Animal development has an intriguing puzzle - scaling, the proportionality of different body parts. Whether you have an elephant or a mouse, organ and tissue sizes are generally proportional to the overall size of the body.

Clearly evolution determined 'just right' but how? Some new clues from fruit flies show the size and patterning accuracy of an embryo depend on the amount of reproductive resources mothers invest in the process before an egg leaves the ovary.

As we age, our bodies biologically are going to perform less efficiently. There are no 60-year-old shortstops in major league baseball, we can injure more easily and our brains slow down as well. We often won't have the memory or cognitive processing ability we used to have, but that doesn't mean it is dementia.

A new paper outlines a risk factor scoring system for dementia. The downside to risk factors is people really do not understand them, if Angelina Jolie continues to get genetic tests and then surgery as a result she may soon have no internal organs left, but properly used they can help identify those at risk and that leads to early diagnosis.

Most savvy citizens and policy makers are concerned about the departure of the world's best and brightest researchers from antibiotic discovery - regulations are up and everyone wants generic prices from the moment products are approved - but a paper in BMJ takes the contrarian approach and argues new antibiotics probably wouldn't help with antibiotic resistance anyway.

Associate Editor and Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy Peter Doshi, like many academics, comments academically because the real world is a simple black box - he believes authorities should not be approving drugs unless they are certain they can tackle the problem of antimicrobial resistance.

A new study finds that it is possible to detect endometrial cancer using tumor DNA picked up by ordinary tampons. DNA samples from vaginal secretions can show the presence of chemical "off" switches - known as methylation - that can disable genes that normally keep cancer in check.

The finding is a critical step toward a convenient and effective screening test for endometrial cancer, which is the most common gynecologic malignancy in the United States.

"Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis", by Will Chang, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall and Andrew Garrett (all of UC-Berkeley), provides new support for the "steppe hypothesis" or "Kurgan hypothesis", which proposes that Indo-European languages first spread with cultural developments in animal husbandry around 4500 - 3500 BCE.

Chang et al. examined over 200 sets of words from living and historical Indo-European languages. After determining how quickly these words changed over time through statistical modeling, they concluded that the rate of change indicated that the languages which first used these words began to diverge approximately 6,500 years ago,

Distillers dried grains with solubles, or DDGS, are increasingly common in swine diets in the United States. In recent years, different types of DDGS have come on the market.

"Ethanol plants use different procedures to produce DDGS, which results in different end products," said Hans H. Stein, a professor of animal sciences at University of Illinois.

"To produce conventional DDGS, the corn is cooked to gelatinize starch prior to fermentation. However, uncooked DDGS can also be used if specific enzymes are used to pre-digest the starch prior to fermentation. Some ethanol plants also use a different fractionation technology to produce DDGS with more protein than conventional DDGS."