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In a paper published in Wildlife Society Bulletin, entitled Perceived Efficacy of Livestock-Guarding Dogs in South Africa: Implications for Cheetah Conservation, researchers from the University's School of Anthropology and Conservation studied the effect guarding dogs have on the protection of farm animals across South Africa.

The research revealed that livestock guarding dogs eliminated livestock losses from predators on 91% of the farms studied, with each farmer saving over $3,000 per year due to the reduction in killed livestock.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – To improve healthcare for children, medical research that involves kids is a must. Yet, only five percent of parents say their children have ever participated in any type of medical research, according to a new University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health.

Chamomile is a medicinal plant used mainly in the treatment of stomach and intestinal diseases, including the field of veterinary medicine. Agricultural scientist Bettina Fähnrich from the Institute of Animal Nutrition and Functional Plant Compounds has been focusing on the genetics of chamomile (Matricaria recutita). She has been looking for chamomile varieties with a triploid (threefold) set of chromosomes instead of the natural diploid (double) set. Plants with the triploid form produce blooms that last longer and have a longer harvesting period.

Researchers from the University of Southampton, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Quebec at Montreal, have developed a new microsystem for more efficient testing of pharmaceutical drugs to treat diseases such as cystic fibrosis, MG (myasthenia gravis) and epilepsy.

A large percentage of pharmaceutical drugs target ion channels, which are proteins found in a cell's membrane, that play a pivotal role in these serious disorders and that are used to test the effectiveness of new drugs.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the 2006 Revised Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (UAGA) or enacted similar legislation giving individuals the "First Person Authorization" (FPA) to consent to organ donation after death via a signed donor card or driver's license, or by enrollment in a donor registry. While such laws give hospitals legal authority to proceed with organ procurement without consent of the registered donor's family, a new study shows that organ procurement organizations' implementation of FPA has been inconsistent and incomplete.

E-cigarettes have been widely promoted as a way for people to quit smoking conventional cigarettes. Now, in the first study of its kind, UC San Francisco researchers are reporting that, at the point in time they studied, youth using e-cigarettes were more likely to be trying to quit, but also were less likely to have stopped smoking and were smoking more, not less.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – One of the largest and longest experiments ever done to test the impact of nutrient loading on coral reefs today confirmed what scientists have long suspected – that this type of pollution from sewage, agricultural practices or other sources can lead to coral disease and bleaching.

A three-year, controlled exposure of corals to elevated levels of nitrogen and phosphorus at a study site in the Florida Keys, done from 2009-12, showed that the prevalence of disease doubled and the amount of coral bleaching, an early sign of stress, more than tripled.

People with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) run a higher risk of virologic failure than previously thought, even when their number of RNA copies of the retrovirus per millilitre of blood is slightly above the detection threshold, according to a study by Claudie Laprise at the University of Montreal's Department of Social and Preventative Medicine. Her findings were published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

This news release is available in German.

Several Canadian biologists, including two at Simon Fraser University, are breathing a collective sigh of relief after learning that a monstrous fish found in a Burnaby, B.C. pond is not a northern snakehead.

But they say their discovery that the half-metre-long, 3.7-kg snakehead fished out of Burnaby Central Park's lagoon last December was a blotched snakehead, or a blotched/northern hybrid is still a serious concern.

The seafloor off the coast of Northern Siberia is releasing more than twice the amount of methane as previously estimated, according to new research results published in the Nov. 24 edition of the journal Nature Geoscience.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is venting at least 17 teragrams of the methane into the atmosphere each year. A teragram is equal to 1 million tons.

SEATTLE—When Group Health patients received support from a nurse navigator, or advocate, soon after a cancer diagnosis, they had better experiences and fewer problems with their care—particularly in health information, care coordination, and psychological and social care—according to a randomized controlled trial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

SALT LAKE CITY— For the past ten years, clinicians throughout the United States have been performing unnecessary Pap tests for cervical cancer screening in certain groups of women, according to a researcher from Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah. The research results were published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine today.

Otitis media, more commonly known as ear infection, is the leading cause of pediatric health care visits and the most frequent reason children are prescribed antibiotics or undergo surgery. Researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have discovered that, during recent years, several interventions have been introduced aiming to decrease the otitis media burden — and they've been successful.

Barriers to human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination among adolescents in the U.S. range from financial concerns and parental attitudes to social influences and concerns about the vaccination's effect on sexual behavior, according to a review of the available medical literature published by JAMA Pediatrics, a JAMA Network publication.