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A 20-year-old HIV-positive adult on antiretroviral therapy (ART) in the U.S. or Canada may be expected to live into their early 70's, a life expectancy approaching that of the general population, according to results published December 18, 2013, in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Hasina Samji and colleagues from the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (BC-CfE) and the North American AIDS Cohort Collaboration on Research and Design (NA-ACCORD).

Giant moa bird (Dinornis robustus, literally meaning 'robust strange bird') may not have actually had robust bones, according to new research conducted by The University of Manchester. The leg bones of one of the tallest birds that ever existed were actually rather like those of its modern (but distant) relatives, such as ostrich, emu and rhea, the studypublished in PLOS One today (18 December) shows.

DURHAM, N.C. -- A long-term study of aggression in lemurs finds that infants born to older mothers are less likely to get hurt than those born to younger mothers.

The researchers base their findings on an analysis of detailed medical records for more than 240 ring-tailed lemurs -- cat-sized primates with long black-and-white banded tails -- that were monitored daily from infancy to adulthood over a 35-year period at the Duke Lemur Center in North Carolina.

TORONTO, Dec. 18, 2013 — After successfully text messaging 'O Canada' using evaporated vodka, two York University researchers and their UK-based counterpart say their simple system can be used where conventional wireless technology fails.

Regenerative medicine may offer ways to banish baldness that don't involve toupees. The lab of USC scientist Krzysztof Kobielak, MD, PhD has published a trio of papers in the journals Stem Cells and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that describe some of the factors that determine when hair grows, when it stops growing and when it falls out.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — As is well known, the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old. No rocks exist, however, that are older than about 3.8 billion years. A sedimentary rock section in the Jack Hills of western Australia, more than 3 billion years old, contains within it zircons that were eroded from rocks as old as about 4.3 billion years, making these zircons, called Jack Hills zircons, the oldest recorded geological material on the planet.

Equipped with high-speed, high-resolution video, scientists have discovered important new information on how marine snail larvae swim, a key behavior that determines individual dispersal and ultimately, survival.

In a study of national data on colon surgery, Johns Hopkins researchers found that while patients who undergo either minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery or the high-tech robotic approach have similar outcomes, robotic surgery is significantly more expensive.

The findings provide a counterpoint to the aggressive advertising used by some hospitals to tout benefits of the pricey new gadget, even before research has been done to learn whether robotic surgery is actually better for patients.

DALLAS, Dec. 18, 2013 — Heart disease and stroke remain two of the top killers of Americans and pose a significant threat to millions of others, according to the American Heart Association's Heart Disease and Stroke Statistical Update 2014, published in its journal Circulation.

Metabolism was lost in the shadows of cancer research for decades but has recently been reclaiming some of the spotlight. Now, Mina Bissell, Distinguished Scientist with Berkeley Lab's Life Sciences Division and a leading authority on breast cancer, has shown that aerobic glycolysis - glucose metabolism in the presence of oxygen – is not the consequence of the cancerous activity of malignant cells but is itself a cancerous event.

University of Minnesota researchers have discovered a first-of-its-kind series of compounds possessing anti-human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) activity. The compounds present a new target for potential HIV drug development and future treatment options.

Complete findings are printed in today's issue of the Journal of Virology.

Completely banning tobacco use inside the home – or more broadly in the whole city – measurably boosts the odds of smokers either cutting back or quitting entirely, report University of California, San Diego School of Medicine researchers in the current online issue of Preventive Medicine.

AVALON, CA -- The wild bison roaming Catalina Island are a major attraction for the nearly 1 million tourists who visit the Channel Island's most popular destination every year. But managing the number of bison so that the herd remains healthy and doesn't endanger the health of the rest of the Island has been a major challenge for wildlife biologists.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – A newly identified immune protein influences each person's response to vaccines and risk for autoimmune diseases like lupus and multiple sclerosis, according to a study published today by researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The protein, called a receptor and part of signaling pathways, also provides a new target for personalized therapies for patients with autoimmune diseases.

A vaccine study in monkeys designed to identify measurable signs that the animals were protected from infection by SIV, the monkey version of HIV, as well as the mechanism of such protection has yielded numerous insights that may advance HIV vaccine research. Seven laboratories collaborated on the research led by Mario Roederer, Ph.D., and John R. Mascola, M.D., at the Vaccine Research Center of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health.