A protein known as mini-chromosome maintenance (MCM) has been found to change DNA topology and make DNA twist up into a so-called "supercoil".

Supercoiling can be thought of as similar to twisting one end of a rubber band while holding the other end still. After a few turns, it forms a neatly twisted rope. But if you keep on turning, the twisted band will twist back upon itself into an increasingly coiled-up knot. Similarly, a DNA molecule can be twisted and coiled to varying extents to form different "supercoiled" structures.

Video games can be difficult, even frustrating at the harder levels. That is part of their appeal. It turns out that frustrated people are attracted to video games also. The temptation to steal or cheat is greater if the risk of being caught is low and a new psychology paper suggests that denying people the opportunity to engage in these taboo behaviors may lead them to seek out violent video games as a way of managing their frustration.

People with more money may live longer, if not better, than poor people but attempts to link high socioeconomic status to better health and lower mortality have been ineffective because it's unclear whether the association has more to do with access to resources or the glow of high social status relative to others. Scholars call the latter "relative deprivation."

A new study found that women who take aspirin have a reduced risk of developing melanoma. The longer they take it, the lower the risk, suggesting that aspirin's anti-inflammatory effects may help protect against this type of skin cancer.

In the Women's Health Initiative, researchers observed US women aged 50 to 79 years for an average of 12 years and noted which individuals developed cancer. At the beginning of the study, the women were asked which medications they took, what they ate, and what activities they performed.

Researchers have developed a cloud-computing platform,  the RoboEarth Cloud Engine, that allows robots connected to the Internet to directly access the powerful computational, storage, and communications infrastructure of modern data centers for tasks and learning.

This continues their work towards creating an Internet for robots. The new platform extends earlier work on allowing robots to share knowledge with other robots via a WWW-style database, greatly speeding up robot learning and adaptation in complex tasks.

Research and Markets has released its "Life Science Research Tools Market Size, Growth and Trends 2006-2016" report.