It's done - the independent sequence and assembly of the six billion base pairs from the genome of one person, Craig Venter of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), has been completed. Two general…

Scientists have found monoclonal antibodies which may make a successful Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) vaccine a reality. Hepatitis treatment is expensive and only successful in half of patients. Untreated…

Nothing starts a debate in the medical community like death. Abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, all controversial subjects; three anesthesiologists and a medical ethicist tackle the last one…

DNA is one of the most popular building blocks of nanotechnology and is commonly used to construct ordered nanoscale structures with controlled architectures. For the most part, DNA is looked upon as…

Nutrients taken from avocados are able to thwart oral cancer cells, killing some and preventing pre-cancerous cells from developing into actual cancers, according to researchers at Ohio State…

Purging is often associated with bulimics, who eat large quantities of food and then vomit. A University of Iowa professor says that purging is its own disorder, distinct because it involves women…

Probiotics, the friendly bacteria beloved of yoghurt advertisers, may be an effective substitute for growth promoting antibiotics in pigs, giving us safer pork products, according to scientists…

A new study by Jeremy Graff and colleagues from Eli Lilly and Company has demonstrated the anti-cancer effect of a new therapeutic in a mouse model of human tumors and has spawned clinical trials to…

ADHD is characterized by hyperactivity, impulsive behavior and an inability to pay attention to tasks; the condition affects social behaviors and achievement at school and work. A new study says an…

The largest-ever study of treatments for diabetes has shown that a fixed combination of perindopril and indapamide also reduces the risks of heart and kidney disease. One of the study leaders,…

During the last Ice Age, the ice dammed enormous lakes in Russia. The drainage system was reversed several times and the rivers flowed southwards. A group of geologists is now investigating what took…

With prices of gourmet coffee approaching sticker-shock levels, scientists in Illinois are reporting development of a method to "fingerprint" coffee to detect when corn has been mixed in to short…

British astronomers from the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a new camera that gives much more detailed pictures of stars and nebula than…

Plant biologists at the Max Planck Institute of Developmental Biology and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have discovered that an autoimmune response, triggered by a small number of…

Many breeds of African, Asian, and Latin American livestock are at risk of extinction, say scientists from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and they have called…

I had a long correspondence with Deirdre McCloskey about what she and Lynn Conway did to try to ruin Michael Bailey. Most of it is on her website. The most interesting part was at the end. She…

Stars do not like to be alone. Indeed, most stars are members of a binary system, in which two stars circle around each other in an apparently never-ending cosmic ballet. But sometimes, things can go…

A nationwide survey of the religious beliefs and practices of American physicians has found that the least religious of all medical specialties is psychiatry. Among psychiatrists who have a religion,…

Hepatitis E virus infections can be fatal in pregnant women, but until recently doctors thought the disease was confined to China, India and developing countries. Now Europeans are also contracting…

Antibiotics are over-prescribed for bacterial infections and patients too often fail to complete their courses of treatment properly, which means many bacteria are able to pick up an entire array of…