A paper published this week in the open access journal PLoS Medicine provides strong evidence that one specific part of the genome is associated with rheumatoid arthritis.

Rene Toes and colleagues from Leiden University Medical Center, the Karolinska Institute, and Celera studied four groups of patients and matched controls. They found a consistent association with one specific region of the genome -- a region on chromosome 9 that includes the two genes, complement component 5 (C5) of the complement system (a primitive system within the body that is involved in the defense against foreign molecules) and a gene involved in the inflammatory response, TNF receptor-associated factor 1(TRAF1).

A team led by biophysicist Jeremy Smith of the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has taken a significant step toward unraveling the mystery of how proteins fold into unique, three-dimensional shapes.

Using ORNL's Cray XT4 Jaguar supercomputer as well as computer systems in Italy and Germany, the team revealed a driving force behind protein folding involving the way its constituents interact with water. The team's results are being published in this week's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Proteins are the workhorses of the body, taking on a wide variety of tasks. They fight infections, turn food into energy, copy DNA and catalyze chemical reactions. Insulin is a protein, as are antibodies and many hormones.

Whether a smoking-cessation drug will enable you to quit smoking may depend on your genes, according to new genotyping research from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). The study, published in the September issue of the journal Biological Psychiatry, found that the enzyme known to metabolize both the smoking cessation drug bupropion and nicotine is highly genetically variable in all ethnicities and influences smoking cessation.

For two generations of physicists, it has been a standard belief that the neutron, an electrically neutral elementary particle and a primary component of an atom, actually carries a positive charge at its center and an offsetting negative charge at its outer edge.

The notion was first put forth in 1947 by Enrico Fermi, a Nobel laureate noted for his role in developing the first nuclear reactor. But new research by a University of Washington physicist shows the neutron's charge is not quite as simple as Fermi believed.

Using precise data recently gathered at three different laboratories and some new theoretical tools, Gerald A.

Who knew that the sex lives of African bat bugs could be so interesting? Males with female genitalia, female bugs with 'paragenitals' on their abdomens that guide the males to the right spot by basically impaling them if they mess up, males trying to impregnate males.

It's Extreme Transexualism, coming soon to a species near you.

Why is it necessary in these bugs? Males tend to get overanxious and just start stabbing away anywhere in the abdomen but they really need to go into a special warm place that some men on the internet know nothing about - though it's still in their abdomen, in the case of female bat bugs.

Good-looking people capture our attention and render us temporarily helpless to turn our eyes away from them, according to a new Florida State University study. That applies to men and women and, in the case of married people, even to looking at the same sex.

“It’s like magnetism at the level of visual attention,” said Jon Maner, an assistant professor of psychology at FSU, who studied the role mating-related motives can play in a psychological phenomenon called attentional adhesion. The paper is one of the first to show how strongly, quickly and automatically we are attuned to attractive people, he said.

The "Victorian Era", named for the period when Queen Victoria was Queen of England and the British Empire was at its apex, is now regarded as one of either impeccable manners and dress or one of sexual repression and quiet frustration.

Ian Christopher McManus of the University College London says that Victorian society also seems to have repressed left-handedness. 11 percent of people today are left-handed yet according to his research only 3 percent of people born in 1900 were. They say that threefold difference merits explanation and they looked to old films for answers.

"Left-handedness is important because more than 10 percent of people have their brains organized in a qualitatively different way to other people," said McManus. "That has to be interesting.

For the first time scientists have been able to film, in real time, the nanoscale interaction of an enzyme and a DNA strand from an attacking virus.

Women and men appear to respond differently to the same biochemical manipulation. Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the most common mental disorders, and it is also one of the most studied. It is already known that reduced serotonin transmission contributes to the pathophysiology, or functional changes, associated with MDD and most of today’s most popular antidepressants block the serotonin “uptake site”, also known as the transporter, in the brain. It is also known that people with MDD are frequently found to have impaired impulse control.

A new study published in Nature Genetics on Sunday 16 September 2007 show that common, complex diseases are more likely to be due to genetic variation in regions that control activity of genes, rather than in the regions that specify the protein code.

This surprising result comes from a study at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute of the activity of almost 14,000 genes in 270 DNA samples collected for the HapMap Project. The authors looked at 2.2 million DNA sequence variants (SNPs) to determine which affected gene activity.

They found that activity of more than 1300 genes was affected by DNA sequence changes in regions predicted to be involved in regulating gene activity, which often lie close to, but outside, the protein-coding regions.