Where are baseball batters looking during the fraction of a second when a pitched ball is in their air? Their visual tracking strategies differ depending on whether they're swinging at the pitch, reports a study.

Recognizing that administrative health care databases can be a valuable, yet challenging, tool in the nation's ongoing pursuit of personalized medicine, statisticians have developed advanced statistical modeling and analytic tools that can make health care and medical data more meaningful.

A new publicly available database will catalog metadata associated with biologic samples, making it easier for researchers to share and reuse genetic data for environmental and ecological analyses. It links publicly available genetic data to records of where and when samples were collected. Such information is critical for comparing biodiversity in different locations worldwide, across time. Despite calls for more data sharing within the research community, researchers have until now lacked the tools they needed.

RNAi is a mainstay of contemporary biological research. But how exactly this crucial mechanism functions in humans remains a partial mystery that we are now one step closer to solving. Structural biologists have now published atomic-resolution pictures and a comprehensive analysis of the workings of a part of the RNAi machinery in Molecular Cell. They've discovered how several parts of the machinery work in concert to tamp down gene expression after the attachment of the machinery to an mRNA copied from a gene.