The biggest problem for controlling hypertension (high blood pressure) is compliance with treatment, states an editorial in this week’s Lancet.

“Despite very effective and cost-effective treatments, target blood pressure levels are very rarely reached, even in countries where cost of medication is not an issue. Many patients still believe that hypertension is a disease that can be cured, and stop or reduce medication when blood pressure levels fall.”

The risk of becoming hypertensive for a person in a developed country exceeds a “staggering” 90%, and the increasingly common combination and interaction of hypertension with obesity, diabetes and hyperlipidaemia, if left untreated for too long, leads to cardiovascular disease, stroke, renal failure and death.

For mice, carbon dioxide often means danger — too many animals breathing in too small a space or a hungry predator exhaling nearby. Mice have a way of detecting carbon dioxide, and new research from Rockefeller University shows that a special set of olfactory neurons is involved, a finding that may have implications for how predicted increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide may affect animal behavior.

Most olfactory sensory neurons express odorant receptor molecules that detect odors and reside within the lining of the nasal cavity. But a small subset express an enzyme called guanylyl cyclase-D (GC-D). Peter Mombaerts, professor and head of the Laboratory of Developmental Biology and Neurogenetics at Rockefeller, and Andreas Walz, a research associate in Mombaerts’s CO2 detector.

Scientists have determined for the first time the atomic structure of an ancient protein, revealing in unprecedented detail how genes evolved their functions.

"Never before have we seen so clearly, so far back in time," said project leader Joe Thornton, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oregon. "We were able to see the precise mechanisms by which evolution molded a tiny molecular machine at the atomic level, and to reconstruct the order of events by which history unfolded."

A detailed understanding of how proteins – the workhorses of every cell – have evolved has long eluded evolutionary biologists, in large part because ancient proteins have not been available for direct study.

Pressures and temperatures at the Earth’s core are stupendous – more than 3.5 Mbar and 7000K – and currently it is impossible to recreate these conditions in the laboratory. Our information about the core comes from observing the way that seismic waves travel through the core, extrapolating from experimental studies and studying iron rich meteorites.

As a result we know that the core is mostly iron, but that it also must contain some light impurities such as oxygen, silicon, sulphur, hydrogen and magnesium (because the density of the core is too low to be pure iron). The most significant impurity is thought to be nickel, which makes up between 5 and 15% of the composition.

Most studies on the Earth’s core have approximated the composition to be pure iron.

Most modern attempts to decipher how portions of genetic code are translated into physical characteristics are akin to a first-grader trying to sound out a word letter by letter — or, in this case, base pair by base pair.

But University of Florida researchers have developed a computational method that’s more like reading whole words at a time.

In a world where science’s ability to transcribe an organism’s genetic code is growing faster every day, the technique could offer much needed efficiency in translating the seemingly endless string of characters into information that can cure disease or create new crops.

Natural selection has driven two closely related species of fish in Lake Malawi down different evolutionary paths - even though they live side by side.

An international team of scientists from Canada (Université Laval), the U.K. (University of Hull, Cardiff University) and Spain (Doòana Biological Station), have discovered that a pair of closely related species of East African cichlid fishes – a group of fish whose diversity comprising hundreds of species has puzzled evolutionary biologists for decades – evolved divergent immune gene adaptations which might explain why they do not interbreed, despite their closeness.

Most people understand how liquids freeze as solid crystals when temperatures become cold enough, like water droplets crystallizing into snowflakes or molten glass hardening into solid glass.

Latter 20th-century physicists realized that at low enough temperatures, most liquids that exist in nature become energetically unstable as they solidify. Scientists discovered solids that don't have the commonly known, regular crystalline and glass phases - things like liquid crystals, quasi-crystals and charge-density waves. Charge-density waves are systems that display interesting physics, such as metals becoming insulators.

In their search for the cellular and molecular causes of multiple sclerosis, an Italian-German research team has identified a subgroup of protective immune cells (suppressor cells) which are strikingly reduced in number in patients with this nervous system disorder.

These suppressor cells are characterized by a specific surface marker, called CD39, and degrade ATP, an energy carrier released from damaged tissues. By this means, suppressor cells appear to be able to curb inflammation occurring in the central nervous system in the course of the disease.

With CD39, Dr. Giovanna Borsellino (Laboratory for Neuroimmunology of the Fondazione Santa Lucia in Rome, Italy) in collaboration with Dr. Olaf Rötzschke and Dr.

Scientists have discovered a new protein that may offer fresh insights into brain function in mad cow disease. “Our team has defined a second prion protein called ‘Shadoo’, that exists in addition to the well-known prion protein called ‘PrP’ ” said Professor David Westaway, director of the Centre for Prions and Protein Folding Diseases at the University of Alberta.

“For decades we believed PrP was a unique nerve protein that folded into an abnormal shape and caused prion disease: end of story. This view is no longer accurate,” Westaway adds.

The study was conducted jointly by the University of Toronto, University of Alberta, Case Western Reserve University (Ohio) and the McLaughlin Research Institute (Montana).