Researchers have determined why certain stem cells are able to stay stem cells. A recent study reveals that an enzyme that changes the way DNA is packaged in cells allows specific genes to be turned on and off, thereby preventing a stem cell from becoming another cell type.

Antimicrobial peptides from the skin of frogs may protect against life-threatening, multidrug-resistant infections such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa, say researchers from Italy.

Researchers have published what is believed to be the first detailed examination of robot deception. They developed algorithms that allow a robot to determine whether it should deceive and designed techniques that help the robot select the best deceptive strategy to avoid getting caught.

Yeast cells do not normally eat complex sugars or carbohydrates, only simple sugars like glucose and sucrose. Researchers have now added genes to yeast that allow it to eat more complex sugars, in particular the two-, three- and four-glucose molecules called cellodextrins. These yeast could find use in the biofuels...

Fresh insight into how plants slow their growth in cold weather could help scientists develop crops suited to cooler environments.

In our dynamic 3-D world, we can encounter a familiar face from any angle and still recognize that face with ease, even if the person has, for example, changed his hair style. This is because our brain has used the 2-D snapshots perceived by our eyes (like a camera) to...

A small research-based Norwegian company has developed a method to reduce the formation of the carcinogenic compound acrylamide during industrial production of potatoes and coffee. International food giants are paying attention.

Scientists have identified a critical enzyme that keeps traffic flowing in the right direction in the nervous system, and the finding could eventually lead to new treatments for conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

Researchers in Australia have developed the ability to move particles over large distances, using a specially designed laser beam that can move very small particles up to distances of 1.5 meters using only the power of light.

Computer vision systems can struggle to make sense of a single image, but a new method enables computers to gain a deeper understanding of an image by reasoning about the physical constraints of the scene.

Researchers in Tunisia have published details of a speech enhancement system that uses two distinct tools to reduce the noise from a recorded or sampled voice signal. In a new article, the researchers explain how a bionic wavelet transform and a recurrent neural network can be used for speech enhancement.

There is new evidence that people can learn to control the activity of some brain regions when they get feedback signals provided by functional magnetic resonance brain imaging (fMRI).

Fresh insight into how plants slow their growth in cold weather could help scientists develop crops suited to cooler environments.

Tuberculosis, or TB, is a dreaded contagious disease of the lungs and other organs. The causative agent, Mycobacterium tuberculosis (or M. tuberculosis), infects roughly a third of the world's population and one-in-ten to one-in-twenty of the infected population becomes sick or infectious at some point during their lifetime.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have developed new software that greatly improves the speed at which scientists can analyze RNA sequencing data. RNA sequencing is used to compare differences in gene expression to identify those genes that switched on or off when, for instance, a...

Scientists from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified dendritic antigen-presenting cells in zebrafish, opening the possibility that the tiny fish could become a new model for studying the complexities of the human immune system.

For 70 years the world has mismanaged the common good of antibiotics. The result is a growing global burden of antibiotic resistance, threatening to take health care back to an era where ordinary infections might once again become fatal.

Mycoplasmas are responsible for a variety of important diseases, including atypical pneumonia in humans and mastitis in cows, sheep and goats, which results in loss of milk production. Mycoplasmal mastitis represents a particular problem in the dairy industry and is thus a subject of intense study. One of the...

Genetically closely related skin bacteria that have developed resistance to several different antibiotics and that can cause intractable care-related infections are found and seem to be spreading within and between hospitals in Sweden.

Elimination of a molecular gatekeeper leads to the development of arthritis in mice, scientists report in a study published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. The newly discovered gatekeeper is a protein that determines the fate – survival or death – of damaging cells that mistakenly attack the body's own...

A research team led by Cary Pirone from the Department of Biological Sciences at Florida International University has identified bilirubin in the popular Bird of Paradise plant. The breakthrough study, published in the September 2010 issue of the American Society for Horticultural Science's journal HortScience, provides new insights into color...

Cancer is a difficult disease to treat because it's a personal disease. Each case is unique and based on a combination of environmental and genetic factors. Conventional chemotherapy employs treatment with one or more drugs, assuming that these medicines are able to both "diagnose" and "treat" the affected...