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University of Adelaide researchers say a small wasp that scientists had forgotten about for more than 200 years is now making a name for itself – as a predator of Australia's most common dangerous spider, the redback.

The wasp (Agenioideus nigricornis) was first described scientifically in 1775 by Danish entomologist Johan Christian Fabricius, thanks to samples collected in Australia during Captain Cook's first great voyage (1768).

INDIANAPOLIS -- As outbreaks of preventable diseases such as whooping cough and measles increase in the United States, researchers from the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine are investigating whether altruism, known to influence adults' decisions to immunize themselves, influences parental decisions to vaccinate their children.

LOS ANGELES – Latinos are more likely to store fat in the pancreas and are less able to compensate by excreting additional insulin, a Cedars-Sinai study shows.

The research examining overweight, prediabetic patients, published online by Diabetes Care, is part of a focus by Cedars-Sinai's Heart Institute, Biomedical Imaging Research Institute and Diabetes and Obesity Research Institute, to identify biological measures that could help predict which patients are likely to develop type 2 diabetes.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many Americans started driving more due to a fear of flying – and lost their lives in traffic accidents. But why did this happen more frequently in some states than in others? And why didn't Spanish driving habits change in the same way following the 2004 train bombings in Madrid? Wolfgang Gaissmaier and Gerd Gigerenzer from the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin present new findings on this topic in the journal Psychological Science.

"The most important thing for us is to raise awareness of the dangers of artificial light at night and we have already come a long way now that the American Medical Association (AMA) recently announced its new policy recognizing adverse health effects of exposure to light at night and encouraging further research into the matter," said Prof. Abraham Haim, a leading authority on light pollution, who coordinated the 21st International Congress of Zoology (ICZ) that was held last week at the University of Haifa, Israel.

Serious gaming can be used to enhance surgical skills, but games developed or used to train medical professionals need to be validated before they are integrated into teaching methods, according to a paper in the October issue of the surgical journal BJS.

Researchers from The Netherlands reviewed 25 research studies covering 30 serious games published between 1995 and 2012.

The results obtained by Rune T. Kidmose and Nick S. Laursen are remarkable. "It's extremely rare that you can trap a proteolytic (protein-degrading) enzyme in the middle of the process of cleaving an intact protein," says Associate Professor Gregers Rom Andersen, the students' supervisor. "We now know in detail which parts of MASP-2 recognise the substrate C4.

Athens, Ga. – The study of an oxygen-sensing bacterial regulatory protein by chemistry researchers at the University of Georgia has provided molecular insight into the oxygen sensing mechanism, which could ultimately lead to a better understanding of the ageing process and new treatments for human diseases such cancer, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

A University of Louisville scientist has found a way to prevent inflammation and bone loss surrounding the teeth by blocking a natural signaling pathway of the enzyme GSK3b, which plays an important role in directing the immune response.

A new high-throughput screening technique developed by researchers at the RIKEN Plant Science Center (PSC) has been used to uncover five novel immune-priming compounds in Arabidopsis plants. Discovery of the compounds, which enhance disease resistance without impacting plant growth or crop yield, establishes the new technique as a powerful asset in the battle to protect crops from damaging pathogens.

A new study has found that children of immigrants have an advantage over children of native-born Americans when it comes to the transition to adulthood. Among children of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, school conditions, and other characteristics, those born abroad to immigrant parents who came to the United States before their teen years are more likely to follow the best trajectory in academic achievement and school engagement, followed by those born in the United States to immigrant parents.

Health is an important part of development, with links to how children do cognitively and academically, and it's a strong predictor of adult health and productivity. A new study of low-income families in the United States has found that children's health and access to health care services differ according to the immigrant status of their parents.

The study, by researchers at Cornell University and the University of Chicago, is published in the journal Child Development, whose September/October 2012 issue has a special section on the children of immigrants.

San Diego, CA, September 11, 2012 – The World Health Organization recently recognized environmental noise as harmful pollution, with adverse psychosocial and physiological effects on public health. A new study of noise pollution in Fulton County, Georgia, suggests that many residents are exposed to high noise levels that put them at risk of annoyance or sleep disturbance, which can have serious health consequences. The research is published in the October issue of American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center and colleagues have published a study describing the greater difficulty in finding matched, unrelated donors for non-Caucasian patients who are candidates for hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT).

The study appeared in the August issue of Bone Marrow Transplantation.

The success of HCT depends on finding cell donors who are closely matched genetically; as the degree of mismatching increases, the success of unrelated donor HCT falls accordingly. A patient's ideal donor is a genetically matched sibling.

For the first time ever, more than 8,000 scientists from the IUCN Species Survival Commission (IUCN SSC) have come together to identify 100 of the most threatened animals, plants and fungi on the planet. But conservationists fear they'll be allowed to die out because none of these species provide humans with obvious benefits.