wired.com: By Brandon Keim

By genetically modifying the brains of songbirds for the first time, scientists may have a devised useful new tool for studying neurological growth and healing in humans.

“Songbirds have become a classic tool for studying vocal learning and neuron replacement. This will bring those two topics into the molecular age,” said neuroscientist Fernando Nottebohm of Rockefeller University, author of a study published September 28 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [ more ]

discovery.com: Eric Bland

Pop off most dandelion heads and, just for a second, white sap oozes freely from the wound. Pop the head off a new genetically engineered dandelion, however, and white sap oozes for minutes, allowing scientists to gather five times more latex than from the average dandelion. [ more ]

ted.com: Virus hunter Nathan Wolfe is outwitting the next pandemic by staying two steps ahead: discovering deadly new viruses where they first emerge — passing from animals to humans among poor subsistence hunters in Africa — before they claim millions of lives.

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ted.com: Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria “talk” to each other, using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defense and mount attacks. The find has stunning implications for medicine, industry — and our understanding of ourselves.

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discovermagazine.com: by Boonsri Dickinson

Snowflake-like robot could be used in biopsies and other procedures.

Researchers have come up with many clever concepts for micro­devices that could perform fine surgery or assemble tiny electronics. In December Johns Hopkins University chemical engineer David Gracias and colleagues announced a big but tiny breakthrough: They had developed a set of microgrippers [pdf] that open and close in reaction to simple chemical changes. The minute machines are able to pick up and put down objects less than 1/500th of an inch across. [ read more ]

discovermagazine.com: by Jane Bosveld:

Bioengineers will likely control the future of humans as a species. “There are no shortcuts in evolution,” famed Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis once said. He might have reconsidered those words if he could have foreseen the coming revolution in biotechnology, including the ability to alter genes and manipulate stem cells. These breakthroughs could bring on an age of directed reproduction and evolution in which humans will bypass the incremental process of natural selection and set off on a high-speed genetic course of their own. Here are some of the latest and greatest advances.

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wired.com: By Michael Wall

New insights into how cells cope with stress could help combat neurological diseases and reduce the ravages of aging. Scientists have known for years that moderate stressors, such as a calorie-restricted diet, increase lifespan in a variety of organisms. Now new research is illuminating how this works at the molecular level. A particular protein is key in regulating at least one aspect of the stress response and may be a good model for anti-aging drugs.

“What we have here is an essential protective pathway that now looks like a very effective therapeutic target,” said biologist Richard Morimoto of Northwestern University. [ read more ]

sciam.com: By Emily Anthes

The adult human brain is surprisingly malleable: it can rewire itself and even grow new cells. Here are some habits that can fine-tune your mind:

Amputees sometimes experience phantom limb sensations, feeling pain, itching or other impulses coming from limbs that no longer exist. Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran worked with patients who had so-called phantom limbs, including Tom, a man who had lost one of his arms.

Ramachandran discovered that if he stroked Tom’s face, Tom felt like his missing fingers were also being touched. Each part of the body is represented by a different region of the somatosensory cortex, and, as it happens, the region for the hand is adjacent to the region for the face. The neuroscientist deduced that a remarkable change had taken place in Tom’s somatosensory cortex. [ read more ]

wired.com: By Brandon Keim

Infectious diseases may have an unexpected weakness: their own propensity for laziness. Researchers genetically engineered “cheating” versions of a common, inflammation-causing microbe. When injected into already-infected mice, the bugs benefited from the chemical labors of other microbes without working themselves. Able to devote their energies to reproduction, the lazy bugs divided faster than their brethren, and infections turned rapidly less virulent.

“The wild bacteria expend all this energy to make these signaling compounds and virulence factors. That slows down their growth,” said Kendra Rumbaugh, a microbiologist at Texas Technical University and lead author of the study, published Thursday in Current Biology. “The cheaters save up like crazy, divide like crazy, and take over the population.” [ read more ]

bbc.co.uk:

Scientists say they have a working prototype of a fully artificial heart ready for implanting in humans. The device beats almost exactly like the real thing using electronic sensors to regulate heart rate and blood flow. Developers Carmat now need approval from the French authorities before pushing ahead with clinical trials. But heart experts warned it was still early days as previous attempts to create a fully artificial heart had failed during human testing. [ read more ]