The Research

A drug treatment that mimics fasting can also provide the same benefit, study finds.... Intestinal stem cells from mice that fasted for 24 hours, at right, produced much more substantial intestinal organoids than stem cells from mice that did not fast, at left. Credit: Maria Mihaylova and Chia-Wei Cheng     A s people age, their intestinal stem cells begin to lose their ability to regenerate. These stem cells are the source for all new intestinal cells, so this decline can make it more difficult to recover from gastrointestinal infections or other conditions that affect the intestine. In fasting mice, cells begin breaking down fatty acids instead of glucose, a change that stimulates the stem cells to become more regenerative. The researchers found that they could also boost regeneration with a molecule that activates the same metabolic switch. Such an intervention could potentially help older people recovering from GI infections or cancer patients undergoing chemot...

Despite their ostensible intelligence, academics are not at all immune to engaging in risky behaviors that erupt in spectacular displays of controversy. Even if they ultimately prove innocent or unaccountable, their situations always pose inevitable questions about the ethics and legalities behind the research and publication process. The following incidents in particular managed to spark fireworks on an epic scale, inciting a flurry of insight into what needs to be done to better prevent any potentially damaging abuses. Stephen Ambrose : This popular historian and professor enjoyed bestseller status and mainstream recognition for his inquiries into World War II, most notably  The Wild Blue , and biographies of presidents Eisenhower and Nixon. By 2002, however, it came to light that Stephen Ambrose quite shamelessly plagiarized much of his research from lesser-known contemporary Thomas Childers, the author of  Wings of Morning .  Forbes  launched a pa...

Catalog of candidate genes involved in plant-microbe relationships Published Dec. 18, 2017 in Nature Genetics, a team led by researchers at Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) have exploited a catalog of bacterial genomes to identify and characterize candidate genes that aid bacteria in adapting to plant environments, specifically genes involved in bacterial root colonization. This image depicts a phylogenetic tree of over 3,800 high quality and non-redundant bacterial genomes. Outer ring denotes the taxonomic group, central ring denotes the isolation source, and inner ring denotes the root-associated genomes within plant-associated genomes. Taxon names are color-coded based on phylum: green - Proteobacteria, red - Firmicutes, blue -Bacteroidetes, purple - Actinobacteria. Credit: Asaf Levy, JGI As the global population rises, estimated to hit nearly 10 billion by 2050, so does the need to ...