A way to turn off one gene at a time has earned acceptance in biology laboratories over the last decade. Doctors envision the technique, called RNA interference, as a tool to treat a variety of diseases if it can be adapted to humans.

New research into the treatment of Alzheimer's disease reports improvement in language abilities using a novel immune-based approach. A video accompanying the research, published today in the open access journal BMC Neurology, documents rapid language improvement within minutes of using this new treatment.

Biogeoscientists show evidence of 90 billion tons of microbial organisms—expressed in terms of carbon mass—living in the deep biosphere, in a research article published online by Nature, July 20, 2008. This tonnage corresponds to about one-tenth of the amount of carbon stored globally in tropical rainforests. The authors: Kai-Uwe Hinrichs and Julius Lipp of the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) at University of Bremen, Germany; and Fumio Inagaki and Yuki Morono of the Kochi Institute for Core Sample Research at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) concluded that about 87 percent of the deep biosphere consists of Archaea. This finding is in stark contrast to previous reports, which suggest that Bacteria dominate the subseafloor ecosystem. To reach this conclusion, the researchers investigated sediment cores collected from several hundred meters beneath the seafloor of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Black Sea. The cored sediments included samples that were the result of research expeditions conducted by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP).

Olympic athletes aren't the only ones who need to be concerned about the heavily polluted air in Beijing. The dirty air may trigger serious cardiovascular problems for some spectators.

No-take marine reserves where fishing is banned can have benefits that extend beyond the exploited fishes they are specifically designed to protect, according to new evidence from Australia's Great Barrier Reef reported in the July 22nd issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. Researchers have found that outbreaks of large, predatory crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci), which can devastate coral reefs, occur less often in protected zones, although they don't yet know exactly why.

For millennia, humans and viruses have been locked in an evolutionary back-and-forth -- one changes to outsmart the other, prompting the second to change and outsmart the first. With retroviruses, which work by inserting themselves into their host's DNA, the evidence remains in our genes. Last year, researchers at Rockefeller University and the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center brought an ancient retrovirus back to life and showed it could reproduce and infect human cells. Now, the same scientists have looked at the human side of the story and found evidence that our ancestors fought back against that virus with a defense mechanism our bodies still use today.

Montreal, 17 July 2008 – The question of whether insulin-producing cells of the pancreas can regenerate is key to our understanding of diabetes, and to the further development of regenerative therapies against the disease. Dr Rosenberg from the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) and McGill University together with Dr Bernard Massie from the Centre hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal (CHUM) have just concluded that they can. The results of their study have been published in the July issue of the journal Laboratory Investigation.

The Chesapeake Bay, like other East Coast estuaries, suffers from pollution by excess nitrogen. If you are living in the eastern United States, the environment around you is being harmed by air pollution. From Adirondack forests and Shenandoah streams to Appalachian wetlands and the Chesapeake Bay, a new report by the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and The Nature Conservancy has found that air pollution is degrading every major ecosystem type in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic United States.

Commercial venues are very aware of the effects that the environment – in this case, music – can have on in-store traffic flow, sales volumes, product choices, and consumer time spent in the immediate vicinity. A study of the effects of music levels on drinking in a bar setting has found that loud music leads to more drinking in less time.

For the first time, researchers have successfully grown functional human blood vessels in mice using cells from adult human donors — an important step in developing clinical strategies to grow tissue, researchers report in Circulation Research: Journal of the American Heart Association.

When individuals infected with HIV become infected with a second strain of the virus, the two viral strains can exchange genetic information, creating a third, recombinant strain of the virus. It is known that the presence of multiple viral strains, called superinfection, frequently leads to a loss of immune control of viral levels. Now a study from the Partners AIDS Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital (PARC/MGH) shows that how and where viral strains swap DNA may be determined by the immune response against the original infecting strain. Their report will appear in the Journal of Experimental Medicine and has been released online.

An artist's representation shows the midshipman fish singing to attract a mate. Talking fish are no strangers to Americans. From the comedic portrayal of "Mr. Limpet" by Don Knotts, to the children's Disney favorite, "Nemo," fish can talk, laugh and tell jokes--at least on television and the silver screen. But can real fish verbally communicate? Researchers say, "Yes," in a paper published in the July 18 issue of the journal Science. Further, the findings put human speech--and social communications of all vertebrates--in evolutionary context.

New research into the earliest events occurring immediately upon infection with HIV-I shows that the virus deals a stunning blow to the immune system earlier than was previously understood. According to scientists at Duke University Medical Center, this suggests the window of opportunity for successful intervention may be only a matter of days – not weeks – after transmission, as researchers had previously believed.

Viruses achieve their definition of success when they can thrive without killing their host. Now, biologists Pamela Bjorkman and Zhiru Yang of the California Institute of Technology have uncovered how one such virus, prevalent in humans, evolved over time to hide from the immune system.