Looking after yourself, and trying not to infect others, is a good strategy to prevent disease from spreading - not only if you are a considerate co-worker, but also if you are an ant, meerkat or other social animal, as revealed by an epidemiological model developed by the groups of Professor Fabian Theis from the Helmholtz Center Munich and Professor Sylvia Cremer from the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria.

In a Theme Issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B on "The Society-Health-Fitness Nexus" published on 13 April 2015, they combine observations of hygienic interaction networks within ant colonies with epidemiological modeling to conclude that this strategy is best to prevent disease spread in social animal groups.

Nearly anyone touched by ovarian cancer will tell you that almost 80 percent of patients reach advanced stages before diagnosis and that most patients are expected to die within five years. One quarter of women diagnosed have no warning that they are resistant to platinum-based chemotherapy, the main line of defense and they probably have less than 18 months to live. 

Diagnosis, prognosis, and even treatment of ovarian cancer have remained largely unchanged for 30 years - the best indicator for how a woman will fare, and how her cancer should be treated, has been the tumor's stage at diagnosis. 

Literacy has been getting declining support in recent years. The Obama administration only wants to spend $187 million for its Effective Teaching and Learning: Literacy initiative while the Bush administration had devoted $1 billion annually to the Reading First program. That means it is necessary to find out which programs work best.

A new study uses a scientific lens to look at the conversational art of instruction, a team of researchers identify specific ways teachers talk to students that measurably impact literacy skills.

Faster increases in life expectancy do not necessarily produce faster population aging, a counterintuitive finding that came as a result of applying new measures of aging developed at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in order to project future populations for Europe out to the year 2050.

Traditional measures of age simply categorize people as "old" at a specific age, usually 65, but previous research by Scherbov, Sanderson, and colleagues has shown that the traditional definition puts many people in the category of "old" who have characteristics of much younger people. 

Poor sanitation is linked to 280,000 deaths per year worldwide but it has lots of benefits besides just saving lives. That is why sanitation is a key policy goal in many developing countries.

Strange sociological voodoo like a "community motivation" model to improve hygiene has done nothing, according to a recent analysis of Bangladesh, but it would if there are subsidies for hygienic latrines targeted to the poor. 

Scientists at the Vetmeduni Vienna investigated whether stomach ulcers in cattle are related to the presence of certain bacteria. For their study, they analyzed bacteria present in healthy and ulcerated cattle stomachs and found very few differences in microbial diversity. Bacteria therefore appear to play a minor role in the development of ulcers.

The microbial diversity present in the stomachs of cattle has now been published.