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In research that could help control contamination from the radioactive element uranium, scientists have discovered that some bacteria found in the soil and subsurface can release phosphate that converts uranium contamination into an insoluble and immobile form.

The majority of studies suggesting that “moderate” drinking helps prevent heart disease may be flawed, according to an international research group. In a new report, researchers from the U.S., Canada, and Australia analyze 54 studies that linked how much people drink with risk of premature death from all causes, including heart disease. Researchers from the University of Victoria in British Columbia and the University of California, San Francisco led the team.

Parents of young girls may soon be offered the opportunity to have their daughters immunised against a sexually transmitted virus that is the major cause of cervical cancer, the 4th International Conference on Teenage and Young Adult Cancer Medicine heard Thursday.

NASA will send three astronauts and a Cincinnati doctor under the ocean next month to test space medicine concepts and moon-walking techniques. During the mission, called the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) project, new long-distance medical techniques that could help keep spacefarers healthy will be practiced. Doctors thousands of miles away will guide aquanauts as they perform surgeries on a patient simulator.

The songs of the humpback whale are among the most complex in the animal kingdom. Researchers have now mathematically confirmed that whales have their own syntax that uses sound units to build phrases that can be combined to form songs that last for hours.

A new method of delivering chemotherapy to cancer patients without incurring side effects such as hair loss and vomiting is being developed. The method, produced at the University of Bath, England, involves using tiny fibres and beads soaked in the chemotherapy drug which are then implanted into the cancerous area in the patient’s body.

Researchers and their colleagues have discovered a new retrovirus in humans that is closely related to a cancer-causing virus found in mice. Their findings describe the first documented cases of human infection with a retrovirus that is native to rodents.

In a new study forthcoming in the May 2006 issue of The American Naturalist, Mark A. Changizi and his coauthors, Qiang Zhang, Hao Ye, and Shinsuke Shimojo, from the California Institute of Technology explore the hypothesis that human visual signs have been cross-culturally selected to reflect common contours in natural scenes that humans have evolved to be good at seeing.

The biological processes underlying diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and cancer are fundamentally linked, and should be linked in how they are treated with drugs, a series of MIT studies indicates. Key to the work: The researchers applied an engineering approach to cell biology, using mathematical and numerical tools normally associated with the former discipline.

A rapid method for detecting and identifying very small numbers of diverse bacteria, from anthrax to E. coli, has been developed by scientists from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Described in the March 28 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,* the work could lead to the development of handheld devices for accelerated identification of biological weapons and antibiotic-resistant or virulent strains of bacteria—situations where speed is essential.

A pain–killing medication appears to halt the production of an enzyme that is key to a common form of breast cancer, a new study using tissue cultures suggests. The drug is called nimesulide. In laboratory experiments on breast cancer cells, scientists found that derivatives of nimesulide stopped the production of aromatase, the enzyme implicated in estrogen-dependent breast cancer. This form of breast cancer is the most common kind of breast cancer in postmenopausal women.

Five spacecraft from two ESA missions unexpectedly found themselves engulfed by waves of electrical and magnetic energy as they travelled through Earth’s night-time shadow on 5 August 2004. The data collected by the spacecraft are giving scientists an important clue to the effects of ‘space weather’ on Earth’s magnetic field.

Results from a clinical trial demonstrate that high doses of an experimental H5N1 avian influenza vaccine can induce immune responses in healthy adults. Approximately half of those volunteers who received an initial and a booster dose of the highest dosage of the vaccine tested in the trial developed levels of infection-fighting antibodies that current tests predict would neutralize the virus.

Scientists with NASA’s Cassini mission have found evidence that a new class of small moonlets resides within Saturn’s rings. There may be as many as 10 million of these objects within one of Saturn’s rings alone. The moonlets’ existence could help answer the question of whether Saturn’s rings were formed through the break-up of a larger body or are the remnants of the disk of material from which Saturn and its moons formed.

A common and widespread species of freshwater plankton, called a copepod, forms new species at an uncommonly high rate, scientists have discovered. Indeed, a new study has revealed that what was once believed to be a single copepod species is really a collection of many species.

Oxygen depletion in the world’s oceans, primarily caused by agricultural run-off and pollution, could spark the development of far more male fish than female, thereby threatening some species with extinction, according to a study published today on the Web site of the American Chemical Society journal, Environmental Science & Technology.

Sleeping helps to reinforce what we’ve learned. And brain scans have revealed that cerebral activity associated with learning new information is replayed during sleep. But, in a study published in the open access journal PLoS Biology, Philippe Peigneux and colleagues at the University of Liege demonstrate for the first time that the brain doesn’t wait until night to structure information. Day and night, the brain doesn’t stop (re)working what we learn.

Researchers in Switzerland report that extreme rains in Europe may grow stronger and more frequent in the near future and have significant effects on the region’s infrastructure and natural systems. They aggregated a number of regional European climate models to produce more refined estimates of increases in precipitation extremes over most of the continent by the late 21st century than were previously available.

“That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.” That famous communique from Apollo 11 during the historic first-ever moon walk was brought to you by the 64-meter antenna at NASA’s Deep Space Network in Goldstone, Calif.

Rodeo athletes have often been called a breed of their own and now University of Alberta research looking into how they deal with whiplash injuries confirms it.