Milk is a key element for household food security and provides a stable income to farmers including women, who are usually in charge of taking care of the milk-producing animals in the low-income countries. Currently pathogen growth in milk is managed with refrigeration or with chemicals.

Although bacterial growth in milk is managed with refrigeration in the high-income countries, a high cost of infrastructure and a demand for a permanent electricity supply prevent milk refrigeration in the rural areas in the low-income countries.

Moreover, certain pathogens, for example Listeria monocytogenes, are less sensitive to low temperature; therefore, they can proliferate at refrigeration during transportation and storage.

The Mediterranean diet became a health fad when epidemiologists looked at a region in Europe and determined that their lower heart disease was due to more fish.

A new paper uses a debunked claim "it takes a gallon of gas to make a pound of beef" and uses that to declare that a new diet would reduce global warming. The authors from the University Hospital Complex of Huelva, Jaume I University of Castellón and the University of Huelva compared the daily menus in Spain, based on a roughly Mediterranean diet, to those eaten in English-speaking countries, such as the United Kingdom and the US.

Rhodiola rosea (R. rosea), or roseroot, may be a beneficial treatment option for major depressive disorder, according to a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, comparison trial of oral R. rosea extract versus conventional antidepressant for mild to moderate major depressive disorder.

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.