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From a zebra carcass on the plains of Namibia in Southern Africa, an international team of researchers has discovered a new, unusually large virus (or bacteriophage) that infects the bacterium that causes anthrax. The novel bacteriophage could eventually open up new ways to detect, treat or decontaminate the anthrax bacillus and its relatives that cause food poisoning. The work is published Jan. 27 in the journal PLOS One.

A team of researchers from Penn State University and the University of California has discovered a protein that is required for the growth of tiny, but critical, hair-like structures called cilia on cell surfaces. The discovery has important implications for human health because lack of cilia can lead to serious diseases such as polycystic kidney disease, blindness and neurological disorders.

Conventional wisdom holds that gossip and social exclusion are always malicious, undermining trust and morale in groups. But sharing this kind of "reputational information" could have benefits for society, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Robb Willer, an associate professor of sociology, explored the nature of gossip and ostracism in collaboration with co-authors Matthew Feinberg, a Stanford University postdoctoral researcher, and Michael Schultz from the University of California–Berkeley.

To gauge the participants' inflammation levels, the scientists measured the activation of three proteins in the blood that are markers of inflammation – called pro-inflammatory cytokines. They generated the protein activity by injecting a compound that stimulated an immune response. The proteins are interleukin-6 (IL-6), interleukin-1 beta (IL-1B) and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-a).

Inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions are a major public health concern, costing millions of dollars in unnecessary health care costs annually and contributing to the problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Still, despite widely accepted prescription guidelines, physicians continue to prescribe antibiotics for colds even when they won't help. A new study in JAMA Internal Medicine to be released January 27 offers an inexpensive and seemingly simple "nudge" that reduced inappropriate antibiotic prescribing by nearly 20 percent.

PITTSBURGH—An enthusiastic group of non-experts, working through an online interface and receiving feedback from lab experiments, has produced designs for RNA molecules that are consistently more successful than those generated by the best computerized design algorithms, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University report.

Retrieval of ancient DNA molecules is usually performed with special precautions to prevent DNA from researchers or the environment to get mixed in with the DNA from the fossil. However, many ancient fossils have been lying in museum collection for decades, and are contaminated with present-day human DNA before they enter the DNA-laboratory.

A team of researchers at the University of Toronto has discovered a method of assembling "building blocks" of gold nanoparticles as the vehicle to deliver cancer medications or cancer-identifying markers directly into cancerous tumors. The study, led by Warren Chan, Professor at the Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) and the Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research (CCBR), appears in an article in Nature Nanotechnology this week.

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists have discovered a promising new class of antibiotics that could aid efforts to overcome drug-resistance in tuberculosis (TB), a global killer. The drugs increased survival of mice infected with TB and were effective against drug-resistant strains of TB. St. Jude led the international research effort, results of which appear in the current issue of the journal Nature Medicine.

Island plants and animals are often different from their mainland relatives. In general, the lack of top predators and large herbivores on isolated oceanic islands influences traits of island organisms. Consider, for example, the dodo: this island-dwelling, flightless bird was so fearless that it was hunted to extinction by humans within 200 years of first contact. Human interaction is just one threat to conservation. Differences in the threats posed by pathogens and parasites may also be important for conservation of today's extinction-prone island populations.

In the largest retrospective study to date using data from the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) database for adult double-lung transplants, Temple University School of Medicine researchers have shown that there is no statistically significant difference between rejection and mortality rates among double-lung transplant recipients when their transplanted organs came from donors whose blood-type was identical or compatible to their own.

Your best friend swears by the Paleo Diet. Your boss loves Atkins. Your sister is gluten-free, and your roommate is an acolyte of Michael Pollan. So who's right? Maybe they all are.

In new research published this month in Cell Metabolism, USC scientists Sean Curran and Shanshan Pang identify a collection of genes that allow an organism to adapt to different diets and show that without them, even minor tweaks to diet can cause premature aging and death.

New Rochelle, NY, January 27, 2014—Drugs comprised of single strands of DNA, called aptamers, can bind to targets inside tumor cells causing cell death. But these DNA drugs cannot readily get inside tumor cells on their own. Effective delivery of DNA aptamers using a natural polysaccharide as a carrier is described in an article in Nucleic Acid Therapeutics, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. publishers.

Baltimore, Md. (January 27, 2014) – Researchers at the Kennedy Krieger Institute recently announced study findings showing the successful development of a humanized preclinical model for facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), providing scientists with a much needed tool to accelerate novel therapeutic research and development.

Philadelphia, Pa. (January 27, 2014) – A staged approach to epilepsy surgery—with invasive brain monitoring followed by surgery in a single hospital stay—is a safe and beneficial approach to treatment for complex cases of epilepsy in children, reports the February issue of Neurosurgery, official journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons.