Tumor progression can now be mapped less to mathematical standards and more to individual patients according to a new study by researchers at Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities. The study provides a new paradigm in calculating tumor development, showing that it appears to be driven by mutations in many genes.

Our understanding of the progression of cancer has long been based on streamlined models where cancer is driven by mutations in only a few genes. Niko Beerenwinkel et al. show how tumor progression can be driven by hundreds of genes. As many as 20 different mutated genes might be responsible for driving an individual tumor’s development.

Which gender is the most talkative? (1) No matter your answer, you are partially right.

A recent Gallup poll showed that both men and women believe that women possess the gift of gab and some even believe women are biologically built for conversation but all of that is challenged in research published in the November issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review.

In a recent set of meta-analyses conducted by Campbell Leaper and Melanie Ayres, they collected all of the available evidence from decades of scientific study and systematically combined the findings into an overall picture of the differences between men and women regarding talkativeness.

Yellowstone is North America’s largest volcanic field, produced by a “hotspot” – a gigantic plume of hot and molten rock – that begins at least 400 miles beneath Earth’s surface and rises to 30 miles underground, where it widens to about 300 miles across.

Certain varieties of common fescue lawn grass come equipped with their own natural broad-spectrum herbicide that inhibits the growth of weeds and other plants around them.

Cornell researchers have identified the herbicide as an amino acid called meta-tyrosine, or m-tyrosine, that these lawn grasses exude from their roots in large amounts. This amino acid is a close relative of para-tyrosine (p-tyrosine), one of the 20 common amino acids that form proteins.

A new study led by researchers at The Miriam Hospital’s Weight Control & Diabetes Research Center finds that dieters who have the tendency to eat in response to external factors, such as at festive celebrations, have fewer problems with their weight loss than those who eat in response to internal factors such as emotions. The study also found that emotional eating was associated with weight regain in successful losers.

The study is published in the October 2007 issue of Obesity.

“We found that the more people report eating in response to thoughts and feelings, such as, ‘when I feel lonely, I console myself by eating,’ the less weight they lost in a behavioral weight loss program.

The English Reformation spurred a fundamentalist approach to Bible reading, according to new research by a Harvard professor.

“Evangelical reading habits after 1525 were disciplinary, punishing and even demeaning,” says James Simpson, Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English in Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

In 1525, Protestant reformer William Tyndale translated the Bible into early modern English. Scholars have widely hailed that moment as a liberating step for the literate public, who could suddenly read the Bible on their own terms, without the constraints of priestly interpretation.

New work on fruit fly genomics suggests new ways to look at the much larger human genome, and gives insights into the role of adaptation in evolution.

In two recent papers, researchers led by David Begun and Charles Langley, professors of evolution and ecology at the UC Davis Center for Population Biology, compared the whole genomes of several individuals of the fly Drosophila simulans to close relatives D. melanogaster and D. yakuba.

The same approach could be extended to the much larger genomes of humans and our close relatives, Begun said, showing which changes in the genome are uniquely human.

An Israeli-Jordanian-U.S. cooperative project aimed at measuring air quality in the area between the neighboring southern cities of Aqaba in Jordan and Eilat in Israel has been launched by scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem together with scientists from the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Administration (ASEZA) and the Desert Research Institute of Reno, Nevada, in the US.

The one-month, intensive, transboundary regional air quality research study began earlier this month, with the Israeli team operating a mobile laboratory located north of Eilat, and the Jordanian researchers performing continuous measurements of air quality in Aqaba.

The scientific community is progressively experiencing a greater interest in environmentally friendly energy generation technologies, and their suitable applications, such is the case of hydrogen fuel cells applied to aeronautics.

This contamination free technology has taken a crucial role in the development of modern aeronautics and the present objective is the realization of fully electrical planes. Hydrogen fuel cells are currently being tested as propulsion system in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles by companies like Boeing, where all the advantages it could offer are being taken into consideration, from its efficiency to the possibility to recycle the water generated as by-product, maybe for use in the plane’s toilets.