Voyage to the bottom of the sea, or simply look along the bottom of a clear stream and you may spy lobsters or crayfish waving their antennae. Look closer, and you will see them feeling around with their legs and flicking their antennules – the small, paired sets of miniature feelers at the top of their heads between the long antennae.

Both are used for sensing the environment. The long antennae are used for getting a physical feel of an area, such as the contours of a crevice. The smaller antennules are there to both help the creature smell for food or mates or dangerous predators and also to sense motion in the water that also could indicate the presence of food, a fling or danger.

How do adult stem cells protect themselves from accumulating genetic mutations that can lead to cancer?

For more than three decades, many scientists have argued that the "immortal strand hypothesis" - which states that adult stem cells segregate their DNA in a non-random manner during cell division -- explains it. And several recent reports have presented evidence backing the idea.

But now University of Michigan stem cell researcher Sean Morrison and his colleagues say they have dealt a mortal blow to the immortal strand, at least as far as blood-forming stem cells are concerned.

A University of Leicester research team is working on a new technique for growing nanoparticles which could have extraordinary implications in electronics, medicine, the measurement of atmospheric air and the cleansing of car exhausts.

Dr Andrew Ellis and Dr Shengfu Yang, both of the University’s Department of Chemistry, have discovered a niche way of making nanoparticles that cannot be formed in any other way.

Working with Professor Chris Binns and Dr Klaus von Haeften in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, they are developing a technique involving the use of helium nanodroplets.

For the first time, scientists have extracted human DNA from ancient artifacts. The work potentially opens up a new universe of sources for ancient genetic material, which is used to map human migrations in prehistoric times.

Before this, archaeologists could only get ancient DNA from relics of the human body itself, including prehistoric teeth, bones, fossilized feces, or — rarely — preserved flesh. Such sources of DNA are hard to find, poorly preserved, or unavailable because of cultural and legal barriers.

By contrast, the genetic material used in the Harvard study came from two types of artifacts — 800 to 2,400 years old — that are found by the hundreds at archaeological sites in the American Southwest.

A new study authored by Tore Nielsen, PhD, of the Sleep Research Centre at the Hôpital du Sacré-Cœur de Montréal in Montréal, Québec, Canada, found that expectant mothers had their dream content impact impacted and it wasn't always good.

Maternal responsibility and concern led to anxiety in the mother that often spilled over into wakefulness. These kinds of dreams were also accompanied by complex behaviors in new moms such as motor activity, speaking and expressing emotion.

Combining radiation therapy with a drug that helps destroy blood vessels nourishing malignant tumors has been shown in mice to be significantly more effective in treating lung cancer than either approach alone, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found.

The study, involving human lung-cancer cells implanted in mice, appears in the Sept. 1 issue of Clinical Cancer Research.

In the study, Dr. Philip Thorpe, professor of pharmacology at UT Southwestern, and his colleagues found that radiation generates a chemical reaction in the membranes of endothelial cells, which line the blood vessels that feed tumors. The reaction causes membrane components called anionic phospholipids to flip inside out, exposing them. In normal blood vessels, they face the interior of the cell.