Researchers at the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center have demonstrated a new way to target and choke off the blood supply to cancerous liver tumors in mice. The new method inhibited liver tumor growth and extended survival in mice by blocking a receptor on blood vessel endothelial cells that triggers blood vessel growth. Blocking this “Tie2” receptor worked as well as or better than naturally occurring proteins that inhibit blood vessel growth in tumors, the study showed.

The new study comes

An international research team co-led by Prof. Harvey Richer of the University of British Columbia today announced that it has confirmed the existence of the universe’s oldest known and farthest planet.

The findings end a decade of speculation and debate as to the true nature of this ancient world, which takes a century to complete each orbit. The un-named planet is 2.5 times the mass of our solar system’s largest planet, Jupiter. Its existence provides evidence that the universe&

Of the estimated 7,000 tigers left in the world, scientists know the least about the roughly 2,000 thought to remain in Southeast Asia.

Unstable or repressive political conditions in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Myanmar and Malaysia have long impeded Western biologists trying to study tigers there. Much of the big cats’ habitat, meanwhile, consists of remote, extremely wild rain forest that offers near-perfect cover to the shy and elusive predators.

So tiger experts are h

The University Fertility Consultants at the Oregon Health & Science University have successfully frozen human eggs that have resulted in the birth of a baby boy to a Forest Grove couple. It is the first successful birth using this method on the West Coast, according to David Battaglia, Ph.D., who utilized a technique that was developed in Bologna, Italy. He is also an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology. Egg freezing technology is just emerging as a viable option for patients and this bi

Nearly 80 percent of the world’s food begins as seeds, including such staple crops as corn, wheat and rice. Despite the importance and ubiquity of seeds, researchers have learned precious little about the processes that regulate plant fertilization, the essential first step in seed formation.

Now, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers have identified a key molecular signal that regulates the growth and guidance of the “pollen tube,” a tunnel formed by the pollen grain that

Working with blue crabs, biologists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have discovered what may turn out to be a previously unrecognized, fundamental and widespread support mechanism in crabs, lobsters, insects and other arthropods that periodically shed their hard external skeletons.

Doctoral student Jennifer R.A. Taylor and William M. Kier, professor of biology, have found that rather than being flaccid and mostly immobile after molting, crabs switch to what’s called