With predictions that more than 3 billion people will live in areas facing severe water shortages by the year 2025, the challenge is to find an environmentally benign way to remove salt from seawater. Global climate change, desertification, and over-population are already taking their toll on fresh water supplies. In coming years, fresh water could become a rare and expensive commodity.

MIT researchers have identified a family of proteins key to the formation of the communication networks critical for normal brain function. Their research could lead to new treatments for brain injury and disease.

The team, led by MIT biology professor Frank Gertler, found that a certain family of proteins is necessary to direct the formation of axons and dendrites, the cellular extensions that facilitate communication between neurons.

The work focuses on cellular outgrowths called neurites, which are the precursors to axons and dendrites. Understanding how neurites form could eventually lead to therapies involving stimulation of neurite growth, said Gertler.

Headlines last week reported that researchers successfully produced stem cells from cloned monkey embryos. Using a process that has become almost routine with mice, scientists can now make make primate embryonic stem cells that are genetically identical to a given DNA donor. Once we learn to do this in humans, the possibility of stem cell based treatments for heart disease, neurodegeneration, and more will be closer to reality. But in the US and elsewhere, can we develop the political will to let this research move forward?

Doctored photos of past public events can influence what people think they remember of the incident, as well as altering their attitudes and any subsequent responses, according to research published today in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology.

Three researchers, UC Irvine psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and University of Padua researchers Franca Agnoli and Dario Sacchi, came to this conclusion after showing either original or digitally doctored images to 299 people aged 19-84. The images were of two different protests, one in 1989 in Tiananmen Square, the other 2003 in Rome.

Sexy dads produce sexy sons, in the insect world at least. While scientists already knew that specific attractive traits, from cricket choruses to peacocks’ tails, are passed on to their offspring, the heritability of attractiveness as a whole is more contentious. New research by the University of Exeter, published in Current Biology, shows that attractiveness is hereditary.

The research team, based on the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus, focused on the fruitfly Drosophila simulans. They paired up males and females at random and found the length of time it took for them to mate ranged from just two minutes to two hours. Female fruitflies need to make themselves accessible to males for mating to take place, so males cannot force copulation.

At MIT economist says U.S. greenhouse gas emissions could grow more quickly in the next 50 years than in the previous half-century and technological advances could hurt rather than help.

The paper by Professor Emeritus Richard Eckaus of the MIT Department of Economics and his co-author, Ian Sue Wing, of Boston University, "The Implications of the Historical Decline in U.S. Energy Intensity for Long-Run CO2 Emission Projections," was published in the November issue of Energy Policy. In it, the pair portray the changing interplay among technology, energy use and CO2 emissions based on a simulation of the U.S.

Three decades have passed since gene therapy pioneer William W. Hauswirth, Ph.D., and his colleagues at the University of Florida began work on a virus that could safely deliver corrective genes into living animals.

It’s been six years since a multi-university team used gene therapy to give sight to puppies born with a defect that causes blindness.

Now the gene-transfer technique is being tested for safety in people in a phase 1 clinical research study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Florida with support from the National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

Before you plop in front of the television for a day of football, pizza and beer, you might consider this: new research shows that in young adults, decades of hard-won progress in reducing the risk of heart disease appears to be stalling, as recent death rates from coronary disease remain almost unchanged in young men and may even be increasing in women.

The research, conducted at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, appears in the November 27, 2007, issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC).

The worrisome plateau in death rates comes at a time when young Americans are increasingly likely to be obese and suffer from diabetes, high blood pressure and other cardiovascular risk factors.

Brain scans used to track changes in a dozen patients who received an experimental gene therapy show that the treatment normalizes brain function - and the effects are still present a year later.

Andrew Feigin, MD, and David Eidelberg, MD, of The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research collaborated with Michael Kaplitt, MD, of Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan and others to deliver genes for glutamic acid decarboxylase (or GAD) into the subthalamic nucleus of the brain in Parkinson’s patients. The study was designed as a phase I safety study, and the genes were delivered to only one side of the brain to reduce risk and to better assess the treatment.

New research from Northwestern University finds that college students’ choice of social networking sites -- including Facebook, MySpace and Xanga -- is related to their race, ethnicity and parents’ education.

The findings challenge discourse about the democratic nature of online interaction and fly in the face of conventional wisdom suggesting that all college students communicate via Facebook, the popular social networking site (SNS) launched in 2004 by a Harvard undergraduate.

“That race, ethnicity and the education level of one’s parents can predict which social network sites a student selects suggests there’s less intermingling of users from varying backgrounds on these sites than previously believed,” says Eszter Hargittai, author of