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.

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.  

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. 

For the last decade, political science has been engaged in an effort to make all political behavior a function of biology, much the same way evolutionary psychologists make everything about sex. 

A new paper goes beyond suspect fMRI imaging interpretation and surveys of college students and makes the case that political leaning can be predicted by a preference for...body odor. 

"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" biologists once said - meaning that an animal's "ontogeny", its embryonic development, replays its entire evolutionary history.

Today our understanding a more nuanced and a better way to figure out how animals evolved is to compare regulatory networks that control gene expression patterns, particularly embryonic ones, across species.  But that task can be humbling, according to Stowers Institute for Medical Research Scientific Director Robb Krumlauf, Ph.D. and colleagues, who show that the sea lamprey Petromyzon marinus, a survivor of ancient jawless vertebrates, exhibits a pattern of gene expression that is reminiscent of its jawed cousins, who evolved much, much later.

The saying goes that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, so while there is no cure for muscular dystrophy, rather than solely focusing on the underlying genetic defect might not help people right now as directly targeting muscle repair. 

Muscular dystrophies are a group of muscle diseases characterized by skeletal muscle wasting and weakness. Mutations in certain proteins, most commonly the protein dystrophin, cause muscular dystrophy in humans and also in mice.

The Asian monsoon was believed to have begun about 25 million years ago  as a result of the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalaya Mountains but a new study finds it existed 40 million years ago - a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide was 4X what it is now. The monsoon then weakened 34 million years ago when atmospheric CO2 then decreased by 50 percent and an ice age occurred. 

The monsoon, the largest climate system in the world, governs the climate in much of mainland Asia, bringing torrential summer rains and dry winters. 

The authors make the surprising claim in Nature that the monsoon is as much a result of global climate as it is a result of topography.