Psychologists from the University of Exeter have identified an 'early warning signal' in the brain that helps us avoid repeating previous mistakes. Published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, their research identifies, for the first time, a mechanism in the brain that reacts in just 0.1 seconds to things that have resulted in us making errors in the past.

Previous research has shown that we learn more about things for which we initially make incorrect predictions than for things for which our initial predictions are correct. The element of surprise in discovering we are wrong is conducive to learning, but this research is the first to show how amazingly rapid our brain’s response can be.

A vital molecule for resistance to food allergy has been identified and offers a potential target for therapy.

There is currently no way to treat food allergy and the only way for sufferers to manage the problem is to avoid certain foods and make sure they have injectable adrenaline at hand.

Scientists led by Dr Claudio Nicoletti at the Institute of Food Research in Norwich have found that a molecule called Interleukin-12 (IL-12) is absent during allergic responses. Dr Nicoletti suggests that by delivering an allergen in the presence of IL-12, allergic reactions could be brought back under control.

There's a problem in all of the climate predictions people have made over the last few years - we just don't know who to trust. Some experts remind us that since we can't predict the weather more than 10 days from now making economy-shattering policy decisions on such incomplete science is a bad idea. One prominent politician says he took a random sample of all the climate studies out there and that 928 out of 12,000 articles agreed with him, so he must be right. How are we to know?

Global warming is more politics than science and I don't want to get into whether it is happening or not, or how much, because that's not science, it's advocacy no matter what I say.

Did another universe collapse give birth to the one we live in today?

"My paper introduces a new mathematical model that we can use to derive new details about the properties of a quantum state as it travels through the Big Bounce, which replaces the classical idea of a Big Bang as the beginning of our universe," said Martin Bojowald, assistant professor of physics at Penn State.

In what they call a “stunning research advance,” investigators at Georgetown University Medical Center have been able to use simple, non-toxic chemical injections to add and remove fat in targeted areas on the bodies of laboratory animals.

They say the discovery could revolutionize human cosmetic and reconstructive plastic surgery and treatment of diseases associated with human obesity.

Investigators say these findings may also, over the long-term, lead to better control of metabolic syndrome, which is a collection of risk factors that increase a patient’s chances of developing heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.

In the last 40 years, scientists have perfected ways to determine the knot-like structure of enzymes, but they’ve been stumped trying to translate the structure into an understanding of function – what the enzyme actually does in the body. This puzzle has hindered drug discovery, since many of the most successful drugs work by blocking enzyme action.

Variations in the WFS1 gene, known to affect both the survival and function of insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, can be linked to type 2 diabetes susceptibility, according to a new study from Cambridge.

The study has two major implications – it identifies a new risk factor in a disease reaching epidemic levels worldwide while also showing that variations in a gene – and not only mutations – can lead to type 2 diabetes.

Ongoing field trials since 2002 by a team that includes 16 farmers, Cornell researchers and Cornell Cooperative Extension field crops educators in 10 counties are showing the value of on-farm research. Their results are successfully quantifying and predicting the nitrogen needs for growing corn, saving farmers money and reducing environmental impact.

"With this program, we focus on determining under what situations extra nitrogen would be good to add and when a farmer can save money by reducing fertilizer applications without impacting yield and quality," says Quirine Ketterings, associate professor of crop and soil sciences, who co-leads the research team.

Early use of new DNA sequencing technology enables scientists to create whole genome maps of chromatin in embryonic stem cells and other cells

As a fertilized egg develops into a full grown adult, mammalian cells make many crucial decisions — closing doors of opportunity as they adopt careers as liver cells, skin cells, or neurons. One of the most fundamental mysteries in biomedicine is how cells make such different career decisions despite having exactly the same DNA. By using a new kind of genomic technology, a new study unveils a special code — not within DNA, but within the so-called “chromatin” proteins surrounding it — that could unlock these mysterious choices underlying cell identity.

Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have developed a novel strategy to expand the natural repertoire of 20 amino acids in mammalian cells, including neurons, and successfully inserted tailor-made amino acids into proteins in these cells. In a powerful demonstration of the method’s versatility, they then used unnatural amino acids to determine the operating mechanism of the “molecular gates” that regulate the movement of potassium ions in and out of nerve cells.

“In the past, this type of engineering has been mainly restricted to bacteria or in yeast, and it was very challenging to efficiently incorporate unnatural amino acids in mammalian cells.