[Special Issue News] Frontiers in Cancer Therapy: When less is more
For decades, cancer treatments have been given to patients continually at the maximum dose that can be tolerated. But a few labs are challenging that dogma. They are motivated by theoretical models of cancer growth and evidence from animal studies suggesting that briefly stopping or cutting back a drug dose can help keep the cancer cells from becoming resistant to the drug and can even trigger some cells to die, extending patients' lives. Periodically ceasing cancer therapy can also be less toxic for the patient. Trials are testing these new dosing strategies. Some stop the drug altogether, then restart it on a fixed sched...
Source: Science: This Week - March 15, 2017 Category: Science Authors: Jocelyn Kaiser Tags: Frontiers in Cancer Therapy Source Type: research

[Special Issue News] Prediction: The pulse of the people
Could online data enhance polling as a forecasting tool, or even replace it? Polling, whether done by phone or door-to-door, is labor intensive and expensive. And response rates have fallen to single digits, leaving pollsters to rely on a thin and biased sample. By contrast, analyzing tweets, for instance, allows researchers to track the political opinions of millions of people directly, second by second, and the data are free. But polling and Twitter analyses both failed to predict the winner of last November's U.S. presidential election. The internet, it seems, can't yet reliably take the pulse of the people. But social ...
Source: Science: This Week - February 1, 2017 Category: Science Authors: John Bohannon Tags: Prediction Source Type: research

[Special Issue News] Breakthrough of the Year: Breakdowns of the year
Scientists caught in political crossfires and the failure of a blood-testing technology to live up to commercial hype achieved the dubious distinction of Science's 2016 breakdowns of the year. In Turkey, a crackdown following a failed coup attempt on 15 July resulted in the arrest or firing of tens of thousands of public employees suspected of supporting the coup—including thousands of higher education faculty and administrators. In the United States, two congressional committees issued subpoenas demanding records—including unpublished data, emails, and bank accounts—from scientists and organizations conducting resea...
Source: Science: This Week - December 22, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Science Magazine (mailto:soleditor at aaas.org) Tags: Breakthrough of the Year Source Type: research

[Special Issue News] Breakthrough of the Year: Areas to watch in 2017
Science picked four areas likely to attract attention in 2017. The ability to keep human embryos developing in the lab for almost 2 weeks—achieved for the first time this year—should provide new insights into very early human development, and generate debate on whether ethical limits on studying embryos in culture should be extended. Candidate Zika vaccines, which have shown early promise, should be in clinical trials next year. Astronomers will be searching for direct evidence of a ninth planet in the far reaches of the solar system; its existence was inferred this year from its gravitational effects on icy objects be...
Source: Science: This Week - December 22, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Science Magazine (mailto:soleditor at aaas.org) Tags: Breakthrough of the Year Source Type: research

[Special Issue News] Breakthrough of the Year: Scorecard for 2016
How prescient were Science's editors and writers when they picked three areas to watch in 2016, as part of the 2015 Breakthrough of the Year package? On gravitational waves, they were spot on: The detection of the infinitesimal ripples in spacetime became Science's 2016 Breakthrough of the Year. The prediction that we may finally know where dogs came from was partially successful: A study indicated that they may have evolved from wolves once in Europe and once in Asia or the Near East. And the recommendation that we keep an eye on a French satellite, which will test whether falling bodies made of different materials accele...
Source: Science: This Week - December 21, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Science Magazine (mailto:soleditor at aaas.org) Tags: Breakthrough of the Year Source Type: research

[Special Issue News] Circadian Physiology: The scientific night shift
Working nights is unavoidable, or at least commonplace, in certain scientific fields. If you want to study bat behavior or stellar nebulae or sleep physiology, you may have to become half-nocturnal yourself, and scientists who sign up for the night shift encounter problems that just don't arise during the day. They tumble down embankments in the pitch black, nod off midexperiment, and grow paranoid in the witching hours. It's a tough gig, and for these and other reasons psychologists and sleep experts take a dim view of night work, which can disrupt sleep, throw hormones out of whack, and make you measurably dumber. And ye...
Source: Science: This Week - November 23, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Sam Kean Tags: Circadian Physiology Source Type: research

[Special Issue News] Plant Translational Biology: The nitrogen fix
A handful of biologists is working to endow major crops with the ability to "fix" nitrogen from the air into a biochemically usable form, a talent that is currently limited to certain microbes—and is essential to life. Fixed nitrogen is a key ingredient in important biomolecules, including amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. And, for now, farmers have to laboriously supply it by applying fertilizer or planting legumes, which host nitrogen-fixing bacteria in their roots. Altering cereals to produce their own nitrogen would be a tour de force of biotechnology. But it could help solve two big problems: the overuse...
Source: Science: This Week - September 15, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Erik Stokstad Tags: Plant Translational Biology Source Type: research

