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Certain influenza strains are highly virulent—they cause more serious disease and kill more people. Some of the damage is caused by the stronger immune response such strains elicit, especially in the lung. A study published on May 8th in PLOS Pathogens identifies SOCS4 as a key regulator of the immune response against influenza virus.

Cytokine storms are believed to be the primary cause of death in young and otherwise healthy people who are infected with influenza, particularly pandemic flu strains.

"Many of the estimated 50 million deaths caused by the 1918 flu epidemic are believed to have been caused by these cytokine storms," Dr Kedzierski said. "Cytokine storms in patients' lungs are also thought to be responsible for many of the 500,000 influenza-related deaths that occur around the world each year."

A genomic investigation by University of British Columbia researchers has revealed that a lethal parasite infecting a wide range of insects actually originated from pond scum, but has completely shed its green past on its evolutionary journey.

A team led by UBC Botany Prof. Patrick Keeling sequenced the genome of Helicosporidium – an intracellular parasite that can kill juvenile blackflies, caterpillars, beetles and mosquitoes – and found it evolved from algae like another notorious pathogen: malaria.

Leptin-dependent regulation of reproduction

Eating more fruits and vegetables may reduce the risk of stroke worldwide, according to new research in the American Heart Association's journal Stroke.

Researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 20 studies published over the last 19 years to assess the effects of fruit and vegetable consumption on risk of stroke globally. The combined studies involved 760,629 men and women who had 16,981 strokes.

Stroke risk decreased by 32 percent with every 200 grams of fruit consumed each day and 11 percent with every 200 grams of vegetables consumed each day.

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Children with autism experience deficits in a type of immune cell that protects the body from infection. Called granulocytes, the cells exhibit one-third the capacity to fight infection and protect the body from invasion compared with the same cells in children who are developing normally.

The cells, which circulate in the bloodstream, are less able to deliver crucial infection-fighting oxidative responses to combat invading pathogens because of dysfunction in their tiny energy-generating organelles, the mitochondria.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- MIT researchers have devised a novel cancer treatment that destroys tumor cells by first disarming their defenses, then hitting them with a lethal dose of DNA damage.

A Case Western Reserve University student and his mentor have discovered an ancient kitten-sized predator that lived in Bolivia about 13 million years ago—one of the smallest species reported in the extinct order Sparassodonta.

Third-year undergraduate student Russell Engelman and Case Western Reserve anatomy professor Darin Croft made the finding by analyzing a partial skull that had been in a University of Florida collection more than three decades.

Flowers aren't just pretty to look at, they are how plants reproduce. In agricultural plants, the timing and regulation of flower formation has economic significance, affecting a crop's yield.

A new paper by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania published in the journal Science has revealed that a plant hormone once believed to promote flower formation in annual plants also plays a role in inhibiting flowers from forming. The dual role of this hormone, gibberellin, could be exploited to produce higher-yielding crop plants.

Showing students how to cope with test anxiety might also help them to handle their built-up angst and fretfulness about other issues. The results of a new study by Carl Weems of the University of New Orleans show that anxiety intervention programs that focus on academic matters fit well into the demands of the school routine, and do not carry the same stigma among youth as general anxiety programs do.

When ovarian cancer spreads from the ovaries it almost always does so to a layer of fatty tissue that lines the gut. A new study has found that ovarian cancer cells are more aggressive on these soft tissues due to the mechanical properties of this environment. The finding is contrary to what is seen with other malignant cancer cells that seem to prefer stiffer tissues.

Mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes account for nearly 25 percent of hereditary breast cancers and most hereditary ovarian cancers, yet a study by cancer prevention and control researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center suggests an alarmingly small amount of women who qualify for BRCA genetic counseling actually receive the services. Additionally, they found that a significant proportion of women with a family history of breast and ovarian cancer underestimate their own risk.

SAN ANTONIO, May 8, 2014 – A new method for isolating and genome sequencing an individual malaria parasite cell has been developed by Texas Biomed researchers and their colleagues. This advance will allow scientists to improve their ability to identify the multiple types of malaria parasites infecting patients and lead to ways to best design drugs and vaccines to tackle this major global killer. Malaria remains the world's deadliest parasitic disease, killing 655,000 people in 2010.

Single-cell genomics could provide new insight into the biology of Malaria parasites, including their virulence and levels of drug resistance, to ultimately improve treatment and control of the disease, according to new research funded by the Wellcome Trust and the National Institutes of Health.

The findings are revealed in a study by researchers at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute and published today in the journal Genome Research.

In a study published today in F1000Research, Professor Kenneth Lee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong reveals the full experimental results of an attempt to replicate a controversial study published in Nature recently that suggested that bathing somatic cells in acid can reprogram them to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells).