Body

Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center and colleagues have found that healthy adolescent females have predetermined expectations for becoming parents in the future, but have concerns about fertility and childbearing should they develop a life-threatening illness, such as cancer.

The study appeared in the February issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Want to know what you are eating? DNA barcodes can be used to identify even very closely related species, finds an article published in BioMed Central's open access journal Investigative Genetics. Results from the study show that the labelling of game meat in South Africa is very poor with different species being substituted almost 80% of the time.

The bacteria that cause acne live on everyone's skin, yet one in five people is lucky enough to develop only an occasional pimple over a lifetime.

In a boon for teenagers everywhere, a UCLA study conducted with researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute has discovered that acne bacteria contain "bad" strains associated with pimples and "good" strains that may protect the skin.

Highlights

Highlights

Although they have an important impact on children's health and education, school-based deworming programmes have a limited impact on the level of infection in the wider community, according to a mathematical modeling study conducted by researchers at Imperial College London.

TORONTO, Ontario (Feb. 28, 2013) - A diagnostic "cocktail" containing a single drop of blood, a dribble of water, and a dose of DNA powder with gold particles could mean rapid diagnosis and treatment of the world's leading diseases in the near future. The cocktail diagnostic is a homegrown brew being developed by University of Toronto's Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) PhD student Kyryl Zagorovsky and Professor Warren Chan that could change the way infectious diseases, from HPV and HIV to malaria, are diagnosed.

Studies screening the genome of hundreds of thousands of individuals (known as Genome-wide association studies or GWAS) have linked more than 100 regions in the genome to the risk of developing cardiovascular disease. Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and the University of Heidelberg, through the joint Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit (MMPU), are taking these results one step further by pinpointing the exact genes that could have a role in the onset of the disease.

HOLLYWOOD Fla. — When Jim Thomas and his global team of researchers returned to the Madang Lagoon in Papua New Guinea, they discovered a treasure trove of new species unknown to science.

This is especially relevant as the research team consisted of scientists who had conducted a previous survey in the 1990s.

"In the Madang Lagoon, we went a half mile out off the leading edge of the active Australian Plate and were in 6,000 meters of water," said Thomas, Ph.D., a researcher at Nova Southeastern University's National Coral Reef Institute in Hollywood, Fla.

Beginning in 2004, a group of scientists from around the globe, including two University of Oklahoma faculty members, set out to map the genome of the sea lamprey. The secrets of how this jawless vertebrate separated from the jawed vertebrates early in the evolutionary process will give insight to the ancestry of vertebrate characters and may help investigators more fully understand neurodegenerative diseases in humans.

RAPID CITY, S.D. (Feb. 28, 2013) – A South Dakota School of Mines & Technology assistant professor and his team have discovered a new species of herbivorous dinosaur and published the first fossil evidence of prehistoric crocodyliforms feeding on small dinosaurs.

NEW YORK (Feb. 28, 2013) — The Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) largest remaining forest elephant population, located in the Okapi Faunal Reserve (OFR), has declined by 37 percent in the last five years, with only 1,700 elephants now remaining, according to wildlife surveys by WCS and DRC officials. WCS scientists warn that if poaching of forest elephants in DRC continues unabated, the species could be nearly extinguished from Africa's second largest country within ten years.

Melbourne, AUSTRALIA - Monash Institute of Medical Research scientists have found a protein in the female reproductive tract that protects against sexually transmitted diseases (STIs) such as chlamydia and herpes simplex virus (HSV).

It is estimated that 450 million people worldwide are newly infected with STIs each year. Chlamydia has the highest infection rate of all the STIs reported in Australia.

Durham, NC — Researchers studying aging in an endangered lemur known as the Milne-Edwards' sifaka report that in old age, females are the safer sex.

After observing these animals for more than two decades in the wild in Madagascar, co-author Patricia Wright of Stony Brook University had a hunch that females were living longer than their male counterparts.

Four leading environmental scientists today urged the international community to install a legal trade in rhino horn – in a last ditch effort to save the imperilled animals from extinction.

In an article in the leading international journal Science the scientists argued that a global ban on rhino products has failed, and death rates among the world's remaining black and white rhinos are soaring due to illegal poaching to supply insatiable international demand.