Champaign, IL, USA. Exclusive licensing deals are a two-way safety net that fosters cooperation as new product ideas weave their way toward the marketplace, according to new research led by a business strategy expert.

Deepak Somaya of the University of Illinois says that granting sole rights to a partner is a tool to curb risk and leverage cooperation, not to corner the market when breakthrough innovations are ultimately launched. “We found that exclusive licensing is very significantly about the collaboration needed to reach the marketplace and succeed, not about dominating the marketplace,” he said.

“Past research theorized that exclusivity was largely about creating downstream monopolies to drive sales and profits.” In short, the deals link innovators with partners who are skilled in taking new products to the marketplace, according to findings that appear in the Strategic Management Journal. Those partners, in turn, develop a vested interest in success because exclusivity means no new licenses will water down earnings potential once the partner has helped the product succeed.

Hinxton, Cambridge, UK. By integrating gene expression data from an unprecedented variety of human tissue samples, scientists have for the first time produced a global map of gene expression.

The map, which provides a systematic and consistent baseline for meaningful comparisons, is now the basis for a new bioinformatics service, the Gene Expression Atlas Resource.

The Atlas provides a unique view of the genetic activities determining our appearance, function and behavior.

The work was performed by Alvis Brazma and his team at the European Bioinformatics Institute, an outstation of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and their collaborators. The full analysis is published in Nature Biotechnology.

Houston, TX, USA. A science team has captured video of a mammalian embryonic heart before it began beating, using techniques that are prime for adaptation to other internal structures prior to their activation as human organs.

The team consisted of Kirill Larin, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Houston, and his colleagues in the Texas Medical Center, in collaborated with scientists at the Baylor College of Medicine. The researchers documented the formation of the mammalian heart through a high-resolution, non-invasive imaging device, providing perhaps the best live imagery of the embryonic heart before it began beating.

"Everything we know about early development of the heart and formation of the vasculature system comes from in vitro studies of fixed tissue samples or studies of amphibian and fish embryos," Larin said. "With this technology, we are able to image life as it happens, see the heart beat in a mammal for the very first time."

Leicester, Leicestershire, UK. Four geologists suggest that Earth has entered a new age of geological time, the Anthropocene Epoch.

The scientists propose that over just two centuries humans wrought such vast and unprecedented changes to our world that we actually might have ushered in a new geological time interval, altering the planet for millions of years.

Depending on your point of view, the news is either good or irredeemably bad, since the dawning of this new epoch may include the sixth largest mass extinction in the history of the Earth.

Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams from the University of Leicester Department of Geology; Will Steffen, Director of the Australian National University's Climate Change Institute and Paul Crutzen the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist of Mainz University provide evidence for the scale of global change in their commentary in the American Chemical Society's' journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Stanford, CA, USA. For the first time, researchers have been able to confine and study an individual protein without having to pin it down so tightly as to alter its fundamental behavior. Scrutinizing a single molecule for more than a few milliseconds used to require effectively "stapling" it down, inhibiting its normal behavior.

This is the first practical application to proteins of a technique recently developed in the Moerner lab at Stanford University. They confined a protein and made detailed observations of the dynamic behavior of the molecule for more than one second.

Observing molecules one at a time is valuable because it lets researchers get a clear picture of that molecule's changing behavior over time, without the picture being confused by the presence of other molecules. Protein molecules are among the most important of all, playing a central role in living organisms. They are the chief actors within a cell, carrying out the duties specified by information encoded in genes.