A team of scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) reports on Thursday their success in solving the molecular structure of a key portion of a cellular receptor implicated in Alzheimer`s, Parkinson`s, and other serious illnesses. Assistant Professor Hiro Furukawa, Ph.D., and colleagues at CSHL, in cooperation with the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory, ob...

If you forget your password when logging into an e-mail or online shopping Web site, the site will likely ask you a security question: What is your mother`s maiden name? Where were you born? The trouble is that such questions are not very secure. More people than you may think will know your answers. And if they don`t, it might not be hard to search for it online or even make a lucky guess. But Ru...

What do you get when you cross a mouse with poor hearing and a mouse with even worse hearing? Ironically, a new strain of mice with "golden ears" — mice that have outstanding hearing as they age. The work by one of the world`s foremost groups in age-related hearing loss, or presbycusis, marks the first time that scientists have created the mouse equivalent of a person with "go...

The same genes that are chemically altered during normal cell differentiation, as well as when normal cells become cancer cells, are also changed in stem cells that scientists derive from adult cells, according to new research from Johns Hopkins and Harvard. Although genetically identical to the mature body cells from which they are derived, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are notably speci...

A group of drunken fruit flies have helped researchers from North Carolina State and Boston universities identify entire networks of genes — also present in humans — that play a key role in alcohol drinking behavior. This discovery, published in the October 2009 print issue of the journal Genetics, provides a crucial explanation of why some people seem to tolerate alcohol better than o...

Supporting Los Alamos National Laboratory`s role in the international Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI) consortium, researchers are using the Roadrunner supercomputer to analyze vast quantities of genetic sequences from HIV infected people in the hope of zeroing in on possible vaccine target areas. Physicist Tanmoy Bhattacharya and HIV researcher Bette Korber have used samples taken b...

Paved parking lots and driveways make our lives easier, but they often create an easy pathway for pollutants to reach underground water sources and alter the natural flow of water back into the ground. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced a study that will investigate ways to reduce pollution that can run off paved surfaces and improve how water filters back into the ground. EPA ...

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) or primary liver cancer forms in the epithelial tissue of the liver and is most commonly caused by the hepatitis B virus (HBV) or hepatitis C virus (HCV). In the U.S., the National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimates that 15,000 men and 6,000 women are diagnosed with HCC each year. Worldwide, HCC accounts for 632,000 cases with the highest regions being Western Pacific ...

Taking nanomaterials to a new level of structural complexity, scientists have determined how to introduce kinks into arrow-straight nanowires, transforming them into zigzagging two- and three-dimensional structures with correspondingly advanced functions. The work is described this week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology by Harvard University researchers led by Bozhi Tian and Charles M. Lieber. ...

Deep in the ear, 95 percent of the cells that shuttle sound to the brain are big, boisterous neurons that, to date, have explained most of what scientists know about how hearing works. Whether a rare, whisper-small second set of cells also carry signals from the inner ear to the brain and have a real role in processing sound has been a matter of debate. Now, reporting on rat experiments in the Oct...