Most people wouldn’t consider anthrax toxin to be beneficial, but this bacterial poison may someday be an effective cancer therapy. Anthrax toxin has actually been shown to be fairly selective in targeting melanoma cells, although the risk of non-cancer toxicity prevents any clinical use.

To develop a better and safer treatment, Stephen Leppla and colleagues created a mutated antrax toxin that could only be turned on by matrix metalloproteinases (MMP), proteins that are overproduced only in cancer cells.

When they tested this mutated toxin in mice, the researchers observed that 100% of the animals tolerated a dose that would be lethal for the natural toxin.

When President George Bush announced in 2004 that he wanted to reinvigorate space exploration, he presented a number of arguments for increasing funding but they were all rather tepid. Space exploration technology, for example, led to CAT scans and MRIs. Oh, and we got better weather forecasting.

Honestly, those are pretty weak arguments to justify an organization that gets almost $15 billion per year. Why not mention Tang and a pen that writes upside down? At least Tang is something most of us have had. I have never had an MRI.

In the New York Times, Abigail Zuger, an M.D., recently reviewed a book called Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine by R. Barker Bausell — the “truth” being, if I read Zuger correctly, that it’s all baloney. Zuger calls the book “immensely educational”. Not educational enough:

Highly publicized events such as school shootings arouse public interest in the effects of media violence exposure on children, yet there is still considerable public debate about whether to take this issue seriously.

A recent article in Social Issues and Policy Review summarizes the research on the effects of media violence and convincingly demonstrates the profound influence that media violence is having in our society.

The many studies that have been compiled on the effects of viewing media violence show that there are at least 14 scientifically documented effects on children’s physiological and psychological well-being, both in the short and long term.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is the name given to two lung diseases that frequently co-exist, bronchitis and emphysema, characterized airflow obstruction that interferes with breathing. COPD is the fourth leading cause of death in America, claiming the lives of 122,283 Americans in 2003 and the number of women dying from the disease has surpassed the number seen in men.

Patients with severe COPD may benefit more from therapy that combines salmeterol and fluticasone [SFC] than treatment with tiotropium, according to results from a long-term, multi-center study, “Investigating New Standards for Prophylaxis in Reducing Exacerbations” (INSPIRE) that directly compared the two therapies.

Genome rearrangements, resulting in variations in the numbers of copies of genes, occur when the cellular process that copies DNA during cell division stalls and then switches to a different genetic “template,” said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in a report that appears today in the journal Cell.

The new mechanism is called replication. “Fork Stalling and Template Switching,” said Dr. James R. Lupski, Cullen professor of molecular and human genetics and vice chair of the department at BCM. It not only represents a new way in which the genome generates DNA copy number variation, but it also demonstrates that copy number variation can occur at a different time point in the life of a cell. DNA replication takes place as the cell is dividing and becoming two.

Laser surgery to correct vision problems has been in use since the early 1990s. Photorefractive Keratotomy (PRK) is typically used to correct low to moderate myopia, while laser in-situ keratomileusis (LASIK) is preferred for high myopia corrections. Although over 18 million LASIK procedures have been performed worldwide, there is still some controversy regarding the maximum correction possible and efficacy with this technique.

In an article published in the January 2008 issue of the American Journal of Ophthalmology, researchers from Miguel Hernandez University, Medical School, Alicante, Spain; and Ankara University School of Medicine, Ankara, Turkey; report on a study of high myopia patients ten years after LASIK surgery.

A team of biologists have developed a model mapping the control circuit governing a whole free living organism. This is an important milestone for the new field of systems biology and will allow the researchers to model how the organism adapts over time in response to its environment.

This study marks the first time researchers have accurately predicted a cell’s dynamics at the genome scale (for most of the thousands of components in the cell). The findings, which are based on a study of Halobacterium salinarum, a free-living microbe that lives in hyper-extreme environments, appear in the latest issue of the journal Cell.

The researchers focused on a little studied organism that can survive high salt, radiation, and other stresses that would be deadly to most other organisms.

When it comes to choosing a place to live, male chimpanzees in the wild don’t stray far from home, according to a new report in the Dec. 27th Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press. The researchers found that adult male chimps out on their own tend to follow in their mother’s footsteps, spending their days in the same familiar haunts where they grew up. Male chimpanzees are generally very social, but how they use space when they are alone might be critical to their survival, the researchers said.

“We have found that, like females, male chimpanzees have distinct core areas in which they forage alone and to which they show levels of site fidelity equal to those of females,” said Anne Pusey of the University of Minnesota.