The BBC reports about a group that has found ways to use "vaccines" to substantially down-regulate allergic responses.
The Gene Expression blog reports on an instance of one species of fish splitting into two species within twenty years. (I'm always amazed that people can still claim that evolution is "unproven".)
Science Magazine published a paper reporting the use of femtosecond laser pulses in combination with STMs to observe the motion of individual carbon monoxide molecules on a copper surface.
The BBC reports that Statins have been shown to slow HIV infections.
The BBC reports that a single protein in the brain, called NPS, appears to act as a major signal in both sleep and anxiety signaling pathways.
The FuturePundit blog reports that silencing either the TLR4 gene or the related CD14 signaling gene resulted in the substantial reduction of age related weight gain and bone loss in mice.
New Scientist reports that increasing the production of a protein called PPARdelta in the muscles of mice resulted in a two-thirds reduction in weight gain when the animals were fed a high fat diet. More interestingly, the mice also were able to run 92% longer than the controls. Both effects appear to have resulted from a doubling in the production of so-called "slow twitch" muscle in the mice.
There were a lot of other articles I've seen recently, but those were a few highlights. I know lots of people out there are skeptical of the notion that we're approaching some sort of "Technological Singularity", but as a passive observer of the science literature, let me note that discoveries that would have made front page headlines of mainstream newspapers a few years ago are now happening so often that they barely get mentioned in the news sections of the science press. The rate of discovery in molecular biology has become especially stunning — gaining access to complete genomes has opened up the floodgates as never before.
I'm becoming hopeful that major uncured illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, many cancers, etc., are going to be completely understood, and possibly even fully treatable, in the next decade.