An international research team of scientists from UC Riverside, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Geoscience Australia, the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, the California Institute of Technology and the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom has found the oldest evidence for animals in the fossil record.

The researchers examined sedimentary rocks in south Oman, and found an anomalously high amount of distinctive steroids that date back to 635 million years ago, to around the end of the last immense ice age. The steroids are produced by sponges – one of the simplest forms of multicellular animals.

Autism affects as many as 1.5 million Americans, and the number is increasing, according to the Autism Society of America. It is estimated that 1 in 150 births involve children with some form of autism.

Autism can be caused by a variety of genetic factors, but a new Brown University study focused on one particular area — the Fragile X protein. If that protein is mutated, it leads to Fragile X syndrome, which causes mental retardation and is often accompanied by autism.

Women who stopped taking the postmenopausal hormone combination of estrogen plus progestin experienced a marked decline in breast cancer risk which was unrelated to mammography utilization change, according to a study from the Women's Health Initiative led by a Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute (LA BioMed) investigator that was published today in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Breast cancer in the United States began to decline in 2003, after the Women's Health Initiative's initial findings that combined hormone therapy was related to higher risk of breast cancer and heart problems.

Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine say they have discovered a gene that when mutated causes obesity by dampening the body's ability to burn energy while leaving appetite unaffected. 

The new research could potentially lead to new pharmacologic approaches to treating obesity in humans that do not target the brain, according to study senior author Yi Zhang, Ph.D., Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and professor of biochemistry and biophysics in the UNC School of Medicine. Zhang is also a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. 

Two newly described fossil whales---a pregnant female and a male of the same species--reveal how primitive whales gave birth and provide new insights into how whales made the transition from land to sea.

An international team of researchers has discovered a new chemical compound that consists of a single element―boron. Chemical compounds are conventionally defined as substances consist of two or more elements, but the researchers found that a high pressure and temperature pure boron can assume two distinct forms that bond together to create a novel 'compound' called boron boride.