By Joao Pedro de Magalhaes, University of Liverpool

Molecules containing carbon-halogen bonds are produced naturally across all kingdoms of life and constitute a large family of natural products with a broad range of biological activities. 

The presence of halogen substituents in many bioactive compounds has a profound influence on their molecular properties and a goal of chemical science has been to find the late-stage, site-specific incorporation of a halogen atom into a complex natural product by replacing an sp³ C-H bond (one of the most inert chemical bonds known in an organic compound) with a C-X bond (X=halogen).

There has been no reliable synthetic or biological method known to be able to achieve this type of transformation but in Nature Chemical Biology

In 2010, McGill Redmen receiver Charles-Antoine Sinotte suffered a concussion during his last home game. "It was like nothing I had experienced before," recalls Sinotte. "I felt like I was out of my body."

Although he received medical attention and missed the rest of the game, he admits he downplayed his symptoms in order to play in the next game – his last before leaving McGill. 

Researchers have discovered "the most famous wheat gene," a reproductive traffic cop of sorts that can be used to transfer valuable genes from other plants to wheat, which clears the way for wheat varieties with disease- and pest-resistance traits of other grasses.

Though it would be genetic modification, because of precise legal definitions that ban some genetic optimization but allow mutagenesis and other older forms of genetic modification, it would not have the same regulatory hurdles and controversy of modern GMOs.

Men who had moderate baldness affecting both the front and the crown of their head by age 45 were at a 40% increased risk of developing aggressive prostate cancer than men with no baldness, according to a new, large cohort analysis from the prospective Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian (PLCO) Cancer Screening Trial.

Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer among men.
Aggressive prostate cancer usually indicates a faster growing tumor resulting in poorer prognosis relative to non-aggressive prostate cancer later in life. There was no significant link between other patterns of baldness and prostate cancer risk. 

The use of unnecessary medical tests and procedures driven by a fear of malpractice lawsuits, commonly known as 'defensive medicine', has been estimated to cost up to $46 billion annually in the U.S. 

It used to be that we didn't want medical decisions being made by insurance companies, and instead they became dictated by lawyers. 

For a recent paper, the authors estimated the cost of defensive medicine on three services – tests, procedures or hospitalizations – by asking physicians to estimate the defensiveness of their own orders. The authors invited 42 hospital physicians to complete a survey, which 36 physicians did and rated 4,215 orders for 769 patients in the research letter.  

Vitamin B12 is an essential molecule required by most life on this planet but it is only produced by a relatively small group of microorganisms due to its large size and complexity. For us, vitamin B12 plays a key role in maintaining the brain and nervous systems, as well as DNA synthesis in cells throughout the body. 

In the modern era, a great deal of policy decisions are made by people who do not report to the public. If the EPA agrees to settle a lawsuit with canoers by calling water a pollutant, they can just do it, and stick local government with a $500 million liability. 

By Jane Johnston

A New Zealand High Court judgment handed down on Friday will have far-reaching implications for journalists and bloggers, as courts around the world consider the rapidly changing definitions of journalism.

The 500 million years after Earth formed were not the hot, lava-filled Hell commonly portrayed, it may have had oceans, continents and active crustal plates - a lot like we have today.

This alternate view of Earth's first geologic eon, called the Hadean, gets support from the first detailed comparison of zircon crystals that formed more than 4 billion years ago with those formed contemporaneously in Iceland, which has been proposed as a possible geological analog for early Earth.