A team of Australian, American and French coral reef scientists has achieved a world breakthrough in tracking fish that could revolutionize the sustainable management of coral reefs and help restore threatened fisheries. Working on coral reefs in a marine protected area in Papua New Guinea, the team has pioneered a new way to study fish populations by "tagging" adult fish with a minute trace of a harmless isotope, which they pass on to their offspring.

Hamilton College researchers have identified molecules that have been shown to be effective in the fight against breast cancer.

The Hamilton researchers used state-of-the-art computational techniques in a novel way to design molecules that they predicted would be effective lead compounds for breast cancer research. Scientists from the Albany Medical College subsequently synthesized the predicted molecules and showed that they were indeed potential anti-breast cancer compounds in animal systems.

Preterm related deaths accounted for more than 10,000 of the nearly 28,000 infant deaths in 2004, according to the NCHS. Birth defects remain the leading cause of infant death, followed by prematurity, according to official reporting systems. But, using this new classification, premature birth would be the most frequent cause of infant death. The traditional methods cannot accurately gauge the true impact of preterm birth on the infant mortality rate, the NCHS said.

In adult monkeys, an antidepressant treatment has induced new nerve cell growth in the hippocampus, a brain area responsible for learning and memory. A similar process may occur in humans, the research suggests, and may help explain the effectiveness of antidepressant treatments.

Euthanasia for newborn babies with lethal and disabling conditions is illegal worldwide, but in reality, its acceptance and practice vary between different countries.

In the Netherlands, about 200,000 live births occur annually; of these, 10-20 babies – mostly with severe congenital malformations – are thought to be actively killed. Yet between 1997 and 2004 only 22 such deaths were reported to the authorities, writes Kate Costeloe, Professor of Paediatrics at the University of London.

COROT has provided its first image of a giant planet orbiting another star and the first bit of ‘seismic’ information on a far away, Sun-like star- with unexpected accuracy.

The unanticipated level of accuracy of this raw data shows that COROT will be able to see rocky planets - perhaps even as small as Earth - and possibly provide an indication of their chemical composition.