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LAWRENCE -- A golfer, a banker and a gambler linked in an insider trading case make for a great headline and provocative news.

That was true last week when it was disclosed that as chairman of Dean Foods, Thomas C. Davis reportedly repaid gambling debts by feeding boardroom secrets to sports bettor William T. Walters. Throw in pro golfer Phil Mickelson -- who was not accused of wrongdoing but was "unjustly enriched" -- and you've got a sensational insider trading story.

Researchers can build complex, nanometer-scale structures of almost any shape and form, using strands of DNA. But these particles must be designed by hand, in a complex and laborious process.

This has limited the technique, known as DNA origami, to just a small group of experts in the field.

Now a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere has developed an algorithm that can build these DNA nanoparticles automatically.

Research from North Carolina State University and Ohio University finds that having an "alcohol identity" puts college students at greater risk of having drinking problems - and that posting about alcohol use on social media sites is actually a stronger predictor of alcohol problems than having a drink.

People have always wondered why many birds lay bright blue eggs. David Lahti of the City University of New York and Dan Ardia of Franklin & Marshall College tested the hypothesis that pigmentation might help an egg strike a balance between two opposing and potentially damaging effects of the sun: light transmission into light-colored eggs, and heating up of dark-colored eggs.

Why do animals migrate? Explanations behind the evolution of such a costly, yet common behavior are varied. However, rarely do parasites and pathogens figure into the story. Researchers from the University of Minnesota and the University of Neuchâtel think this is an important oversight, and have worked out the math to prove it.

Garbage, nutrients and tiny animals are pushed around, suspended in the world's oceans by waves invisible to the naked eye according to a new 3-D model developed by mathematicians at the University of Waterloo.

David Deepwell, a graduate student, and Professor Marek Stastna in Waterloo's Faculty of Mathematics have created a 3-D simulation that showcases how materials such phytoplankton, contaminants, and nutrients move within aquatic ecosystems via underwater bulges called mode-2 internal waves.

The toxic dinoflagellate, Alexandrium fundyense, is a photosynthetic plankton--a microscopic organism floating in the ocean, unable to swim against a current. New research by scientists at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (UHM) School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) suggests that ingestion of this dinoflagellate changes the energy balance and reproductive potential of a particular copepod--a small crustacean--in the North Atlantic, which is key food source for young fishes, including many commercially important species.

The pyran ring is present in so many useful compounds, such as pharmaceuticals (antibiotics, anti-infectives, cardiovascular agents, neurological modulators, anti-allergic, anti-asthmatic, anti-inflammatory agents, reproductive and genitourinary agents, growth promoters and antidiabetic agents), veterinary products, agrochemicals, toxins, polymers and additives, photosensitizers and photoinitiators, surfactants, food products, dyes and pigments, This fact keeps motivating synthetic organic chemists to develop newer facile synthetic methods to make these compounds accessible in high enantiom

New research showing that refusal to allow surgery teams to take the patient to the recovery room after surgery unless the full WHO Safe Surgery Checklist has been complete is a highly effective way to improve use of the checklist. The study is being presented at Euroanaesthesia 2016 (London, UK, 27-30 May), and is by Dr Rajkumar Rajendram, King's College London, United Kingdom (and formerly of the Royal Free Hospital, London, UK, where the research was carried out) and colleagues.

More young people of all ages are surviving cancer than ever before, but new research published today in The Lancet Oncology journal shows that adolescents and young adults have a lower chance of surviving eight relatively common types of cancer than children, according to the latest data from a long-running study of cancer survival across Europe.

• Pilot study shows mindful meditation helps men deal with stress of active surveillance
• Anxiety causes one in four men to drop out of active surveillance
• Mindfulness eased men's fears and uncertainties

CHICAGO -- Men with prostate cancer who are under close medical surveillance reported significantly greater resilience and less anxiety over time after receiving an intervention of mindfulness meditation, according to a recently published pilot study from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Imagine a device that is selectively transparent to various wavelengths of light at one moment, and opaque to them the next, following a minute adjustment.

Such a gatekeeper would enable powerful and unique capabilities in a wide range of electronic, optical and other applications, including those that rely on transistors or other components that switch on and off.

Cardiac complications are the number one cause of death among diabetics. Now a team of scientists has uncovered a molecular mechanism involved in a common form of heart damage found in people with diabetes.

A research team from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston in collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine, University of California San Diego and the University of Texas at Dallas have published their findings the journal Cell Reports.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Prescribing certain medications on the basis of a patient's race has long come under fire from those uneasy with using race as a surrogate for biology when treating disease.

But there are multiple challenges to overcome before we can move beyond race-based treatment decisions, writes Duke University geneticist and bioethicist Charmaine Royal in a perspective piece published May 25 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The team encountered the first individual, a beautiful meter-long silvery female, climbing in a Silver Palm tree near the water's edge on a remote island in the southern Bahamas. As dusk approached, Harvard graduate student and team member Nick Herrmann called out on the radio: "Hey, I've got a snake here." The rest of the team came crashing back to his position, and collectively gasped when they saw the boa. Expedition member Dr.