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The louder the voice, the cloudier the choice: So says research led by the University of Iowa, which found that a single loud voice can skew the result of voice votes, a common decision-making feature in American public life.

Voice voting is used at civic, local, and county governmental meetings. It's also employed regularly in Congress (especially the Senate) and in state legislatures to pass resolutions. The format is simple: A presiding officer states a question, and the group that replies either yea or nay the loudest is declared the winner.

The regular appearance of food poisoning in the news, including a recent event that led to the recall of more than 33,000 pounds of chicken, drives home the need for better bacterial detection long before meats and produce make it to the dinner table. On the horizon is a new approach for pathogen screening that is far faster than current commercial methods. Scientists are reporting the technique in the ACS journal Analytical Chemistry.

It is common to spread salt on roads to prevent ice and the hazards it can entail for traffic. This preventive treatment is based on weather forecasts, but does not take into account that the road can already have enough salt, scattered during previous frost and snowfall.

It is often said that breakfast is important for our health and a study conducted by Umeå University, published in Public Health Nutrition supports this claim.

The study revealed that adolescents who ate poor breakfasts displayed a higher incidence of metabolic syndrome 27 years later, compared with those who ate more substantial breakfasts.

Increasing numbers of bacteria are developing antibiotic resistance. This forms a significant challenge in the battle against bacterial infections. Alvin Lo and Han Remaut (VIB/Vrije Universiteit Brussel) have identified a chemical substance with the potential of acting as a new drug to treat bacterial infections, particularly urinary tract infections. In contrast to the most popular antibiotics, this candidate drug does not destroy pathogenic bacteria, but rather disarms them.

We've all heard about circadian rhythm, the roughly 24-hour oscillations of biological processes that occur in many living organisms. Yet for all its influence in many aspects of our lives — from sleep to immunity and, particularly, metabolism — relatively little is understood about the mammalian circadian rhythm and the interlocking processes that comprise this complex biological clock.

Previous studies have shown that breast cancer survivors who meet the current exercise recommendations (2.5 hours of moderate intensity physical activity per week) are at 25% lower risk for dying from breast cancer. New research from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and reported in the International Journal of Cancer suggests that exceeding the recommendations may provide greater protection, and that running may be better than walking.

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, Jan. 29, 2014 – Myriad Genetics, Inc. (NASDAQ: MYGN) today announced results from PROCEDE 500, a clinical utility study with its Prolaris test, at the 2014 ASCO Genitourinary Cancers Symposium in San Francisco, Calif. The study demonstrated the significant clinical value of Prolaris to physicians who are treating men with prostate cancer. Prolaris is a prognostic test that accurately predicts prostate cancer-specific death and metastases and has been validated in 11 clinical studies with more than 5,000 patients.

Proteins play a fundamental role in almost all biological processes. They consist of chains constructed of up to 20 different amino acids, and their composition, structure and function are controlled by the genetic code. Brilliant minds at the Center for Biopharmaceuticals are now attempting to rewrite the core function of proteins by making alterations in their molecular backbone, for example. By combining biological and chemical methods, researchers are able to design semi-synthetic proteins with almost no regard to the limitations of nature:

Air pollution in China has exhibited noticeable changes over the past 30 years, shifting from point-source pollution (around factories and industrial plants) in the 1980s to urban pollution in the 1990s. Since the start of this century, air pollution has become increasingly regional and more complex. Recent research has indicated that the cooperative transition of SO2 and NOx into secondary aerosols (sulfate and nitrate) played a critical role in the haze pollution episode in China in January 2013.

The thyroid hormone thyroxine, which controls our day-to-day activity and was previously believed to remain at a constant level in the blood, actually fluctuates as a result of a protein which modifies the release of the hormone depending on body temperature, new research reveals. The research was published today, 29 January, in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Ever since the nineteenth century scientists have recognised that some regions contain more species than others, and that the tropics are richer in biodiversity than temperate regions. But why are there more species in the tropics? A new study publishing 28 January in the Open Access journal PLOS Biology scrutinizes most of the living mammalian species and reveals a two-fold mechanism; the rate at which mammals arose was higher in the tropics, and the rate at which they became extinct lower.

School-based intermittent screening and treatment programs for malaria may be unsuccessful in low to moderate transmission areas

A school-based intermittent screening and treatment program for malaria in rural coastal Kenya had no benefits on the health and education of school children, according to a study by international researchers published in this week's PLOS Medicine.

A University of Colorado Cancer Center study published today in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology Biology and Physics shows that patients taking crizotinib for ALK+ non-small cell lung cancer may safely and durably use up to three courses of targeted radiation therapy to eradicate pockets of drug-resistant disease. Eliminating these pockets of resistant disease allows patients to continue treating the overall condition with crizotinib, leading to improved 2-year survival rates compared with patients forced to discontinue the drug sooner.

Researchers at the Prairie Research Institute's Illinois Natural History Survey have found that overall, concentrations of arsenic, selenium, and mercury in bighead and silver carp from the lower Illinois River do not appear to be a health concern for a majority of human consumers. The full results of the study have been published in the journal Chemosphere.