Life Sciences

Delicate yet voracious, the sea slug Elysia rufescens grazes cow-like on bright green tufts of algae, rooting around to find the choicest bits.

But this inch-long marine mollusk gains not only a tasty meal — it also slurps up the algae's defensive chemicals, which the slug can then deploy against its own predators.

Invading predators can devastate an ecosystem. In fact, a leading cause of extinction is the introduction of predators into an isolated system like an island or a lake. The destruction is usually blamed on the predator’s eating choices, but sometimes the key lies in the prey animals’ responses, according to an international team of researchers led by Princeton’s Robert Pringle.

The National Academy of Sciences has elected four Princeton faculty members to join its ranks. They are among 100 new members and 25 foreign associates who were selected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Those elected bring the total number of active members to 2,347 and the total number of foreign associates to 487. Foreign associates are nonvoting members of the academy, with citizenship outside the United States.

A Princeton-led team of researchers has discovered a factor that promotes the spread of cancers to bone, opening the way toward treatments that could mitigate cancer’s ability to colonize bone. The study by Mark Esposito, Yibin Kang and colleagues appears in the April 15 issue of Nature Cell Biology.