Body

Bethesda, MD—Breakthrough drugs have made it possible for people to live with HIV longer than ever before, but more work must be done to actually cure the disease. One of the challenges researchers face involves fully eradicating the virus when it is latent in the body.

In order to be effective, a Conservation Unit must have available a list of the species that live within it. They also should have detailed information about the distribution of species among the available habitats. It would be difficult to correctly plan the conservation actions and/or monitoring programs without some minimal knowledge about the species (who are the object of those measures). "This is why our study is so important to the park", said Dr.

By following certain rules, scientists can prepare architectural plans for building ideal protein molecules not found in the real world. Based on these computer renditions, previously non-existent proteins can be produced from scratch in the lab. The principles to make this happen appear this month in Nature magazine.

The lead authors are Dr. Nobuyasu Koga and Dr. Rie Tatsumi-Koga, a husband-and-wife scientific team in Dr. David Baker's lab at the University of Washington Protein Design Institute.

A study dating the age of more than 1 million single-letter variations in the human DNA code reveals that most of these mutations are of recent origin, evolutionarily speaking. These kinds of mutations change one nucleotide – an A, C, T or G – in the DNA sequence. Over 86 percent of the harmful protein-coding mutations of this type arose in humans just during the past 5,000 to 10,000 years.

The scents which permeate our health spas from aromatic essential oils may provide more benefits than just a sense of rest and well-being.

PASADENA, Calif., Nov. 29, 2012 – Immunizing older adults with the tetanus-diphtheria-acellular-pertussis vaccine (Tdap) to prevent pertussis (more commonly referred to as whooping cough) was found to be as safe as immunizing them with the tetanus and diphtheria (Td) vaccine, according to a study by Kaiser Permanente published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Washington, DC (November 27, 2012) –A new study in the Journal of Communication links verbal aggression to prenatal testosterone exposure. The lead researcher, at University at Buffalo – The State University of New York, used the 2D:4D measure to predict verbal aggression. This study is the first to use this method to examine prenatal testosterone exposure as a determinant of a communication trait.

WASHINGTON, DC, November 26, 2012 — Organizations using fear and anger to spread negative messages about Muslims have moved from the fringes of public discourse into the mainstream media since the Sept. 11 attacks, according to new research by a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sociologist.

Titled, "The Fringe Effect: Civil Society Organizations and the Evolution of Media Discourse about Islam since the September 11th Attacks," the study appears in the December issue of the American Sociological Review.

WASHINGTON, DC, November 26, 2012 — Behavior problems, not depression, are linked to lower grades for depressed adolescents, according to a study in the December issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

WASHINGTON, DC, November 27, 2012 — Employers are often more focused on hiring someone they would like to hang out with than they are on finding the person who can best do the job, suggests a study in the December issue of the American Sociological Review.

[EMBARGOED FOR NOV. 29, 2012] A new study of the safety of the tetanus-diphtheria-acellular pertussis (Tdap) vaccine supports the recommendation that those 65 and older get the vaccine to protect themselves and others, particularly young babies, from pertussis. Published online in Clinical Infectious Diseases, the findings come as reported U.S. cases of the bacterial infection, also known as whopping cough, are at the highest level since the 1950s.

Boys whose testes have not descended at birth—a condition known as cryptorchidism—are almost three times as likely to develop testicular cancer in later life, finds an analysis of the available evidence published online in Archives of Disease in Childhood.

The findings prompt the authors to ask whether boys with the condition should be regularly monitored to lessen the potential risk

Cryptorchidsim, where testes fail to descend into the scrotum and are retained within the abdomen, is the most common birth defect in boys, affecting around 6% of newborns.

Judgments made after a moral evaluation are quicker and more extreme than the same judgment based on practical considerations, but morality-based evaluations can be more easily shifted and made with other considerations in mind, according to research published November 28 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Jay Van Bavel and colleagues from New York University.

When seasonal changes affect food availability, omnivores like blue monkeys adapt by changing their diets, but such nutritional changes may impact female reproduction, according to research published November 28 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Steffen Foerster from Barnard College, and colleagues from Columbia University and the Smithsonian Institution.

Skeletal remains in an island cave in Favignana, Italy, reveal that modern humans first settled in Sicily around the time of the last ice age and despite living on Mediterranean islands, ate little seafood. The research is published November 28 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Marcello Mannino and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany.