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Now that the World Series is about to begin, NJIT math professor Bruce Bukiet has announced the probability of each of the contenders winning the best 4 out of 7 game contest. "The Boston Red Sox have a nearly 70% chance of winning the series", says Bukiet. But he gives the caveat that the St. Louis Cardinals have defeated both the competition and his mathematical model in each of their previous series.

For decades, people seeking an HIV test have been counseled on realistic and achievable steps they could take to avoid infection. But a national study led by Miller School investigators has determined that, given the rapid HIV tests available today, the resources devoted to pre-test counseling would be better spent on universal testing that could detect more HIV cases earlier, and link newly infected people to the treatment that could halt the spread of the virus.

Like the Marvel Comics superhero Iceman, some bacteria have harnessed frozen water as a weapon. Species such as Pseudomonas syringae have special proteins embedded in their outer membranes that help ice crystals form, and they use them to trigger frost formation at warmer than normal temperatures on plants, later invading through the damaged tissue. When the bacteria die, many of the proteins are wafted up into the atmosphere, where they can alter the weather by seeding clouds and precipitation.

Errors in the human genetic code that arise from mismatched nucleotide base pairs in the DNA double helix can lead to cancer and other disorders. In microbes, such errors provide the basis for adaption to environmental stress. As one of the first responders to these genetic errors, a small protein called MutS – for "Mutator S" – controls the integrity of genomes across a wide range of organisms, from microbes to humans. Understanding the repair process holds importance for an equally impressive range of applications, including synthetic biology, microbial adaption and pathogenesis.

LA JOLLA, CA---- Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have, for the first time, taken chimpanzee and bonobo skin cells and turned them into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), a type of cell that has the ability to form any other cell or tissue in the body.

Of all the standard units currently in use around the world, the kilogram – the official unit of mass in the International System of Units (SI) – is the only one that still relies on a physical object for its definition. But revising this outdated definition will require precise vacuum-based measurements that researchers are not yet able to make, said Patrick Abbott of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Md.

For the Oct. 16 issue of Biology Letters, a special issue commemorating the 50th anniversary of W.D. Hamilton's famous paper on kin selection, two Washington University in St. Louis biologists contributed an article describing intriguing exceptions to one of his predictions.

The basic idea of natural selection is to pass on your genes, but Hamilton pointed out, in an article that revolutionized the study of social evolution, that you can pass on genes by helping your relatives as well as your offspring.

(Boston) – Similar to passengers on an urban transit system, every protein made in the cell has a specific destination and function. Channels in cell membranes help direct these proteins to their appropriate target. Researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and their colleagues have now captured images of these channels as they open to allow proteins to pass through a membrane, while the proteins are being made. These findings are published as a Letter in Nature (Park, E. et al. 2013).

The lens of the human eye is made up of a highly concentrated protein solution that imparts the eye its high refractive power. Yet, despite this high protein content the ocular lens must remain clear and transparent. To this end ocular lens cells have developed a remarkable strategy: They have thrown overboard the complex machinery present in all other cells of the human body for building up and breaking down proteins. Instead, lens proteins are created only once in a lifetime – during embryonic development.

Boston, MA – A major collaborative research effort involving scientists at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Harvard University have uncovered a novel signal mechanism that controls how fat storage in the liver can communicate with fat burning in skeletal muscle.

Plants use sugars to tell the time of day, according to research published in Nature today.

Plants, like animals, have a 24 hour 'body-clock' known as the circadian rhythm. This biological timer gives plants an innate ability to measure time, even when there is no light - they don't simply respond to sunrise, for example, they know it is coming and adjust their biology accordingly. This ability to keep time provides an important competitive advantage and is vital in biological processes such as flowering, fragrance emission and leaf movement.

Acute dendritic leukaemia is a rare type of leukaemia, but one with the worst prognosis—the average patient survival rate is just 12-14 months—that is difficult to treat. Juan Cruz Cigudosa's team, from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre's (CNIO) Molecular Cytogenetics Group, has for the first time sequenced the exome –the coding, or protein-generating, regions of the genome— of dendritic cell leukaemia.

Currently the resolution of the images is not as fine as what can be obtained with existing breast imaging techniques like X-ray mammography and MRI. In future versions, Srirang Manohar, an assistant professor at the University of Twente who led the research, Wenfeng Xia, a graduate student at the University of Twente who is the first author on the new paper, and their colleagues expect to improve the resolution as well as add the capability to image using several different wavelengths of light at once, which is expected to improve detectability.

HOUSTON – (Oct. 23, 2013) – A first-of-its-kind study led by Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), published online in the journal, Circulation, found that infants with hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS) born far from a hospital providing neonatal cardiac surgery for HLHS have increased neonatal mortality, with most deaths occurring before surgery. Researchers also concluded that efforts to improve prenatal diagnosis of HLHS and subsequent delivery near a large volume cardiac surgical center may significantly improve neonatal HLHS survival.

By the time bone cancer is diagnosed in a pet dog, it is often too late to save the animal's life. Instead, the goal of treatment is to keep the dog as comfortable and free of pain as possible for as long as possible.