The man who helped to first sequence the human genome ten years ago, is looking to use biology to tackle the energy problem.

This image gallery brings to focus the splendid vascular systems of common plants, and showcases the beauty that resides at all levels of the natural world. See the entire gallery.

First proposed in 1929 by J.B.S. Haldane in his essay on the origin of life, the "soup theory" suggested that life as we know it was the result of UV radiation converting methane, ammonia and water into the first organic compounds in the early earth oceans. The first cells grew by fermenting this organic primordial soup to generate energy in the form of ATP.

The loss of wetlands in the prairie pothole region of central North America due to a warmer and drier climate will negatively affect millions of waterfowl that depend on the region for food, shelter and raising young, according to research published today in the journal BioScience.

The image you are seeing is the result of a specialized phorid fly laying its egg in the head of a fire ant, which eventually kills its host. This video from Discovery News was posted in 2008, and chronicles one entomologists efforts to combat invasive fire ant populations that originate in Brazil and are spreading throughout the Southern United States.

A collaboration led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) has developed a microbe that can produce an advanced biofuel directly from biomass. Deploying the tools of synthetic biology, the JBEI researchers engineered a strain of Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria to produce biodiesel fuel and other important chemicals derived from fatty acids.

Portland, Oregon. January, 2010 -- Labgrab.com is announcing the release of a data visualization tool that graphs the current volume of science news by discipline. The colorful chart shows various sized boxes based on the volume of article headlines published by universities, journals, science news aggregators, and science blogs.

How difficult it must be to have to face off as a sperm! From the moment you arrive you are racing along in a wave of competitors. Now complicate that with the fact that your host mammal has been making the rounds! Live together die alone (if you know what that means its our secret) is apparently the biological answer.

By combining a research technique that dates back 136 years with modern molecular genetics, a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist has been able to see how a mammal's brain shrewdly revisits and reuses the same molecular cues to control the complex design of its circuits.

Details of the observation in lab mice, published Dec. 24 in Nature, reveal that semaphorin, a protein found in the developing nervous system that guides filament-like processes, called axons, from nerve cells to their appropriate targets during embryonic life, apparently assumes an entirely different role later on, once axons reach their targets. In postnatal development and adulthood, semaphorins appear to be regulating the creation of synapses -- those connections that chemically link nerve cells.

LA JOLLA, CA-Like a spotlight that illuminates an otherwise dark scene, attention brings to mind specific details of our environment while shutting others out. A new study by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies shows that the superior colliculus, a brain structure that primarily had been known for its role in the control of eye and head movements, is crucial for moving the mind's spotlight.