An investigational malaria vaccine developed by scientists at Sanaria Inc. and known as PfSPZ Vaccine has been found to be safe, to generate an immune system response, and to offer protection against malaria infection in healthy adults, according to the results of an early-stage clinical trial.

Malaria is transmitted to humans by the bite of an infected mosquito. After the bite occurs, infectious malaria parasites in the immature, sporozoite stage of their life cycle first travel to the liver, where they multiply, and then spread through the bloodstream, at which time symptoms develop.

The PfSPZ Vaccine is composed of live but weakened sporozoites of the species Plasmodium falciparum, the most deadly of the malaria-causing parasites.

Researchers have used an atomic clock as a quantum simulator, mimicking the behavior of a different, more complex quantum system, joining a growing list of physical systems that can be used for modeling and perhaps eventually explaining the quantum mechanical behavior of exotic materials such as high-temperature superconductors, which conduct electricity without resistance.

All but the smallest, most trivial quantum systems are too complicated to simulate on classical computers, hence the interest in quantum simulators. Sharing some of the features of experimental quantum computers—a hot research topic—quantum simulators are "special purpose" devices designed to provide insight into specific challenging problems.  

Obesity has risen for decades and social scientists and government officials have scrambled to link cause and correlation, proposing everything from low income to public parks to a thrifty phenotype hypothesis, which says that poor people are biologically unfit to not be poor.

Income may be less of a factor, according to a report by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Despite record-level food stamp usage, chronic under-employment and earnings increases below the rate of inflation, 19 states saw obesity among low-income preschoolers decline between 2008 and 2011. 

Genomic sequencing has shown a mutational signature of upper urinary tract cancers caused by aristolochic acid, a plant compound contained in herbal remedies for arthritis, gout and inflammation.

Caffeine drinks are in some kind of arms race and as caffeine levels escalate, so do reports of caffeine overdose. It's not just those terrible-tasting energy drinks, it's also in snacks, candy, and even chewing gum.

EnergyFiend.com has  tracked caffeine levels for the past 8 years and found that the number of caffeinated products does not appear to be slowing down. According to editor Ted Kallmyer, “We’re now tracking over 1,000 items, and among those are some products with very high levels of caffeine. They are clearly targeted to the teen market.”

How would you measure the 'evolution' - that is to say, changes - in human culture and psychology over the last 200 years? 

Psychologist Patricia Greenfield of the University of California, Los Angeles used the Google Ngram Viewer to examine the frequencies of specific words in a corpus of over 1,160,000 English-language books published in the United States between 1800 and 2000. At least it tells us how linguistics evolved.

The result, says Greenfield, is that people have shifted from rural environment to urban. 

She has coined this hypothesis the "Theory of Social Change and Human Development" and believes that the usage of specific words waxes and wanes as a reflection of psychological adaptation to sociocultural change.