Hydrogen sulfide, the pungent-smelling gas produced by rotten eggs, is a key player in colon cancer metabolism, and a potential target for therapies for the disease, according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cell-culture and mouse experiments demonstrated that colon cancer cells produce large amounts of hydrogen sulfide, and depend on the compound for survival and growth. 

"They love it and they need it," said University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston professor Csaba Szabo, co-author of the paper. "Colon cancer cells thrive on this stuff — our data show that they use it to make energy, to divide, to grow and to invade the host."

Antonio Stradivari is universally recognized as the most famous violin maker in the world - if people can name one violin, it is his. During his life, he and his apprentices built more than a thousand violins, violas, cellos and other stringed instruments. The importance of Stradivari's work obviously lies in the craftsmanship, the quality of the materials used and the finishes on the instruments' surfaces. The sound of a violin is a result of the combination of the materials used e.g. wood species and varnishes, the construction technique and the skill of the maker.

So scientists have sought to duplicate that sound by reverse-engineering ways it could have been done.

The uncanny valley has a new hill to climb - our ability to consider it human-like depends on its role in our lives, say a group of scholars.

 And roles are also important in positive feelings. Designers and engineers assign robots specific roles, such as servant, caregiver, assistant or playmate and the scholars analyzing  60 interactions between college students and Nao, a social robot developed by Aldebaran Robotics, a French company specializing in humanoid robots, found that people expressed more positive feelings toward a robot that would take care of them than toward a robot that needed care.

Standard atomic weights for chemical elements are not quite as constant as you might think - along with the speed of light and the attraction of gravity there are some exceptions. Hold on to your Newtonian hat and prepare for the possibility of elementary nuances.

Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are psychological disorders characterized by extreme eating behavior and distorted body image – both have few proven effective treatments.

A new paper suggests that the altered function of neural circuitry contributes to restricted eating in anorexia and overeating in bulimia.

The study used functional MRI to test this neurocircuitry by measuring the brain response to sweet tastes in 28 women who had recovered from either anorexia or bulimia.
Relative to a cohort of 14 women who had never suffered from either disorder, those recovered from anorexia had significantly diminished, and those recovered from bulimia, significantly elevated responses to the taste of sucrose in the right anterior insula.

A new drought-protecting chemical shows potential for crop protection during periods of dry weather.
A research team led by Sean Cutler, a plant cell biologist at the University of California, Riverside, has found a new drought-protecting chemical that shows high potential for becoming a powerful tool for crop protection in the new world of extreme weather.

Named “quinabactin” by the researchers, the chemical mimics a naturally occurring stress hormone in plants that helps the plants cope with drought conditions.