In most sports, youth helps. The adage was that if an older person can do it better than a younger person, it isn't a sport.

But the lines of performance are lot more blurry today and youth is not a barometer. Lots of high school students can jump right to the NBA, and the first round draft pick in the NFL college draft is likely to be starting the next summer, but baseball drafts aren't big media events because no one drafted is likely to get called up for a few years. Baseball takes more practice.

And when it comes to marathons, old people really blow the sports curve. They even turn it into a U-shape; a 55- or 60-year-old runner will often finish in the same time as an 18-year-old.

Lung cancer is one of the top killers of people. Once patients receive a diagnosis, chemotherapy is common but accurate predictions about whether or not this treatment will help are impossible.

New treatments are always in the works but the road from article on Science 2.0 to FDA approval is long. Before anything can incur the costs of a clinical trial, it has to show success in animal models.

"Animal models may be the best we have at the moment, but all the same, 75 percent of the drugs deemed beneficial when tested on animals fail when used to treat humans," explains Prof. Dr. Heike Walles of the Fraunhofer Institute, who is working on a 3-D test system that can help.

Snakebite is one of the most neglected of all tropical diseases, with nearly 5 million people bitten by snakes each year and fatalities globally up to 30 times higher than that of land mines and comparable to AIDS in some developing countries. It has been estimated that more than 75 percent of snakebite victims who die do so before they ever reach the hospital so a new approach may dramatically reduce the number of global snakebite fatalities, currently estimated to be as high as 94,000 per year. 

Such a fast, accessible, and easy-to-administer treatment for venomous snakebite may be coming. Not soon, the regulatory process allows no shortcuts and clinical trials are expensive, but it is in the works. 

Two new shipping routes have opened in the Arctic: the Northwest Passage through Canada, and the Northern Sea Route, a 3,000-mile stretch along the coasts of Russia and Norway connecting the Barents and Bering seas.

Overall, it means for the first time in perhaps 2 million years, the north Pacific and north Atlantic oceans are navigable, and that means new opportunities for Arctic natural resources and interoceanic trade with lower environmental impact, but commercial ships often inadvertently carry invasive species. Organisms from previous ports can cling to the undersides of their hulls or be pumped in the enormous tanks of ballast water inside their hulls.

If you are an organic farmer, you may be worried your crops can be "contaminated" by a field genetically modified with a gene to express a natural toxin against pests. Nasty weeds sometimes evolve directly from natural crosses between domesticated species and wild relatives. A rare plant is threatened due to its small population size and restricted range.

What do all these situations have in common? They illustrate the important role of gene flow among populations and its potential consequences. Gene flow has been recognized as a significant evolutionary force since the 1940s but its relative role in maintaining a species' genetic integrity and/or its diversity has been debated.

AUSTIN, Texas — Scientists from The University of Texas at Austin and five other institutions have discovered that the more diverse the diet of a fish, the less diverse are the microbes living in its gut. If the effect is confirmed in humans, it could mean that the combinations of foods people eat can influence the diversity of their gut microbes.

The research could have implications for how probiotics and diet are used to treat diseases associated with the bacteria in human digestive systems.

A large body of research has shown that the human microbiome, the collection of bacteria living in and on people's bodies, can have a profound impact on human health. Low diversity of bacteria in the human gut has been linked to a plethora of diseases.