Apple’s App Store Downloads Top 10 Billion CUPERTINO, California—January 22, 2011—Apple® today announced that more than 10 billion apps have been downloaded from its revolutionary App Store℠ by the more than 160 million iPhone®, iPod touch® and iPad™ users worldwide. The 10 billionth app downloaded, Paper Glider, was purchased by Gail Davis of Orpington, Kent, UK. As the winner of the App Store Countdown to 10 Billion Apps, Gail Davis will receive a $10,000 iTunes® Gift Card

In a paper published today in the journal Science, a University of California, Davis, researcher and his co-authors challenge a widely held assumption that plants will move uphill in response to warmer temperatures. Between 1930 and 2000, instead of colonizing higher elevations to maintain a constant temperature, many California plant species instead moved downhill an average of 260 feet, said Jonathan Greenberg, an assistant project scientist at the UC Davis Center for Spatial Technologies and Remote Sensing. “While the climate warmed significantly in this period, there was also more precipitation.

New research suggests that people infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) may be up to three times more likely to have a stroke compared to those not affected with HIV. The study is published in the January 19, 2011, online issue of Neurology ®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. “Our findings showed that stroke hospitalizations in the United States decreased by seven percent in the general population within the last decade while stroke hospitalizations for people with HIV rose 67 percent,” said Bruce Ovbiagele, MD, MSc, Professor of Neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego and a member of the American Academy of Neurology

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have coaxed polymers to braid themselves into wispy nanoscale ropes that approach the structural complexity of biological materials

UCSF researchers have developed a new approach to decoding the vast information embedded in an comanism’s genome, while shedding light on exactly how cells interpret their genetic material to create RNA messages and launch new processes in the cell. By combining biochemical techniques with new, fast DNA-sequencing technology and advanced computer technology, the team was able to examine with unprecedented resolution how a cell converts DNA into RNA – a molecular cousin of DNA that is used in the process of creating proteins that govern most biological functions.

Older adults without dementia and with lower levels in plasma of the biomarkers beta-amyloid 42/40 (protein fragments) had an increased rate of cognitive decline over a period of 9 years, according to a study in the January 19 issue of JAMA . The researchers also found that this relationship was stronger among individuals with less education and lower levels of literacy. An estimated 36 million people currently have dementia, with the prevalence expected to double every 20 years, according to background information in the article.