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The population of chimpanzees across western Africa has decreased by 75% in the past 30 years, due in part to widespread chimp hunting. New strategies are needed to curb this illegal activity. Research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Ecology suggests that genetics may provide valuable clues as to how to crack down on the animal smuggling trade, while also helping to safely reintroduce rescued apes into the wild.

High blood levels of vitamin D are associated with a lower risk of colon cancer, finds a large European study published on bmj.com today. The risk was cut by as much as 40% in people with the highest levels compared with those in the lowest.

Several previous studies have already suggested a link between vitamin D and colorectal cancer, but the evidence has been inconclusive with limited information from European populations.

People diagnosed with early stage lung cancer can double their chances of survival over five years if they stop smoking compared with those who continue to smoke, finds a study published on bmj.com today.

This is the first review of studies to measure the effects of continued smoking after diagnosis of lung cancer and suggests that it may be worthwhile to offer smoking cessation treatment to patients with early stage lung cancer.

Infants born to child brides in India (married before the age of 18) have a higher risk of malnutrition than children born to older mothers, according to research published on bmj.com today.

However, low birth weight and childhood mortality are not significantly linked with the age of the mother, concludes the research, and the child's malnutrition was not related to the mother's body mass index.

The English NHS should "proceed cautiously" in introducing payment for performance schemes aimed at improving the quality of care in hospitals, warn researchers from the University of York on bmj.com today.

They believe that the effects of incentive schemes on healthcare systems are still unclear and that the cost of implementing them may not be justified.

Yiping Han, a researcher from Department of Periodontics at Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine, reports the first documented link between a mother with pregnancy-associated gum disease to the death of her fetus.

The findings are discussed in the article, "Term Stillbirth Caused by Oral Fusobacterium nucleatum," in the February issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

The higher a person's degree of obesity, the higher their risk of stroke — regardless of race, gender and how obesity is measured, according to a new study published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Living organisms have good reason for engaging in sexual, rather than asexual, reproduction according to Maurine Neiman, assistant professor of biology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and researcher in the Roy J. Carver Center for Genomics.

By combining the tools of medicinal chemistry and zebrafish biology, a team of Vanderbilt investigators has identified compounds that may offer therapeutic leads for bone-related diseases and cancer.

The findings, reported in ACS Chemical Biology, support using zebrafish as a novel platform for drug development.

What could human engineers possibly learn from the lowly slime mold? Reliable, cost-efficient network construction, apparently: a recent experiment suggests that Physarum polycephalum, a gelatinous fungus-like mold, might actually lead the way to improved technological systems, such as more robust computer and mobile communication networks.

This revelation comes after a team of Japanese and British researchers observed that the slime mold connected itself to scattered food sources in a design that was nearly identical to Tokyo's rail system.

For the first time, researchers have shown how transmission of MRSA from one person to another can be precisely tracked in a hospital setting. The team have developed a remarkable new method that can 'zoom' from large-scale inter-continental transmission events to the much finer detail of person-to-person infection of MRSA within a single hospital.

The ability to track strains in this way will enable researchers to understand how strains can spread so rapidly, and should lead to novel infection control strategies, not only for MRSA but also for other emerging superbugs.

Scientists at The Royal Melbourne Hospital and the University of Melbourne in Australia have discovered the cells that cause a common type of childhood leukaemia – T cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (T-ALL). Targeting of these cells may lead to improved treatments for this disease and help prevent relapse.

The team, led by Dr Matthew McCormack and Dr David Curtis of the Rotary Bone Marrow Research Laboratories and the University's Department of Medicine at The Royal Melbourne Hospital, made the discovery whilst studying mice prone to developing this leukaemia.

New video footage of a virus infecting cells is challenging what researchers have long believed about how viruses spread, suggesting that scientists may be able to create new drugs to tackle some viruses.

Previously, viruses were thought to spread by entering a cell, replicating there, and then being released to infect new cells, so that the rate of spread of a virus would be limited by how quickly it could replicate in each cell.

A new scientific paper co-authored by a University of Adelaide researcher reports strong evidence that humans, not climate change, caused the demise of Australia's megafauna -- giant marsupials, huge reptiles and flightless birds -- at least 40,000 years ago.

A microbe commonly found in the Chesapeake Bay and other waterways emits a poison not just to protect itself but to stun and immobilize the prey it plans to eat, a team of researchers from four universities has discovered. The findings about algae linked to massive fish kills could lead to new ways to slow the growth of these tiny but toxic marine creatures.