Case Western Reserve University researchers have bred a line of 'super mice' (PEPCK-Cmus mice) that have the capability of running five to six kilometers at a speed of 20 meters per minute on a treadmill for up to six hours before stopping.

“They are metabolically similar to Lance Armstrong biking up the Pyrenees; they utilize mainly fatty acids for energy and produce very little lactic acid,” said Richard W. Hanson.

These genetically engineered mice also eat 60 percent more than controls, but remain fitter, trimmer and live and breed longer than wild mice in a control group. Some female PEPCK-Cmus mice have had offspring at 2.5 years of age, an amazing feat considering most mice do not reproduce after they are one year old.

I received a nice letter from an editor at The Scientist asking for permission to reprint a comment I wrote regarding an article about the American Chemical Society titled "Unrest At The ACS" by Andrea Gawrylewski.

While the human species is unquestionably a member of the Primate group, the identity of the next closest group to primates within the entire class of living mammals has been hotly debated. Now, new molecular and genomic data gathered by a team including Webb Miller, a professor of biology and computer science and engineering at the Penn State University, has shown that the colugos -- nicknamed the flying lemurs -- is the closest group to the primates. The team was led by William J. Murphy, associate professor in the Department of Veterinary Integrative Biosciences at Texas A & M University.

Debates over which of several mammalian groups is the closest relative to the primates have become more intense in the last ten years because of new fossil and molecular evidence.

Cancer cells treated with carbon nanotubes can be destroyed by non-invasive radio waves that heat up the nanotubes while sparing untreated tissue, a research team led by scientists at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and Rice University has shown in preclinical experiments.

In a paper posted Cancer, researchers show that the technique completely destroyed liver cancer tumors in rabbits. There were no side effects noted. However, some healthy liver tissue within 2-5 millimeters of the tumors sustained heat damage due to nanotube leakage from the tumor.

"These are promising, even exciting, preclinical results in this liver cancer model," says senior author Steven Curley, M.D., professor in M. D. Anderson's Department of Surgical Oncology.

The running joke in science has always been that the metric system was invented by the French to combat English predominance culturally - and they got the measurement wrong.

Still, it caught on ( though the French calendar didn't ) and that International System of Units (SI) is used on everything from beer cans to Olympic races. But some of it still isn't entirely accurate, as discussed in Making A More Accurate Kilogram ( along with that same poke at the French ) because man-made objects can change.

The English could have the last laugh. U.K.

A report that appears in the scientific journal Genome Research details the first assembly, annotation, and comparative analysis of the domestic cat genome (Felis catus).

The DNA of a 4-year-old Abyssinian cat named Cinnamon, whose well-documented lineage can be traced back several generations to Sweden, has been sequenced. Cinnamon is one of several mammals that are currently being analyzed using “light” (two-fold) genome sequence coverage. To make sense of Cinnamon’s raw sequence data, a multi-center collaboration of scientists leveraged information from previously sequenced mammalian genomes as well as previous gene-mapping studies in the cat.

The U.S. spends more than double what other countries spend for medical care, $6,697 per capita in 2005, but a new Commonwealth Fund seven-nation survey finds that U.S. patients are more likely to skip care because of costs.

The study surveyed 12,000 adults in Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. One third of U.S. adults called for rebuilding the system, the highest rate in any country surveyed. The U.S. also ranked last in saying only minor changes are needed in the health system.

Canadian patients are least likely to be able to get a same-day appointment with their physicians when sick and the most likely to seek care in emergency rooms as an alternative.

U.S.

A team of Chinese and American scientists has discovered a new mammal from the 165 million-year-old lakebeds of the Jurassic Period in Northern China.

The find is reported in the November 1st issue of the journal Nature.

Charting the circuitry of the brain and nervous system just got a lot more fun.

By activating multiple fluorescent proteins in neurons, neuroscientists at Harvard University are imaging the brain and nervous system as never before, rendering cells with 90 distinct colors which they dubbed a "Brainbow."

Brainbow is a huge leap over the handful of shades possible with current fluorescent labeling. By permitting visual resolution of individual brightly colored neurons, this increase should greatly help neuroscientists in understanding how our brains function.