Richard Young’s lab at the Whitehead Institute has found, in their paper in Cell that most genes thought to be ‘turned off’ (not doing any transcription) are actually turned on, but only a little bit. The process to make RNA begins but isn’t completed. So it looks like gene regulation isn’t as simple as a binary on-off switch.

And researchers from the Dana-Farber, publishing in Cell Metabolism have identified the protein ‘switch’ in mice that causes white fat cells to become brown fat cells; these brown cells burn fuel while white fat cells store it. This opens the door to obesity drugs that can convert the bad fat to good fat.

And finally, Harvard researchers have imaged the poliovirus entering a cell using fluorescence microscopy, according to their PLoS Biology paper. It appears that the virus works faster than most, taking only minutes to get inside the cell, unleash its genome and start the infection. The mechanism of infection of polio has been a source of debate. The researchers say this method could be used to study how other viruses enter cells.