A team of researchers at Duke University Medical Center and the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) has found that lactic acid is an important energy source for tumor cells. In further experiments, they discovered a new way to destroy the most hard-to-kill, dangerous tumor cells by preventing them from delivering lactic acid. 

Determining chronological age is easy - count forward from birth. Establishing physiological age, especially in humans, is purely subjective because it's based on how someone looks or functions. Research in nematode worms could lead to the development of human biomarkers for aging, allowing us to track how we're withstanding the tests of time.

Scientists at the Buck Institute for Age Research say they have identified for the first time these  biomarkers of aging which are highly predictive of both chronological and physiological age.  Biomarkers are biochemical features that can be used to measure the progress of disease or the effects of treatment.

People who have lost the ability to interpret emotion after a severe brain injury can regain this vital social skill by being re-educated to read body language, facial expressions and voice tone in others, according to a new study.

The research, published in the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, reveals that appropriate training can result in significant gains in "emotional perception", which is crucial for successful social communication.

The study involved 18 participants recruited from an outpatient service at the Liverpool Hospital Brain Injury Rehabilitation Unit, in Sydney, Australia. All had experienced a severe traumatic brain injury at least six months earlier and had significantly impaired ability to interpret emotions in others.

Lithium-ion batteries don't get a lot of respect these days, what with everyone talking about magical future batteries that are cheaper and won't make you Prius owners cause acid rain.  They're everywhere still and they provide portable devices that require a lot of energy, such as mobile telephones, digital cameras, and notebook computers, with power. However, their capacity, and thus the running time of the devices, remain somewhat limited - a notebook computer usually runs only about two hours.

University of Alberta research has yielded a way to double the output of rice crops in some of the world's poorest, most distressed areas.

Jerome Bernier, a PhD student in the U of A Department of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Science, has found a group of genes in rice that enables a yield of up to 100 per cent more in severe drought conditions. 

The discovery marks the first time this group of genes in rice has been identified, and could potentially bring relief to farmers in countries like India and Thailand, where rice crops are regularly faced with drought. Rice is the number one crop consumed by humans annually.

Scientists are reporting the first genome-wide sequence of an extinct animal, according to Webb Miller, Penn State professor of biology, one of the project's two leaders. The animal is the woolly mammoth, an extinct species of elephant that was adapted to living in the cold environment of the northern hemisphere and they did it by sequencing four billion DNA bases using next-generation DNA-sequencing instruments and a novel approach that reads ancient DNA with high efficiency.

A detailed analysis of black carbon, the residue of burned organic matter,  in computer climate models suggests they may be overestimating global warming predictions.  A new Cornell study in Nature Geosciences quantified the amount of black carbon in Australian soils and found that there was far more than expected, said Johannes Lehmann, the paper's lead author and a Cornell professor of biogeochemistry. The survey was the largest of black carbon ever published.