The Director of the Centers for Disease Control recently highlighted a campaign to convince up to 86 million Americans that they have pre-diabetes, a condition that doesn't even exist. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is concerned that health care costs under the Affordable Care Act have skyrocketed and millennials are opting to pay the penalty rather than get the health care, which could be twice as expensive. 

Historically called the disease of kings, gout was common among wealthy gents who could afford to eat and drink to excess. These days it doesn’t just affect the rich: rates of gout have been increasing globally since the 1960s. It now affects around 70,000 Australians a year and is more common in men aged over 70.

Worldwide, the prevalence is highest in Taiwan (2.6% of the population and 10.4% of Indigenous Taiwanese) and among the New Zealand Maori (6.1%).

The Molecular Microbiology Research Group in the UAB's Department of Genetics and Microbiology describes for the first time, in a work published in PLOSone, a model of behaviour of a bacterial colony that shows how the colony protects itself against toxic substances, like antibiotics, during the colonisation process.

The researchers have determined that alteration of the equilibrium between two proteins of Salmonella enterica in the presence of antibiotics leads to the disorganisation of the structures that allow the population to spread, which in turn stops the progress of the cells in the bacterial colony that are nearest to harmful concentrations of antibiotic, while the rest spread into areas with lower concentrations.

A honey bee visits and apple blossom.  It may someday

Aging is one of the most mysterious processes in biology. We don't know, scientifically speaking, what exactly it is. We do know for sure when it ends, but to make matters even more inscrutable, the timing of death is determined by factors that are in many cases statistically random.

Researchers in the lab of Walter Fontana, Harvard Medical School professor of systems biology, have found patterns in this randomness that provide clues into the biological basis of aging.

Removal of a gene protected mice against arterial disease, and they stayed lean even when they ate more. The phenomenon underlying this beneficial phenotype is more active brown adipose tissue.

Scientists from Finland developed a mouse model which did not gain weight or develop hardening of arteries, even when they were fed a high-fat diet. The study was published by Science Translational Medicine.

Multinational American companies with significant operations in countries with low corporate taxes take on less debt than companies that face higher taxes, according to a new study from the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. The finding helps to solve an academic mystery: A link between higher corporate taxes and debt levels is predicted by economic theory, but some recent studies have either failed to find such a connection or found it to be weaker than expected.

The paper, by the Smith School finance professor Michael Faulkender and Jason Smith, of Utah State University -- and accepted at the Journal of Financial Economics -- provides yet more evidence that varying corporate-tax rates across countries distort economic activity.

An international team, made up of researchers from the University of Granada, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of South Florida, has linked the symptoms of schizophrenia with the anatomical characteristics of the brain, by employing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Their research, published in the academic journal NeuroImage, could herald a significant step forward in the diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia. In a major breakthrough, scientists have successfully linked the symptoms of the illness with the brain's anatomical features, using sophisticated brain-imaging techniques.

Everyone loves D, the sunshine vitamin. Doctors, patients and the media have been enamored with vitamin D supplements for decades. As well as their clear benefit in curing severe vitamin D deficiencies, endless headlines hail their magical ability to reduce a vast range of conditions from dementia to cancer.

Medical specialists such as myself have been promoting supplements to our patients with osteoporosis and other bone problems for decades.

As our sensory organs register objects and structures in the outside world, they are continually engaged in two-way communication with the brain. In research recently published in Nature Neuroscience, Weizmann Institute scientists found that for rats, which use their whiskers to feel out their surroundings at night, clumps of nerve endings called mechanoreceptors located at the base of each whisker act as tiny calculators. These receptors continuously compute the way the whisker's base rotates in its socket, expressing it as a fraction of the entire projected rotation of the whisker, so that the brain is continually updated on the way that the whisker's rotation is being followed through.