Why can cancer cells be so resilient, even when faced with the onslaught of nearly toxic drug cocktails, radiation, and even our own immune system?

A new research report appearing in the March 2015 issue of The FASEB Journal, shows that intermediate filaments formed by a protein called "vimentin" or VIF, effectively "insulate" the mitochondria in cancer cells from any attempt to destroy the cell. Under normal circumstances, VIF serves as the "skeleton" for cells by helping them maintain their shapes.

Sunday marks the 106th celebration of International Women’s Day.

Since New Yorkers first celebrated it in 1909, American women have made great strides toward equality in the workplace, politics and at home. Long gone are the days when women couldn’t vote or sex discrimination was blatant and legal.

A new sequencing technique may provide a clearer picture of how genes in mitochondria, the "powerhouses" that turn sugar into energy in human cells, shape each person's inherited risk for diabetes, heart disease and cancer, according to a study.

The powerful new tool may help researchers better explain why some people get sick and others do not despite being the same age and weight, or having the same bad habits (e.g. smoking). Researchers have long sought to determine these risks by looking at diet and variations in nuclear genes inherited from both parents. These analyses have left out differences in mitochondrial genes (mtDNA), the second kind of DNA in every cell, which we inherit from our mothers.

Planning permission has been given for what could become the world’s largest offshore wind farm on the Dogger Bank, off England’s east coast.

If fully constructed, the project will have up to 400 turbines with a total generation capacity of 2.4 GW. That’s enough to power 1.9 million households – more than Manchester and Birmingham combined.

The NASA spacecraft Dawn has spent more than seven years traveling across the Solar System to intercept the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres.

Now in orbit around Ceres, the probe has returned the first images and data from these distant objects.

But inside Dawn itself is another first – the spacecraft is the first exploratory space mission to use an electrically-powered ion engine rather than conventional rockets.

Intensified land-use, sewage discharge, and climate change have likely favored disproportionate development of harmful algae in freshwaters. A new study found that blooms of one type of harmful algae, called cyanobacteria, have increased disproportionately over the past two centuries relative to other species, with the greatest increases since 1945.
Cyanobacteria pose a serious threat to drinking water sources worldwide because they can release toxins into the surrounding environment.

Evaluations of research ethics do not benefit from a tick-box approach. 

Australia’s social science research, like that in most developed countries since the infamous Milgram experiments took place at my alma mater in 1961, occurs under the watchful eye of ethics boards.

I am writing a book on mitochondria and after a few months of research you begin to see a common thread - serendipity.  Sometimes big things happen because of what seems to be luck, a group of people all happen to be in one place at one time, they are all spurred on by each other and then dramatic things occur. 

New gaps are opening up in educational achievement between teenage boys and girls, according to a comprehensive new report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Analysis of its 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science across countries, shows that unfortunately, patterns between the performance of girls and boys have not changed much over time, although some of the gaps have closed a little.

Fast food advertising doesn't emphasize healthy menu items enough, and by giving away toys in things like Happy Meals restaurants are being deceptive even by their own self-regulation standards, according to scholars who showed 100 children aged 3–7 years McDonald’s and Burger King children and adult meal ads, randomly drawn from ads that aired on national U.S. television from 2010–11.

After seeing the ad, children were asked to recall what they had seen and transcripts evaluated for descriptors of food, healthy food (apples or milk), and premiums/tie-ins. All children’s ads contained images of healthy foods, like apples and milk, but premiums/tie-ins were recalled much more frequently than healthy food.