A University of Iowa study shows that loss or chemical inhibition of a protein, known as acid sensing ion channel protein (ASIC1a), reduces innate fear behavior in lab animals, making normally timid mice relatively fearless.

The findings might provide useful insight into anxiety disorders and may even point the way to a new therapeutic target.

For humans and other animals, some fears seem to be, in large part, instinctive and inborn rather than learned. For example, laboratory animals fear certain predators even though they have never been exposed to a predator. However, little is known about the brain mechanisms involved in innate fear responses.

South Korean scientists have cloned cats by manipulating a fluorescent protein gene, a procedure that could help develop treatments for human genetic diseases.

As part of the procedure's side effects, the cloned cats glow in the dark when exposed to ultraviolet beams.

Scientists have the first evidence that those "reprogrammed stem cells" that made headlines last month really have the potential to treat disease: They used skin from the tails of sick mice to cure the rodents of sickle cell anemia....

Thursday, scientists in Alabama and Massachusetts reported a key next step when they used the technique to give mice with sickle cell anemia a healthy new blood supply....

Townes had created a strain of mice bearing the human genes for sickle cell, a devastating inherited disease of deformed red blood cells that can't carry enough oxygen.

Townes paired with prominent stem cell scientist Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., to reprogram skin from those mice into embryonic-like stem cells. They coaxed the newly engineered cells to grow into blood-producing cells. Then they replaced the sickle cell-causing gene with a healthy version and infused the new cells.

The mice started producing healthy blood, and their sickle cell symptoms vanished.

Scientists have demonstrated that a combination of stem cell and gene therapy can be used to correct the devastating hereditary disease of muscular dystrophy, according to a new study published Wednesday.

Working with mice but using human cells, a team led by Yvan Torrente of the University of Milan, Italy showed that they could spark the most common form of the muscle-wasting disease, Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), and then reverse it, offering hope to millions of sufferers world-wide.

The key is the microbes, which have existed underground for hundreds of millions of years. They ferment the oil and expel natural gas without requiring oxygen.

Others have tried the approach used by Larter and his colleagues before, seeking to speed up the process by injecting more bacteria. But Larter says the key is giving the microbes their own version of vitamins.

"You'd basically feed them Miracle-Gro or fertilizer to accelerate their growth rate," he said.

The new product would be natural gas, not oil, a cleaner-burning fuel that contributes far less to global warming. Such an approach would be most promising in places with heavy oil, such as Alberta, Venezuela and Utah, other experts said.