Researchers have defined a mutation in the mouse genome that mimics progressive hearing loss in humans. A team from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, working with colleagues in Munich and Padua, found that mice carrying a mutation called Oblivion displayed problems with the function of hair cells in the inner ear, occurring before clear physical effects are seen. The study is published October 31 in PLoS Genetics.

UC San Diego computer scientists have built a software program that can perform key duplication without having the key. Instead, the computer scientists only need a photograph of the key.

"We built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret," said Stefan Savage, the computer science professor from UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering who led the student-run project. "Perhaps this was once a reasonable assumption, but advances in digital imaging and optics have made it easy to duplicate someone's keys from a distance without them even noticing."

We all experience memory errors from time to time and research has suggested that 'false' memories may be a result of having too many other things to remember or perhaps if too much time has passed.

In a new research report published online in The FASEB Journal, researchers describe a discovery that may allow some obese people avoid common obesity-related metabolic problems until they can lose weight: make a common antioxidant, melanin, in excess.  Melanin is a common antioxidant responsible for skin and eye color.

Most promising is that some of the antioxidant drugs that can mimic the melanin effect are FDA-approved and available. This availability would greatly speed the development of new treatments, should they prove effective in clinical trials.

A team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Scripps College, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa writing in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 
say appearance counts  when it comes to perception of politicians - but mostly if the appearance is negative.   This effect diminishes the more people know about a candidate.    So, voters who know little about John McCain coming up to election 2008 might be inclined to view him negatively when compared to a younger, more charismatic Barack Obama.

The natural world behaves a lot like the stock market, with periods of relative stability interspersed with dramatic swings in population size and competition between individuals and species.

While scholars may be a long way from predicting the ins and outs of the economy, University of Calgary biologist Edward McCauley and colleagues have uncovered fundamental rules that may govern population cycles in many natural systems. Their discovery is published today in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.