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A virus was recently shown to cause a rare type of human cancer, Merkel cell carcinoma. Does it also cause a more common type of cancer?

researchers in Boston, US, discovered a way to target cancer stem cells

By working with the simplest amino acids and elementary RNAs, physicists led by Rockefeller University's Albert J. Libchaber, head of the Laboratory of Experimental Condensed Matter Physics, have now generated the first theoretical model that shows how a coded genetic system can emerge from an ancestral broth of simple molecules.

Differentiated human cells have been reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state with the addition of only one gene, rather than the standard four. This should advance techniques for the efficient production of high-quality patient-specific stem cells.

It's just plain silly to make claims like this about a basic science paper given that, as I have discussed before, it often takes decades for basic science observations to wend their way through that long strange trip to becoming actual therapies used by clinicians. The life cycle of translational research is long, and efforts to speed it up have only met with mixed success.

What connects human intelligence to the unsung cunning of slime moulds? An electric component that no one thought existed, explains Justin Mullins

It was supposed to be the first great scientific discovery of the 21st Century - or so many researchers thought when they rushed down to the bookmakers to place bets at what were deemed at the time to be ludicrously generous odds. The physicists believed that they were close to making the first direct detection of gravitational waves, the ripples in space-time generated by supernovas and coalescing neutron stars.