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Numerous genes that regulate the activity of a neurotransmitter in the brain have been found to be abundant in brain tissue of depressed females. This could be an underlying cause of the higher incidence of suicide among women, according to research at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

A new study from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston shows that when plastic surgeons listen to music they prefer, their surgical technique and efficiency when closing incisions is improved. The study is currently available in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal.

In research that could lead to protective probiotics to fight the "chytrid" fungus that has been decimating amphibian populations worldwide, Jenifer Walke, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg, and her collaborators have grown bacterial species from the skin microbiome of four species of amphibians. The research appears July 10 in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

U.S. farmers have long hoped to extend sugarcane's growing range northward from the Gulf coast, substantially increasing the land available for sugar and biofuels. Several hybrid canes developed in the 1980s have proved hardy in cooler climes, surviving overwinter as far north as Booneville, Arkansas. But until now, no one had tested whether these "miscanes," as they are called, actually photosynthesize, and thus continue to grow, when the thermometer dips.

Wild chimpanzees in the forests of Uganda are increasingly eating clay to supplement the minerals in their diet, according to a long-term study published in PLOS ONE. The paper led by the University of Oxford describes how the researchers observed wild chimpanzees in the Budongo forest eating and drinking from clay pits and termite mounds.

A bacterial signal that when recognized by rice plants enables the plants to resist a devastating blight disease has been identified by a multi-national team of researchers led by scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and the University of California (UC) Davis.

Sleeping not only protects memories from being forgotten, it also makes them easier to access, according to new research from the University of Exeter and the Basque Centre for Cognition, Brain and Language. The findings suggest that after sleep we are more likely to recall facts which we could not remember while still awake.

In two situations where subjects forgot information over the course of 12 hours of wakefulness, a night's sleep was shown to promote access to memory traces that had initially been too weak to be retrieved.

How much does diet affect the cancer patient? Do "antioxidants" really play an important role in health - or are they causing more cancers than they cure? And what exactly is the relationship between obesity and cancer?

The latest Special Issue in ecancermedicalscience collects four original articles from experts in cancer and metabolism, addressing the hottest areas of research in this rapidly developing field.

There’s a new study that’s getting a fair amount of attention in the climate science community and the popular press.

The odds of being attacked and castrated by a variety of parasitic flatworms increases for marine horn snails the farther they are found from the tropics. A Smithsonian-led research team discovered this exception to an otherwise globally observed pattern--usually biodiversity is greatest in the tropics and decreases toward the poles.

The study makes a case for using host-parasite relationships as a tool to understand why there are typically more species--and more interactions between species--in the tropics than anywhere else in the world.

When disease-resistant rice is invaded by disease-causing bacteria, a small protein produced by the bacteria betrays the invader. Upon recognizing that protein, the rice plants sense that a microbial attack is underway and are able to mount an immune response to fend off bacterial infection, reports a research team led by the University of California, Davis.

Researchers studying wild banded mongooses in Uganda have discovered that these small mammals have either cooperative or selfish personalities which last for their entire lifetime.

The researchers investigated the selfish behavior of mongoose mate-guarding - where dominant males guard particular females - and the cooperative behavior of 'babysitting' and 'escorting' the young.

They found that cooperative mongooses that helped out with offspring care did so consistently over their whole lifetime but those that put in little effort never increased their workload.

Its unusual biological characteristics make the flightless kiwi a unique kind of bird.

When the first galaxies started to form a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the Universe was full of a fog of hydrogen gas. But as more and more brilliant sources -- both stars and quasars powered by huge black holes -- started to shine they cleared away the mist and made the Universe transparent to ultraviolet light.

Algae are organisms so environmentally adaptable that they flourish in wastelands, sewage and saline bodies of water. They can grow in high densities, in the dark and in the presence of high concentrations of nitrogen and phosphates.

Harnessing the adaptive power of algae is a relatively new research field. Engineers across the country have developed algal biofuels, food additives and skincare products. Livestock scientists see its potential as a sustainable, high-energy feedstuff as well as a protein supplement.