Body

At first glance, one might think Northeastern University junior Tanya Cashorali was bent on outshining the competition. At only 21-years-old, her achievements include three co-op jobs with top cancer scientists, one grant-funded study on tumor development, and numerous presentations to world-renowned doctors. But this young prodigy isn’t out to beat the competition, she’s out to create more; a fleet of young women who study, teach, and conduct groundbreaking high-tech research.

To address the high rate of multiple births resulting from in-vitro-fertilization (IVF), researchers at Yale School of Medicine and McGill University have developed a procedure that estimates the reproductive potential of individual embryos, possibly leading to a decrease in multiple-infant births and a higher success rate in women undergoing IVF.

New non-toxic and targeted therapies for metastatic breast and ovarian cancers may now be possible, thanks to a discovery by a team of researchers at the University of British Columbia.

USC College computational biologist Peter Calabrese has developed a new model to simulate the evolution of so-called recombination hotspots in the genome.

Published March 5 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the mathematical model and its associated software bring much-needed rigor to evolutionary investigations of how natural selection acts on individual genes, said Calabrese, a research assistant professor of biological sciences.

And, they may also aid the search for disease-associated genes within the human genome.

Some 40 years after the release of the classic science fiction movie Fantastic Voyage, researchers in the NanoRobotics Laboratory of École Polytechnique de Montréal’s Department of Computer Engineering and Institute of Biomedical Engineering have achieved a major technological breakthrough in the field of medical robotics. They have succeeded for the first time in guiding, in vivo and via computer control, a microdevice inside an artery, at a speed of 10 centimetres a second.

Over a span of two decades, warming temperatures have caused annual losses of roughly $5 billion for major food crops, according to a new study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Over a span of two decades, warming temperatures have caused annual losses of roughly $5 billion for major food crops, according to a new study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have determined the three-dimensional structure of an RNA enzyme, or "ribozyme," that carries out a fundamental reaction required to make new RNA molecules. Their results provide insight into what may have been the first self-replicating molecule to arise billions of years ago on the evolutionary path toward the emergence of life.

New research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine has identified two proteins that may help protect against skin cancer.

The study, which appears in the advance online edition of the journal Molecular and Cellular Biology, indicates that two proteins, named Timeless and Tipin, form a complex that regulates the rate at which DNA is replicated after exposure to ultraviolet radiation.

"Build a better mousetrap," the saying goes, "and the world will beat a path to your door." In the complex field of organic chemistry, that path leads to Florida State University, where a newly developed substance could make the jobs of scientists throughout the world a little easier as they work to develop new drugs and other chemicals that benefit humanity.

Apples may prove to be a winner when it comes to reducing the risk of heart disease, says a new study of more than 34,000 women. In this study, flavonoid-rich apples were found to be one of three foods (along with red wine and pears) that decrease the risk of mortality for both coronary heart disease (CHD) and cardiovascular disease (CVD) among post-menopausal women, The findings were published in the March 2007 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The cause of one notorious childhood disease, poliovirus, could be used to treat the ongoing threat of another childhood disease, neuroblastoma. In the March 15 issue of Cancer Research, researchers from Stony Brook University report that an attenuated -- or non-virulent -- form of poliovirus is effective in obliterating neuroblastoma tumors in mice, even when the mice had been previously vaccinated against the virus.

As interest in the rising number of newly characterized microbial genomes mounts, powerful computational tools become critical for the management and analysis of these data to enable strategies for such challenges as harvesting the potential of carbon-neutral bioenergy sources and coping with global climate change.

Ultrasound-based tests allowing women undergoing in-vitro fertilization (IVF) to count their chickens before they've hatched may provide alternatives to the hormone-based tests used today. Less costly and invasive than the current ovarian reserve tests, clinicians may in future consider using ultrasound scans of a woman's ovaries to predict her ovaries' response to IVF.

The success of long term hip replacement surgery may lie in the genes, suggests research published ahead of print in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases.

The researchers analysed genetic variations in 312 people, just over half of whom (162) had problems after hip replacement in the 10 years following surgery.