The NY Times recently criticized cancer funding policies as being too risk-averse.

The Director of the National Cancer Institute has responded, but his response helps prove the point that funding is too risk averse:

A gene called Chd1 has been identified in a Nature study as crucial for embryonic stem cell pluripotency - the ability to differentiate into any type of cell.  Chd1 seems to act by keeping the genetic material open and there poised to express any gene. Chd1 is also shown to be fundamental when reactivating differentiated tissue cells in order to create new stem cells.

The discovery has implications, not only for a better understanding of stem cells unique characteristics, but also for the process of obtaining them from tissue-specific cells avoiding all the problems associated with embryonic stem cells.

Twitter, the newest social networking sensation, can generate sales leads for your business faster than other social network, even with a slashed budget, says David White, Founder and Chief Executive of Weboptimiser and he says he can tell you how your company can benefit from it when he presents his webinars in July.   He says Twitter is generating up to half the hits on his company’s website.

The Arxiv is an online repository of scientific papers in physics, astronomy, maths, cosmology, computer science, and a few other topics, where papers due to be published on scientific journals are submitted by the authors, and become quickly accessible for free to anybody before the peer-review process ran by the journals is over and they get printed there.

This is my course assignment of Evolutionary Ecology of Stockholm University,Sweden in the year of 2009.

Abstract

Specialization character of phytophagous insects is one of the key examples of insect-plant relationship. Host specificity of insect is required for their larval development. Several factors like trade-off, characteristics of host plant, insect’s neural system are responsible to an insect for becoming a specialist. Though specialization character of phytophagy increase the vulnerability towards extinction, still insect tense to be specialist for protecting themselves from natural enemies, getting the microclimate facility and boost up the survival rate of their offspring.

Scientists have discovered the gene behind Recessive Omodysplasia, a rare skeletal disease characterised by short-limbed dwarfism and craniofacial anomalies. The work, just published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, reports the identification on chromosome 13 of a gene - GPC6 – that is shown to be crucial for normal bone development.

The research will allow a better comprehension, as well as prevention, of the disease by permitting the screening of potential mutation carriers in pregnancy but most importantly will also help to understand better bone development and its molecular bases.

Nothing makes biologists happier than psychologists declaring things a product of evolution.   Now it turns out even social constructs like 'taking turns' have gotten some benefit from evolutions' 'invisible hand'.

How so?   It spans across species so it must be evolution, say University of Leicester psychologists professor Andrew Colman and Dr Lindsay Browning, who carried out the simulations due to appear in the September issue of Evolutionary Ecology Research which they say helps explain the evolution of cooperative turn-taking.

If you've read your history and wondered about when the next Ice Age is coming, you can thank global warming it hasn't happened.    But it could be worse.   Earth's 4.5 billion years have seen several instances where temperatures changed dramatically, like in life ending ways, along with asteroids bombarding the planet and any number of species going extinct without a single activist to hunger strike for them.

But one of the biggest moments in Earth's lifetime is a positive one - the Cambrian explosion roughly 540 million years ago when complex, multi-cellular life burst out all over the planet.   Scientists can pinpoint this pivotal period as leading to life as we know it today but no one is sure what caused the Cambrian explosion of life.

The news that Newcastle University researchers have used embryonic stem cells to create human sperm under laboratory conditions has led to a lot of questions; like, who will television commercials make fun of if all men are gone?

In the technique developed at Newcastle, stem cells with XY chromosomes (male) were developed into germline stem cells which were then prompted to complete meiosis - cell division with halving of the chromosome set. These were shown to produce fully mature sperm called In Vitro Derived sperm (IVD sperm).