Being Human

Palo Alto, CA -- Cellulose is a fibrous molecule that makes up plant cell walls, gives plants shape and form and is a target of renewable, plant-based biofuels research. But how it forms, and thus how it can be modified to design energy-rich crops, is not well understood.

Australian and New Zealand researchers have accelerated research into Multiple Sclerosis by discovering two new locations of genes which will help to unravel the causes of MS and other autoimmune disease.

Their findings will be published today in the prestigious journal Nature Genetics.

PASADENA, Calif. -- Roughly a billion years from now, the ever-increasing radiation from the sun will have heated Earth into inhabitability; the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that serves as food for plant life will disappear, pulled out by the weathering of rocks; the oceans will evaporate; and all living things will disappear.

Trust in science is diminishing, according to recent studies, especially in the area of biomedicine, biotech and genetics. University of Alberta researchers Tim Caulfield and Tania Bubela blame it on the complexity of many discoveries and they're concerned the whole message from the study isn't getting across to the general public.

For 10 exciting days this October, Perimeter Institute’s 10th anniversary science celebration “Quantum to Cosmos: Ideas for the Future” will take a global audience from the strange subatomic world to the outer frontiers of the universe.

“Ideas developed in the pursuit of pure knowledge have time and again driven fundamental innovation”, says Perimeter Institute Director, Neil Turok.

The students’ talk after lunch was about lipids, double bonds and fuel standards.

It was day seven of the first Intensive Program in Biorenewables at Iowa State University.

The University of Houston is being credited with playing a pivotal role in the creation of the Houston Ship Channel Security District, which was approved unanimously by Harris County Commissioners Court on Tuesday morning.

BATON ROUGE -- LSU's WAVCIS, or Wave-Current-Surge Information System for Coastal Louisiana, has a few new tricks up its sleeve in preparation for the 2009 hurricane season.

LA JOLLA, CA, June 12, 2009 -- New research by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute and other institutions provides a close-up look at the cone-shaped shell that is the hallmark of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), revealing how it is held together -- and possible ways to break it apart.

It's happy hour for Texas wineries.

Research now shows that wines produced in the Lone Star State share the anti-cancer traits known to exist in wines from other producing regions.

Following are story ideas and tips about upcoming AMS meetings, papers in our peer-reviewed journals, and other happenings in the atmospheric and related sciences community.

Washington, DC - A protein known to play a role in growth of some types of leukemia appears to have a mixed function in breast cancer development, say researchers from the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC).

A team of Scripps Research scientists has created a new analog to DNA that assembles and disassembles itself without the need for enzymes. Because the new system comprises components that might reasonably be expected in a primordial world, the new chemical system could answer questions about how life could emerge.

University of Florida researchers have come up with a new gene therapy method to disrupt cancer growth by using a synthetic protein to induce blood clotting that cuts off a tumor's blood and nutrient supply.

• Resveratrol shows therapeutic potential for cancer chemoprevention as well as cardioprotection.

PHILADELPHIA -- Jumping genes do most of their jumping, not during the development of sperm and egg cells, but during the development of the embryo itself. The research, published this month in Genes and Development, "challenges standard assumptions on the timing of when mobile DNA, so-called jumping genes, insert into the human genome," says senior author Haig H.

PHILADELPHIA -- In a study comparing two strains of mice, one susceptible to developing cancer and the other not, researchers found that a high-fat diet predisposed the cancer-susceptible strain to liver cancer, and that by switching to a low-fat diet early in the experiment, the same high-risk mice avoided the malignancy.

New Brunswick, N.J. -- "Taking out the trash" takes on a whole new meaning, as investigators at The Cancer Institute of New Jersey (CINJ) and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, have discovered that a waste disposal protein is the key to cancer tumor suppression in a process known as autophagy. CINJ is a Center of Excellence of UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

It's conventional wisdom in atmospheric science circles: large raindrops fall faster than smaller drops, because they're bigger and heavier. And no raindrop can fall faster than its "terminal speed" -- its speed when the downward force of gravity is exactly the same as the upward air resistance.

BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL, June 10, 2009 -- Metoclopramide, a drug approved in the U.S.