In today’s online edition of Genome Research, a husband-and-wife research team from Thomas Jefferson University report the discovery of a gene that, when mutated, may suppress colorectal cancer. To conduct the study, the researchers used a strain of mice that develop polyps, or small growths of tissue, in the digestive tract—the harbingers of cancer. When these mice possessed one copy of the mutated gene, the incidence of small intestinal and colon polyps were reduced by about 90%.

“This gene may give us a novel target to aid in the diagnosis, prevention, and/or treatment of cancer,” says Dr. Arthur Buchberg, one of the co-senior authors on the report.

Generating electricity from renewable sources will soon become as easy as putting a brush and a tube in a tub of wastewater.

A carbon fiber, bottle-brush anode developed by Penn State researchers will provide more than enough surface for bacteria to colonize, for the first time making it possible to use microbial fuel cells for large scale electricity production. In addition, a membrane-tube air cathode, adapted from existing wastewater treatment equipment, will complete the circuit.

Based on three years of observations from the SCIAMACHY instrument aboard ESA's Envisat, scientists have produced the first movies showing the global distribution of the most important greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide and methane – that contribute to global warming.

The importance of cutting emissions from these 'anthropogenic', or manmade, gases has been highlighted recently with European Union leaders endorsing binding targets to cut greenhouse gases by at least 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. Further illustrating the urgency to combat global warming, Britain became the first country last week to propose legislation for cutting the gases.

Using lasers and tuning forks, researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed a chemical weapon agent sensing technique that promises to meet or exceed current and emerging defense and homeland security chemical detection requirements. The technique, called Quartz Laser Photo-Acoustic Sensing, or "QPAS," is now ready for prototyping and field testing.

PNNL, a Department of Energy national laboratory, has demonstrated QPAS's ability to detect gaseous nerve agent surrogates. In one test, researchers used diisopropyl methyl phosphonate (DIMP), which is a chemical compound that's similar to sarin. QPAS detected DIMP at the sub-part-per-billion level in less than one minute.

Scientists' inability to follow the whereabouts of cells injected into the human body has long been a major drawback in developing effective medical therapies. Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins have developed a promising new technique for noninvasively tracking where living cells go after they are put into the body. The new technique, which uses genetically encoded cells producing a natural contrast that can be viewed using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), appears much more effective than present methods used to detect injected biomaterials.

Described in the February edition of Nature Biotechnology, the method was developed by a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins' Russell H.

Laws in two states requiring disclosure of pharmaceutical company payments to physicians do not provide the public with easy access to payment information and are of limited quality when accessed, according to a study in the March 21 issue of JAMA.

Interactions between the pharmaceutical industry and health care professionals often involve payments, including cash, gift certificates, meals, textbooks or conference fees. In contrast to many other professions, medicine allows payments from a company to an individual who decides whether and how often to use products produced by the company.