Body

These days, more and more people seem to have food allergies, which can sometimes have life-threatening consequences. In ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, scientists report the development of a new type of flour that someday could be used in food-based therapies to help people better tolerate their allergy triggers, including peanuts.

By comparing global patterns in the migrations of all satellite tracked sea turtles with global hatchling drift patterns, they showed that adult sea turtle migrations and foraging habitat selections were based on their past experiences drifting with ocean currents.

The recently extinct Caribbean monk seal (Monachus tropicalis) was one of three species of monk seal in the world. Its relationship to the Mediterranean and Hawaiian monk seals, both living but endangered, has never been fully understood. Through DNA analysis and skull comparisons, however, Smithsonian scientists and colleagues have now clarified the Caribbean species' place on the seal family tree and created a completely new genus.

The modern New Zealand sea lion is a relative newcomer to our mainland, replacing a now-extinct, unique prehistoric New Zealand sea-lion that once lived here, according to a new study.

A team of biologists from New Zealand's University of Otago estimates that this prehistoric mainland sea-lion population became extinct as recently as 600 years ago, and was then replaced by a lineage previously limited to the waters of the cold subantarctic.

The final step in the production of a biotech medicine is finishing with the correct sugar structure. This step is essential for the efficacy of the medicine, but it also makes the production process very complex and expensive. Leander Meuris, Francis Santens and Nico Callewaert (VIB/UGent) have developed a technology that shortens the sugar structures whilst retaining the therapeutic efficiency. This technology has the potential to make the production of biotech medicines significantly simpler and cheaper.

COLLEGE STATION – Sometimes we think we know everything about something only to find out we really don't, said a Texas A&M University scientist.

Dr. Kevin Conway, assistant professor and curator of fishes with Texas A&M's department of wildlife and fisheries sciences at College Station, has published a paper documenting a new species of clingfish and a startling new discovery in a second well-documented clingfish.

Smithsonian Institution

In a random access memory chip, similar logic circuits manipulate electrons on a nanometer scale, controlling billions of compartments in a square inch. But cells are much larger than electrons, which would limit the new devices to hundreds of thousands of storage spaces per square inch.

But Yellen and Kim say that's still plenty small for their purposes.

CLEVELAND, Ohio (May 14, 2014)—Women who go through menopause early—at ages 40 to 45—have a higher rate of heart failure, according to a new study published online today in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS). Smoking, current or past, raises the rate even more.

Preserved giant sperm from tiny shrimps that lived at least 17 million years ago have been discovered at the Riversleigh World Heritage Fossil Site by a team including UNSW Australia researchers.

The giant sperm are thought to have been longer than the male's entire body, but are tightly coiled up inside the sexual organs of the fossilised freshwater crustaceans, which are known as ostracods.

The trial is published in the online journal BMJ Open today. It is the first to be restored under the restoring invisible and abandoned trials (RIAT) initiative that allows third parties to publish previously abandoned studies when the original researchers or sponsors fail to do so.

The initiative was announced last year by editors of The BMJ and PLOS Medicine as a way to complete and correct the scientific record, so that doctors and patients have access to accurate information to make decisions about treatments.

Because of their far-flung geography and colorful examples including the African ostrich, Australian emu, New Zealand kiwi and long lost giants such as the New Zealand moa, Baker, et. al. have examined a fascinating part in the story of the avian tree of life: flightless birds, or ratites.

Provision of a snack before mass treatment of schistosomiasis with praziquantel leads to increased uptake of treatment in school-aged children in Uganda, according to a study published in this week's PLOS Medicine. Simon Muhumuza and colleagues from Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda found that 93.9% of children reported taking praziquantel in schools that offered a snack before treatment compared with 78.7% of children in schools that did not offer a snack.

Identifying larval stages of marine fishes in the open ocean is difficult because the young fishes often bear little or no resemblance to the adults they will become. Confronted with a perplexing fish larva collected in the Florida Straits, Smithsonian scientists turned to DNA barcoding, which yielded an unexpected discovery—a match between the mysterious fish larva and adults of a new species of sea bass discovered off the coast of Curacao. The team's research is published in the May 13 issue of PLOS ONE.

Several medications can help people with alcohol use disorders maintain abstinence or reduce drinking, according to research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The work, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), provides additional options for clinicians to effectively address this global concern.

Among patients with a certain type of colorectal cancer with limited spread to the liver, imaging using positron emission tomography and computed tomography (CT) before surgery did not significantly change the surgical treatment of the cancer, compared with CT alone, according to a study in the May 14 issue of JAMA.