A team of scientists from Canada, Spain and the United States has identified a key gene that allows plants to defend themselves against environmental stresses like drought, freezing and heat. 

"Plants have stress hormones that they produce naturally and that signal adverse conditions and help them adapt," says team member Peter McCourt, a professor of cell and systems biology at the University of Toronto. "If we can control these hormones we should be able to protect crops from adverse environmental conditions which is very important in this day and age of global climate change."

When a fake pandemic is being generated by media corporations having a slow news week, fake medicine is sure to pop up and take advantage of it.   The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) today issued a warning to the public about the risks of buying online medicines for swine influenza, such as Tamiflu or Relenza.

David Pruce, RPSGB Director of Policy said, "With the current fears about swine flu, we are concerned that unscrupulous people are exploiting the public's fears about swine flu by offering to sell the antiviral drugs Tamiflu and Relenza over the internet.

"This is a golden opportunity for counterfeiters to offer fake supplies of these drugs.

When a jet is flying faster than the speed of sound, one small mistake can tear it apart.   It was so feared that the physics blended with the supernatural in the mid 1940s.  Luckily, Chuck Yeager didn't believe in demons.

There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. His controls would freeze up, his plane would buffet wildly, and he would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man would ever pass. They called it the sound barrier.

Calculations by Ryan O'Leary and Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggest that hundreds of massive black holes, left over from the galaxy-building days of the early universe, may wander the Milky Way.   Rogue black holes roaming our galaxy, threatening to swallow anything that gets too close?  Do we call the UN?

No, Earth is safe. The closest rogue black hole should reside thousands of light-years away. Astronomers are eager to locate them, though, for the clues they will provide to the formation of the Milky Way. 

As you know, when different species directly compete for the same finite resource, only the fitter will survive.  A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) says they have demonstrated that in a laboratory environment, along with how, when given a variety of resources, the different species will evolve to become increasingly specialized, each filling different niches within their common ecosystem.

We're big fans of oxytocin understanding.  It generally makes people nicer and  and relationships are difficult.   When you introduce stressful issues into relationships, such as home finances, it can only get worse.    Oxytocin has been found to make relationships a little less difficult because it can take the "edge" off sensitive discussions.

The actual biology of human social relationships is just beginning to emerge as research on social cognition conducted in animals is now informing research in humans.