The Johns Hopkins scientists who first discovered that knocking out a particular muscle gene results in “mighty mice” now report that it also softens the effects of a genetic mutation that causes muscular dystrophy.

The findings, scheduled for the December issue of the Annals of Neurology and currently online, build support for the idea that blocking the activity of that gene, known as myostatin, may one day help treat humans with degenerative muscle diseases.

Working with mice ca

Harvard Medical School researchers have uncovered an ovary gene whose absence from mouse egg cells produced severe pregnancy complications. The gene, Fmn2, which produces the protein formin-2, is similar in mice and humans and offers promise for understanding embryo loss, birth defects, and infertility in women. The study appears in the December Nature Cell Biology.

“As humans we are incredibly bad at producing eggs with the normal number of chromosomes, which is the leading cause of pregnan

Old MacDonald will be surprised when he sees what’s headed for his dairy farm: specially bred cows that naturally produce low-fat milk, designer milk that boosts the immune system, and “green” cows — engineered to produce less methane to help stem global warming. All are among the changes predicted for the future of the milk and dairy industry over the next 50 years.

These and other developments are described in a special report commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Agr

Baby’s first look at the world is likely a dizzying array of shapes and motion that are meaningless to a newborn, but researchers at the University of Rochester have now shown that babies use relationships between objects to build an understanding of the world. By noting how often objects appear together, infants can efficiently take in more knowledge than if they were to simply see the same shapes individually, says the paper published in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy

A new technique to aid early detection of skin cancer could also help fight serious eye diseases such as those caused by diabetes.

The technique has been developed at the University of Birmingham with funding from the Swindon-based Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. It involves using an innovative form of image analysis to tell the difference between skin cancer and other types of skin damage. This allows the cancer to be identified earlier and treated more quickly,

A woman with an obstructed cervix has been successfully treated for infertility using a technique known as intraperitoneal insemination (IPI). The technique, described in a case report just published in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, is less invasive and cheaper than alternative infertility treatments, which involve the harvesting of a woman’s eggs. Scott Sills from the Atlanta Medical Center and Gianpiero Palermo from the Cornell Institute for Reproductive Medicine describe how they wer