A burger and fries may be the quintessential North American meal but it can also be viewed as the perfect example of humanity’s increasingly varied diet, according to researchers who have conducted a unique study of the plants used around the world for food.

“Generally speaking, we eat very broadly from the tree of life,” University of Calgary plant evolutionary ecologist Jana Vamosi said. “Others have looked at the sheer number of plant species we consume but nobody has ever examined whether the plants we eat are clustered in certain branches. It turns out that they are not.”

In the first-ever study of the “phylogenetic distribution” of the human diet, Vamosi, working with a team led by Serban Proches from Stellenbosch University in South Africa, found that humans likely stand alone when it comes to the spectrum of species we consume.

Optical clocks might become the atomic clocks of the future. Their "pendulum", i.e. the regular oscillation process which each clock needs, is an oscillation in the range of the visible light.

As its frequency is higher than that of the microwave oscillations of the cesium atomic clocks, physicists expect another increase in the accuracy, stability and reliability. In the case of one of the candidates for an optical clock which is developed at Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), strontium atoms are retained in the interference pattern of two laser beams.

A compound that naturally occurs in grapefruit and other citrus fruits may be able to block the secretion of hepatitis C virus (HCV) from infected cells, a process required to maintain chronic infection.

A team of researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Engineering in Medicine (MGH-CEM) report that HCV is bound to very low-density lipoprotein (vLDL, a so-called “bad” cholesterol) when it is secreted from liver cells and that the viral secretion required to pass infection to other cells may be blocked by the common flavonoid naringenin.

If the results of this study extend to human patients, a combination of naringenin and antiviral medication might allow patient to clear the virus from their livers.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Arizona State University have sequenced the genome of a rare bacterium that harvests light energy by making an even rarer form of chlorophyll, chlorophyll d. Chlorophyll d absorbs “red edge,” near infrared, long wave length light, invisible to the naked eye.

In so doing, the cyanobacterium Acaryochloris marina, competes with virtually no other plant or bacterium in the world for sunlight. As a result, its genome is massive for a cyanobacterium, comprising 8.3 million base pairs, and sophisticated. The genome is among the very largest of 55 cyanobacterial strains in the world sequenced thus far, and it is the first chlorophyll d –containing organism to be sequenced .

For the first time, scientists have described the transition of the flat, disc-shaped heart field into the primary linear heart tube. The investigations on zebrafish embryos were made by Stefan Rohr and Cécile Otten, members of the research group of Dr. Salim Abdelilah-Seyfried of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch, Germany.

Currently, one of the most important areas to explore in developmental biology is how cellular transformation processes lead to the three-dimensional formation (morphogenesis) of organs. A better understanding of these processes is a basic requirement for elucidating congenital malformation of organs.

The heart, for instance, develops in the embryo from a flat disc, the so-called heart field. The tissue of this two-dimensional structure consists of a thin layer of epithelial cells. Similar cells line all inner organs, but also the skin and blood vessels.

Yulex Corporation, a Maricopa, Arizona company that develops clean technologies to derive bio-based materials and products including natural latex, rubber and renewable energy sources from the desert plant guayule (why-YOU-lee), has added two experts in its efforts to create new industrial products from the crop.

Dr. Lauren Johnson, a leading expert in plant breeding, joins Yulex Corporation as Agricultural Research Director and Jim Mitchell joins as Senior Director of Technology Development respectively.