome of sorghum, a major food and fodder plant with high potential as a bioenergy crop. The genome data will aid scientists in optimizing sorghum and other crops not only for food and fodder use, but also for biofuels production. The comparative analysis of the sorghum genome appears in the January 29 edition of the journal Nature.

RICHMOND, Va. (Jan. 28, 2009) – Virginia Commonwealth University researchers have found that the protein Stat3 plays a key role in regulating mitochondria, the energy-producing machines of cells. This discovery could one day lead to the development of new treatments for heart disease to boost energy in failing heart muscle or to master the abnormal metabolism of cancer.

Patients taking the common cardiac drug clopidogrel following a heart attack are at a significantly higher risk of a recurrence if they are also taking widely used acid-lowering medications called proton pump inhibitors, a new study published online in CMAJ has found (http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/rapidpdf/cmaj.082001).