Researchers have used genetific modification (GM) to bring salt-tolerant plants a little closer to reality.

The research team – based at the University of Adelaide's Waite Campus in Australia – has used a new GM technique to contain salt in parts of the plant where it does less damage.

Salinity affects agriculture worldwide, which means the results of this research could impact on world food production and security.

The work has been led by researchers from the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics and the University of Adelaide's School of Agriculture, Food and Wine, in collaboration with scientists from the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, UK.

A new monkey has been discovered in a remote region of the Amazon in Brazil, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) .

The monkey is related to saddleback tamarins, which include several species of monkeys known for their distinctively marked backs. The newly described distinct subspecies was first seen by scientists on a 2007 expedition into the state of Amazonas in northwestern Brazil.

Though New Orleans residents were told to evacuate days before the arrival of Hurricane Katrina, no one could have predicted the real extent of the devastation that would follow. 

Researchers from Tel Aviv University say they may be ableto make just such a prediction in the future.   They say a reliable way to help predict the intensity of the next big flood can use common cell phone towers across the United States. Their model, which analyzes cell phone signals, adds a critical component to weather forecasting never before available. 

Scientists at Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham) say they have discovered that specialized complex sugar molecules (glycans) that anchor cells into place act as tumor suppressors in breast and prostate cancers.

Glycans play a critical role in cell adhesion in normal cells and their decrease or loss leads to increased cell migration by invasive cancer cells and metastasis but an increase in expression of the enzyme that produces these glycans, β3GnT1, resulted in a significant reduction in tumor activity.

If you were born at a time when social security numbers were not required, you can probably recognize other people from your home state if you see or hear their numbers.    You may have thought there was a smarter system in place by now.

Not so, and it's actually easy to glean a social security number,  say project lead Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon's H. John Heinz III College, and Ralph Gross, a post-doctoral researcher, who have shown that public information readily gleaned from governmental sources, commercial data bases, or online social networks can be used to routinely predict most — and sometimes all — of an individual's nine-digit Social Security number.

Parasites don't get a lot of respect these days but we may have to reconsider that.  In spite of their nasty reputation, they may have given us the joy of sex.

What's so great about sex?

If you don't know, this article cannot help and even from an evolutionary perspective the answer is not as obvious as one might think.