Botulinum toxin - Botox - is one of the most poisonous naturally occurring substances but it has become best known as one of the most commonly used molecules to reduce wrinkles. Now it will be known for something else; saving infants.

Dr. Sam Daniel, Associate Director of Research of the Otorhinolaryngology Division at the Montreal Children’s Hospital of the McGill University Health Centre, has used this protein as an effective method to save newborns suffering from CHARGE Syndrome from having to undergo devastating tracheotomies.

Dr. Daniel describes the case of the first infant patient treated with the toxin in an article from the Archives of Otolaryngology.

You can tell a lot about the concerns of society regarding science by the kinds of topics that bring people to sites like ours. Not a day goes by that people don't arrive using Google searches looking for answers about organic food. The top query is something like 'what is organic food?' and it seems odd that after hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising and $20 billion in sales, no one is sure what organic food is.

There are two sides to the organic food issue to most people; genetics and chemicals. I don't worry too much about organic food from a genetics standpoint, for example, but I am not a fan of most chemicals. I am not even a fan of other people touching my food.

Jet engines operate at temperatures of thousands of degrees Fahrenheit and blades in the most advanced aircraft engines are coated with a thin layer of temperature-resistant, thermally-insulating ceramic to protect the metal. The coating -- referred to as a thermal-barrier coating -- is designed like an accordion to expand and contract with the metal.

The problem: When sand hits the hot engine blade it melts -- and becomes glass. “Molten glass is one of the nastiest substances around. It will dissolve anything,” says Nitin Padture, professor of materials science and engineering at Ohio State.

Conventional ceramic coating destroyed by molten glass. The field of view is about half a millimeter. Credit: Image by Aysegul Aygun and Nitin Padture, courtesy of Ohio State University.

Writing in PNAS, a group of researchers says they have determined the first pervasive 'rule' of evolution - that animals become increasingly more complex.

Examining the last 550 million years of the fossil catalog, the team investigated the different evolutionary branches of the crustacean family tree. They were seeking examples along the tree where animals evolved that were simpler than their ancestors.

Instead they found organisms with increasingly more complex structures and features, suggesting that there is some mechanism driving change in this direction.

The bystander effect suggests that the more witnesses there are to an emergency, the less likely an individual bystander is to intervene. This phenomenon was identified as a particular consequence of the assault and murder of Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964, which was witnessed by some 38 people, all of whom remained bystanders and failed to come to Kitty’s aid.

Scientists have been unable to study the bystander effect, even under controlled conditions, due to ethical and practical reasons. However, researchers say advanced animated humans and environments created by the National Centre for Computer Animation (NCCA) at Bournemouth, University will give scientists a unique opportunity to test the bystander effect in the context of a ‘controlled’ immersive virtual environment.

Apparently, animation in psychology studies requires that people have bodies like superheroes. Credit: National Centre for Computer Animation at Bournemouth University

Does Coke in a glass bottle taste better? Perhaps. A chemical combination can certainly interact different with glass than it does with plastic. If the can for your cream soda changes its design, you make like it less, detracting from the overall experience, but that doesn't mean it tastes different.

When it comes to taste, containers make a difference in actual flavor. Not so with sight, though a good design may entail a more positive reception. A study in the April issue of the Journal of Consumer Research says that 'touch' also falls into the important category when it comes to flavor.

It may be only St. Patrick's Day but it's never too early to think about July 4th fireworks. Plus, 'green' has two meanings today.

Most kids love fireworks. They make pretty colors and loud noises - but they're not terribily friendly toward the environment. A group of researchers is working on that.

“No other application in the field of chemistry has such a positive association for the general population as fireworks,” says Thomas Klapötke from the University of Munich. “However, pyrotechnical applications are significant polluters of the environment.”

Green is more than just a color

Fungi don't have sexes, they have mating types, but a new study in PLoS says there are similarities between the parts of DNA that determine the sex of plants and animals and the parts of DNA that determine mating types in certain fungi.

It makes fungi interesting as new model organisms in studies of the evolutionary development of sex chromosomes.

In the plant and animal kingdoms there are individuals of different sexes, that is, bearers of either many tiny sex cells (males) or a few large ones (females). In the third eukaryote kingdom (organisms with DNA gathered in the cell nucleus), the fungi kingdom, there are no sexes but rather a simpler and more primitive system of different so-called mating types. These are distinguished by different variants of a few specific genes.

If you're a student of culture, a number of things have likely piqued your curiosity; like why so many modern people get drunk about ancient religous stuff.

Take Mardi Gras, for example - go to any Mardi Gras celebration and 98% of people there will be Protestants, so they haven't fasted for Lent in over 400 years, and 85% won't know why they are getting drunk at all, but they still act like they are getting ready to starve for 40 days - if by starving we mean not having yards of beer for 11 straight hours.  It's a real mystery but at least it gets people thinking about religion and its relationship to Brazilian strippers.

Stegography is an ancient technique of hiding data within data. Unlike encryption, it isn't obviously encrypted. Today it is used to take advantage of unused bits of data in images or audio/video files to transmit secrets.

The basic concept of understanding the hidden data in files can also be used in understanding computer networks and biology, says Weixiong Zhang, Ph.D., Washington University associate professor of computer science. He and his co-authors writing in Physical Review E say they have created an algorithm to automatically discover communities and their subtle structures in various networks, including biological ones. They used it to identify the community structure of a network of co-expressed genes involved in bacterial sepsis.