A tumor, as strange as it may sound, is a little society. The cancer cells that make it up cooperate with one another, and together they thrive.

Scientists are only starting to decipher the rules of these communities. But if they can understand how these cells work together, then they may be able to stop the tumor. “You can drive it to collapse,” said Marco Archetti, a biologist at the University of East Anglia and at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Cancer starts when healthy cells mutate and lose the safeguards that normally keep their growth in check. The cells start to multiply quickly, and their descendants gain new mutations, some of which make the cells even better at multiplying.

Continue reading “In the Way Cancer Cells Work Together, a Possible Tool for Their Demise” →

You wouldn’t think hellbenders would be hard to find: The huge salamanders, the biggest amphibians in North America, can grow up to 30 inches long. Yet hellbenders make themselves scarce, living on the bottoms of mountain streams, lurking under massive rocks.

As a result, locating hellbenders takes a crew of scientists. First, some of them must wedge a long pole under a rock to hoist it up, and then their colleagues must plunge into the chilly water to catch their quarry.

A couple of years ago, Stephen Spear, a conservation scientist at the Orianne Society in Athens, Ga., heard about a possible alternative.

Continue reading “Shedding Their Secrets” →

A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.

“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

But there is still time to avert catastrophe, Dr. McCauley and his colleagues also found. Compared with the continents, the oceans are mostly intact, still wild enough to bounce back to ecological health.

Continue reading “Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says” →

If there is a champion among contagions, it may well be the lowly rhinovirus, responsible for many of the coughs and sniffles that trouble us this time of year. Rhinoviruses are spectacularly effective at infecting humans. Americans suffer one billion colds a year, and rhinoviruses are the leading cause of these infections.

Scientists have never been sure why they are so effective, but now a team at Yale University may have found a clue. The scientists argue that rhinoviruses have found a blind spot in the human immune system: They take advantage of the cold air in our noses.

Continue reading “Unraveling the Key to a Cold Virus’s Effectiveness” →