Watch the construction and growth of two petri dish billboards done by Warner Bros. Pictures Canada to promote a new film "Contagion". This "outdoor installation" delivers a creative blend of art and science.

In a report at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, the team of stalwart frog-fanciers described enlisting colleagues worldwide to ship secretions from hundreds of promising frog skins to their laboratory in the United Arab Emirates. Using that amphibious treasure trove, they identified more than 100 antibiotic substances in the skins of different frog species from around the world. One even fights “Iraqibacter,” the bacterium responsible for drug-resistant infections in wounded soldiers returning from Iraq.

Michael Conlon, Ph.D., who reported on the research, noted that the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria, which have the ability to shrug off conventional antibiotics, is a growing problem worldwide. As a result, patients need new types of antibiotics to replace drugs that no longer work.

Now Dr. Bart Legutki, a researcher at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University has pioneered a method for profiling the immune system, using clues provided by antibody activity to track an individual’s state of health. The work was done in collaboration with Dr. Stephen Albert Johnston, director of the Institute’s Center for Innovations in Medicine.

George Whiteside's biography on TED mentions a remarkable list of accomplishments. 950 scientific articles coauthored, he's co-founded a dozen companies and has 50-plus patents with his name on them. This talk focuses on a postage stamp sized device that doesn't require the assistance of a medical technologist or the drawing of blood.

Dr. Gary Matyas and Dr. Carl Alving, researchers in the Division of Retrovirology, MHRP, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), reported in the August 25th online edition of AIDS that they have experimentally induced antibodies that neutralize HIV-1 and recognize both HIV-1 envelope protein and lipids - a first in the HIV research arena.

Researchers at the Jewish General Hospital Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research and McGill University in Montreal have used a new immune-suppressing treatment to completely reverse multiple sclerosis (MS) in mice - sending the autoimmune disease into remission.

Since it was first suggested as the reason for red wines cardioprotective effects in 1992, it has been known that resveratrol acts as an anti-inflammatory. Exactly how this phytoalexin - or plant antibiotic - controlled inflammation has alluded researchers until recently.

University of Bath and Exeter researchers teamed up to develop the first ever system that allows them to follow the progress of bacterial infection in real-time, with living organisms. Traditional studies of bacterial infection are done after the death of the infected organism - in a petri dish - and lack key processes and cellular signals that play an integral part in the infection process.

Researchers at The University of Nottingham have recently suggested that some parasites - such as lice - are important in conditioning our "natural" immune system. Many health problems seen in modern humans today are caused by the body mistakenly attacking its own cells resulting in autoimmune diseases such as arthritis, asthma, diabetes or multiple sclerosis.

The immune system uses proteins encoded by the human leukocyte antigen system (HLAs) to differentiate self-cells from non-self cells. The proteins encoded by HLAs are effectively unique to that person - any cell not displaying a person's HLA type is an invader, and 'marked' for destruction by the bodies defense system of killer T cells.