Reconstructing ancient life has long required a certain amount of inference and imagination - especially speculative is the coloration of long-extinct organisms.

New methods of investigation are being incorporated into paleontology that may shed light (and color) on fossils.

A reference genome for coffee trees has been sequenced for the first time. It improves understanding of the organization of the genome, which is academic, but it also offers new possibilities for selection or improvement of coffee tree varieties. 

The researchers chose Robusta coffee because of its average sized genome (710 million pairs of DNA bases) and its diploid nature contrary to Coffea arabica, which is tetraploid. The genetic map of the coffee tree studied was produced in the 1980s and also had the advantage of being a homozygous plant (two identical sets of eleven chromosomes), which is easier to analyze than natural heterozygotes.

Since 1999, a conjecture by Asher Peres, the 'inventor' of quantum teleportation, that the weakest form of quantum entanglement can never result in the strongest manifestation of the phenomenon, has been debated. 

Peres thought about the phenomenon of quantum entanglement and its different manifestations. When two objects (take photons, for example) are entangled, they remain correlated regardless of the distance that separates them physically: whether they are separated by a millimeter or by several kilometers, any action done to one of them will immediately affect the other. To check whether a system is entangled, scientists test for Bell's inequality.

A new study finds that the inhibition of a particular mitochondrial fission protein, GTPase dynamin-related protein-1 – Drp1, could hold the key to treating Parkinson's Disease.

A new biology paper sheds light on how chromatin (the complex of DNA and proteins) is organized in a cell and how plants regulate genetic material, so that some genes are turned on and others are turned off - and it could make it possible for a new generation of plants to better adapt to and survive environmental swings such as droughts or floods.

The research in The Plant Cell could mean major advances for the agriculture industry. 

"If you understand how plants regulate their genetic material, you can possibly manipulate that in certain circumstances so that plants can withstand environmental changes," said Daniel Vera, a Florida State University graduate student and the lead author of the paper.

The location of oral cancers differ in smokers and nonsmokers and nonsmokers have a higher proportion of cancers occur on the edge of the tongue, according to a new paper in JAMA Otolaryngology-Head&Neck Surgery.