While our chromosomes are relatively stable within our lifetimes, the genetic material found in our mitochondria is highly variable across individuals and may impact upon human health, say researchers at the University of Montreal and its affiliated CHU Sainte-Justine Hospital.

Genomes are changing, they say, not just from generation to generation, but even and in fact within our individual cells. The researchers are the first to identify the extent to which the editing processes of RNA code can vary across a large number of individuals.

Scholars say they have created a breakthrough on understanding the demographic history of Stone-Age humans.

A genomic analysis of eleven Stone-Age human remains from Scandinavia revealed that expanding Stone-age farmers assimilated local hunter-gatherers and that the hunter-gatherers were historically in lower numbers than the farmers. 

A team of researchers led by Robert Quimby at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) has announced the discovery of a galaxy that magnified a background, Type Ia supernova thirtyfold through gravitational lensing. This is the first example of strong gravitational lensing of a supernova confirms the team's previous explanation for the unusual properties of this supernova. 

86-degree Fahrenheit water is quite comfortable for humans, but to many sea creatures it's deadly. If climate change heats up ocean temperatures, the future of species such as coral, which provides sustenance and livelihoods to a billion people, is threatened.

An experiment found that some corals can – on the fly – adjust their internal functions to tolerate hot water 50 times faster than they would adapt through evolutionary change alone. 

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- The smallest, most abundant marine microbe, Prochlorococcus, is a photosynthetic bacteria species essential to the marine ecosystem. An estimated billion billion billion of the single-cell creatures live in the oceans, forming the base of the marine food chain and occupying a range of ecological niches based on temperature, light and chemical preferences, and interactions with other species. But the full extent and characteristics of diversity within this single species remains a puzzle.

Approved in 2012, Brazil's new Forest Code has few admirers. Agricultural interests argue that it threatens the livelihoods of farmers. Environmentalists counter that it imperils millions of hectares of forest, threatening to release the billions of tons of carbon they contain. A new study, co-authored by Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) scientists Michael Coe, Marcia Macedo and Brazilian colleagues, published this week in Science, aims to clarify the new law. Entitled "Cracking Brazil's Forest Code," the article is the first to quantify the implications of recent changes to the Forest Code and identify new opportunities and challenges for conservation.

Washington, DC (April 24, 2014) — Many kidney failure patients in Australia who could benefit from undergoing dialysis at home are being treated in hospitals and dialysis units, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN). This is creating significant costs for healthcare providers and causing unnecessary disruptions to patients' lives.

If you really care about the climate, you can stop filling out surveys and complaining about what people believe and do something more meaningful than buy carbon credits - you can give up meat. 

And 11 other things that can separate you from the pack that are more interested in uniform bans and mitigation. Those won't work. Take the initiative and it doesn't matter what anyone else does.

A new report, Strategies for Mitigating Climate Change in Agriculture by Mitigation 2014, says it can eliminate the climate nosedive that will occur if people continue to eat meat and use air conditionin. It just needs people in richer countries who claim they care about emissions to show it.

A research team lead by Academy Professor Kari Rissanen at the University of Jyväskylä has discovered a new water-soluble fluorescent detection system that is extremely sensitive to pyrophosphate (PPi).

Pyrophosphate has a key role in energy transduction, DNA replication and other metabolic processes that are dysregulated in cancer cells.

The discovery might lead to the development of a method for early detection of cancer cells.

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have been part of a ten-year project which has successfully sequenced the genetic code of the tsetse fly – making major advances in disease control possible.

Tsetse flies are unique to Africa and can infect people bitten by them with sleeping sickness, a disease which damages the nervous system and is fatal if untreated. This kills over 250,000 people each year.

Traditional methods of control such as releasing sterile males, trapping and pesticide spraying are expensive and difficult to implement. Sleeping sickness can also evade the immune system, making a vaccine hard to create, so the genetic information will allow researchers to develop alternative strategies to control the disease.