[Special Issue News] Plant Translational Biology: When is a GM plant not a GM plant?
The recently developed genome-editing methods, from zinc finger nucleases to transcription activatorlike effector nucleases (TALENs) to CRISPR, are shaking up the debate over how to regulate genetically modified (GM) crops. Canada, for example, has stuck to its rule that a plant should be regulated as GM if a novel trait has been introduced to it, regardless of the technology used. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture has so far exempted plants altered by TALENs and CRISPR from its GM regulations. The European Union is still wrestling with the issue. Author: Elizabeth Pennisi (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - September 15, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Elizabeth Pennisi Tags: Plant Translational Biology Source Type: research

[Special Issue News] Plant Translational Biology: The plant engineer
As a child, Dan Voytas developed a green thumb and business savvy running his own seedling business. Now, marrying his academic research with a company, he's poised to reshape 21st century agriculture. Over the past 20 years, he has pioneered new ways of precisely editing a crop's DNA to give it new traits or delete undesirable ones. It's an approach that is potentially more powerful than the traditional way of making genetically modified (GM) crops, and because it leaves no foreign DNA behind, it could free these products from the stigma and regulatory burden of being labeled as GM organisms. But to get to this point, he ...
Source: Science: This Week - September 15, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Elizabeth Pennisi Tags: Plant Translational Biology Source Type: research

[Special Issue News] Plant Translational Biology: The new harvest
Translational plant science yields sustainable oils, pharmaceuticals, and proteins Authors: Pamela J. Hines, John Travis (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - September 14, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Pamela J. Hines Tags: Plant Translational Biology Source Type: research

[Special Issue News] Natural Hazards: Doomsday Machines
In San Diego, California, a six-story tower riddled with strain gauges and accelerometers rises from the platform of one of the world's biggest earthquake machines. This device—a sort of bull ride for buildings—is one in a network built around the United States to advance natural disaster science with more realistic and sophisticated tests. The National Science Foundation initiative has helped scientists simulate some of the most powerful and destructive forces on Earth, including earthquakes, tsunamis, and landslides. The work has led to new building standards and better ways to build or retrofit everything from wharv...
Source: Science: This Week - July 14, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Warren Cornwall Tags: Natural Hazards Source Type: research

[Special Issue News] Natural Hazards: Thinking the Unthinkable
What are the greatest threats to humanity and human civilization? Scholars think a self-induced catastrophe such as nuclear war or a bioengineered pandemic is most likely to do us in. But extreme natural hazards—including threats from space and geologic upheavals here on Earth—could also do the job. Although common, moderately severe disasters such as earthquakes attract far more funding and attention than low-probability apocalyptic ones, a handful of researchers persists in thinking the unthinkable. With knowledge and planning, they say, it's possible to prepare for—or in some cases prevent—rare but devastating n...
Source: Science: This Week - July 13, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Julia Rosen Tags: Natural Hazards Source Type: research

[Special Issue News] Urban Planet: Vancouver's Green Dream
Vancouver, Canada, is trying to become the greenest city on Earth. In 2011, it adopted a Greenest City Action Plan that has made it a prominent pioneer in urban greening, including efforts to transform raw sewage and food waste into energy, and to coax residents to use less water and leave their cars to walk, bike, or ride public transport. And it isn't the only metropolis setting formidable targets. Around the world, urban leaders are embarking on an array of efforts to reduce the strain that cities place on the environment. Although cities are often seen as a source of environmental problems, many analysts argue they are...
Source: Science: This Week - May 19, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Kenneth R. Weiss Tags: Urban Planet Source Type: research

[Special Issue News] Urban Planet: China Rethinks Cities
China is rethinking its urbanization. Although the rapid growth of the nation's cities helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of rural poverty, the breakneck pace has created urban sprawl, car-dependency, massive traffic jams, skyrocketing emissions, sedentary lifestyles, and cityscapes lacking character or individuality. In February, national authorities adopted new urbanization guidelines that should, over time, lead to more compact cities with denser networks of narrow streets, more pedestrian and cycling lanes, better public transport, mixed-use zoning, and more green space. Planners and developers don't have t...
Source: Science: This Week - May 19, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Dennis Normile Tags: Urban Planet Source Type: research

[Special Issue News] Urban Planet: A Plague of Rats
Rats have long been one of the world's most ubiquitous—and infamous—forms of urban wildlife, synonymous with pestilence and squalor. They've attracted only sporadic attention from scientists, however, and much about the secretive city rat—chiefly the Norway rat, Rattus norvegicus, remains a mystery. But as the world's urban population surges, and more people crowd into rat-plagued slums, the rodents are getting renewed attention from researchers and public health experts. Over the past decade, scientists in a number of cities have launched efforts to better understand rat behavior and evolution, and the role they pla...
Source: Science: This Week - May 19, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Warren Cornwall Tags: Urban Planet Source Type: research