A virus that exploits a gene defect common to cancer cells and selectively kills them may offer a new avenue for therapy, suggest researchers in Nature.

The gene p53 is mutated in about half of all human cancers (an event directly implicated in tumour progression) so a way of killing such cells offers the attractive possibility of treating multiple cancer types with one drug. The human adeno-associated virus (AAV) selectively induces cell death in p53-defective cells, Peter Beard and his co

New-found jawbone hints at 200 thousand years of care in the community.

Care for the elderly and disabled may have been around a lot longer than we thought. The discovery of a jawbone scarred by severe gum disease hints that a toothless early human got by with a little help from his friends.

Minus teeth, unable to chew his or her food, the owner of the deformed jawbone nonetheless survived “for at least several months,” estimates anthropologist Erik Trinkaus of Washington U

Silicon still has a lot to offer the microelectronics industry

The end is not nigh for silicon chips. They have “enormous remaining potential”, predicts a new analysis of the limits of integrated circuit technology 1 .

By around 2011, chips could be holding thousands of times more transistors than the billions they house today, calculate James Meindl and colleagues at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Trillion-transistor chips are known as ’terascal

Centipede genealogy has scientists and supercomputers foxed

Four-fifths of all known creatures are arthropods. So immense is this family that no one knows who is related to whom. To resolve the relationships between the family members, the insects, spiders, crustaceans and centipedes, two research groups have performed state-of-the-art analyses – and come up with two different answers.

The main problem is the centipedes and millipedes, collectively called the myriapods. One

Two new techniques will assist the rapid cataloguing of proteins’ roles in the cell.

Decoding the human genome sequence was merely a preliminary step towards understanding how living cells work. Two new techniques should assist the next step: working out the functions of all the proteins that the genes encode 1,2 .

Selectively sticking to small molecules is central to most proteins’ function. Proteins generally have delicately sculpted binding sites, clefts i

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