The California Coastal Commission has approved development of the first shellfish ranch in federal waters, a 100-acre underwater plot for cultivating and harvesting about 2.6 million pounds of Mediterranean mussels a year.

“It’s quite an achievement and I’m pretty happy about it,” Philip Cruver, president and director of Catalina Sea Ranch, said about the commission’s unanimous vote Wednesday. “But I always knew it would happen because of the demand.”

Catalina Sea Ranch's business strategy is in line with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric...

Sometimes, it takes worm glue to fix the hole in a heart. Inspired by creepy crawly creatures like the slug and the sandcastle worm, a team of scientists has created a surgical adhesive that could safely seal up the hearts of babies born with congenital heart defects.

The bioinspired glue, described in Science Translational Medicine, could replace damaging staples, weak or toxic glues and reduce the need for repeated surgeries, said study coauthor Jeffrey Karp, a bioengineer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

When such young patients need closure devices implanted, they come with...

Three quarters of the species of top carnivores – lions, wolves, polar bears among them – are steadily declining worldwide, creating a cascade of negative effects that may threaten the planet’s top predator, man, according to a panel of research scientists.

The two-year synthesis of more than 100 field studies over several decades, published online Thursday in the journal Science, shows that eliminating or decreasing the population of such megafauna damaged entire food webs, often dramatically. It comes two weeks after the 40^thanniversary of the signing of the federal...

Move over, coelacanth. No longer is this extremely rare order of ancient fish crowned the slowest evolving vertebrate animal in the world. That honor now goes to the elephant shark, whose freshly sequenced genome was described in Nature this week.

Known formally as Callorhinchus milii, the elephant shark boasts an incredibly compact genome -- about a billion DNA base pairs, roughly one-third the length of the human genome. And it could provide scientists with new insight into the evolution of their now very distant cousins -- the group of bony fishes called Osteichthyes, which gave rise to all...

Invasive lung cancer, still the leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States, claimed fewer lives over the five-year period ending in 2009, says a report issued Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Driven largely by the success of anti-tobacco campaigns, the decline in lung cancer was greater in men than in women, however.

The grim result: a longstanding gender gap, in which women have lagged behind men in lung cancer rates, is narrowing.

Fifty years after the U.S. surgeon general declared tobacco a hazard to the public's health, more than a million new cases of...

A group of big food companies sold 6.4 trillion fewer calories in the United States in 2012 than it did in 2007, an independent evaluator said Thursday in a report on the pledge manufacturers made to First Lady Michelle Obama’s program to end childhood obesity.

The news release from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which funded the evaluation, is an early look at the effort  -- which it said far exceeded the companies’ 2010 promise. The original pledge was to remove 1.5 trillion calories from the U.S. marketplace by 2015.

The 6.4-trillion-calorie decline translates to a...

An antibody and toxin mix has successfully detected and killed HIV-infected cells lurking in the organs and bone marrow of mice that were altered to have a human immune system.

The results, reported Thursday in the online journal PLOS Pathogens, offer conceptual proof that a reservoir of HIV-infected cells in organs can sought out and destroyed, a scenario that would potentially end the stalemate between the virus and antiretroviral drug therapies.

The altered mice, developed about eight years ago, can be infected by the human immunodeficiency virus in an identical manner to humans; they...

Massive sunspot AR 1944 is getting feisty, and doing some damage.

Several Earth-lengths across, it is one of the largest sunspots seen in a decade. It is also complex, with dozens of dark cores.

"Sometimes you see a nice, big simple brown sunspot, and even though it's big, it's boring," said Alex Young of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "But as soon as they start getting twisted and breaking apart and merging with each other, you know something exciting is going to happen."

And something exciting has happened. Tuesday afternoon, AR 1944 was the source of a powerful X-class solar flare...

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved U.S. marketing of the drug dapagliflozin, the second of a new class of medications that aim to improve glycemic control in patients with Type 2 diabetes. The drug will be marketed under the name Farxiga.

Dapagliflozin is a sodium-glucose co-transporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitor, a drug that blocks the reabsorption of glucose by the kidney, increases the excretion of glucose in urine and lowers glucose levels in the blood.

It will join -- and is likely to be prescribed in conjunction with -- a wide range of diabetes medications, including...

Got some dirty money to launder? Well, Rhode Island scientists say they've devised a method of washing human grease, microbes and motor oil from the world's banknotes using supercritical fluid.

Each year, the world's governments shred roughly 150,000 tons of cold hard cash due to wear and tear, as well as the buildup of human grease, or sebum, which collects on the bills as they are handed from one person to another.

As the sebum reacts with oxygen in the air, the bills begin to turn yellow, making them more likely to be retired by central banks and destroyed. While well-used bills can be...

Scientists have discovered more than 180 species of biofluorescent fish that glow in neon shades of blue, red, orange and green -- most of them hiding out in tropical coral reefs.

Some of the fish glow just around their eyes. Others have intricate fluorescent patterns on their bellies or backs. And some of the fish glow all the way through their bodies. If you slice a false moray eel like a salami and shine a blue light on it, the entire cross-section would illuminate.

And it turns out that reef fish that are the most mottled and brown and difficult to see are the ones that tend to fluoresce...