Researchers from UC San Diego, Santa Barbara and MIT have developed a "cocktail" of different nanometer-sized particles that work in concert within the bloodstream to locate, adhere to and kill cancerous tumors. The team says their work, appearing in an upcoming issue of PNAS, represents the first successful effort to employ a cooperative nanosystem to fight cancer.

In their study, the researchers developed a system containing two different nanomaterials the size of only a few nanometers, or a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, that can be injected into the bloodstream. One nanomaterial was designed to find and adhere to tumors in mice, while the second nanomaterial was fabricated to kill those tumors.

 Volcanic rocks buried along the coasts of New York, New Jersey and New England, and as far south as South Carolina and Georgia, might be ideal reservoirs to lock away carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and other industrial sources. A new study featured this week in PNAS outlines formations on land as well as offshore where scientists say the best potential sites may lie.

The Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver, or SPIRE instrument, riding aboard Herschel Space Observatory, launched in May by the European Space Agency, has provided one of the most detailed views yet of space up to 12 billion years back in time.

The December images have revealed thousands of newly discovered galaxies in their early stages of formation, said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Jason Glenn, a co-investigator on the project. The new images are being analyzed as part of the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey, or HerMES, which involves more than 100 astronomers from six countries.

The authors of a new study published in Current Biology say they've gained new insight into the sex lives of malaria spreading mosquitoes. In finding a partner of the right species type, male and female mosquitoes depend on their ability to "sing" in perfect harmony, and those tones are produced and varied based on the frequency of their wing beats in flight.

A team of anthropologists has for the first time directly analyzed DNA from a member of our own species who lived around 30,000 years ago, allowing scientists a unique glimpse into the history of evolution. Their research is detailed in the December 31 issue of Current Biology.

DNA--the hereditary material contained in the nuclei and mitochondria of all body cells--is a hardy molecule and can persist, conditions permitting, for several tens of thousands of years. Such ancient DNA provides scientists with unique possibilities to directly glimpse into the genetic make-up of organisms that have long since vanished from the Earth, but the ancient DNA approach could not be easily applied to ancient members of our own species.

Biofuels were all the rage in the 1990s.   Sustainable, activists said, because they refused to do math.   It was only when Republicans mandated and subsidized biofuels in 2005 that environmentalists realized there must be something very wrong with them and $10 billion per year of wasted tax dollars on fuels actually worse for the environment than oil are what we have.

If biofuels can make oil companies look good, imagine what they can do for something like tobacco.

Researchers from the Biotechnology Foundation Laboratories at Thomas Jefferson University say they have identified a way to increase the oil in tobacco plant leaves, which may be the next step in using the plants for biofuel, according to a paper in Plant Biotechnology Journal.