Scientists may be on the way to genetically modifying plants to naturally protect against pests in new ways. That is good news for people in developing nations and fans of the environment. Older insecticides present environmental and health risks and insects develop resistance to them, complicating pest-control strategies. 

Along with that, millions of deaths result from diseases transmitted by insects each year, not to mention economic losses totaling billions of dollars annually.

In 1722, when Europeans arrived on Easter Island, nearly 2,300 miles off the west coast of Chile, the native Polynesian culture known as Rapa Nui were already in a demographic tailspin from which they would not recover.

Pick a fad belief of the moment, and someone has correlated it to Easter Island. Environmental damage? Easter Island. Climate change? Easter Island. Add in political partisanship and lifestyle diseases and you can also find a correlation-causation arrow being abused. 

Will there ever be an answer? Hard to say, but a new paper attempts at least some clarification.

Coating the mouth with foods stored in containers that used bisphenol A (BPA), like soup, does not lead to high levels of BPA in blood.

BPA is used to make some plastics and to seal canned food containers against bacterial contamination. Food which picks up trace amounts of BPA from packaging is the major source of human exposure, according to environmental critics, and the health concerns about BPA center on potential to mimic certain hormones at really high exposures.

Researchers have used human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to generate new hair, the first step toward the development of a cell-based treatment for people with hair loss. 

In the United States alone, more than 40 million men and 21 million women are affected by hair loss. The research team developed a protocol that induced human pluripotent stem cells to become dermal papilla cells. They are a unique population of cells that regulate hair-follicle formation and growth cycle. 

Human dermal papilla cells on their own are not suitable for hair transplants because they cannot be obtained in necessary amounts and rapidly lose their ability to induce hair-follicle formation in culture. 

New studies have found that a supplement of ghrelin - the "appetite hormone" - increased the sexual activity of mice.

Ghrelin is a gastrointestinal hormone that is released from the stomach, and is involved in the stimulation of our appetite by activating the brain's reward system. Since the brain's reward system also motivates us to seek a partner and to have sex, a group of researchers at the Sahlgrenska Academy decided to investigate whether ghrelin may also affect sexual behaviors. 

The answer is: yes, at least in mice.

In the largest study of opioids users done to-date, scholars analyzed records of 198,247 people in England who had been involved in drug treatment or the criminal justice system between 2005 and 2009. 

They found that opioid users were six times more likely to die prematurely than people in the general population. Almost one in ten of these deaths were due to suicide, more than four times the rate in the general population. The data recorded 3,974 deaths and their causes during this period. The study is the first to record age trends in opioid users' mortality and with age, the gap gets even wider. In the oldest 45-64 age-group, homicide was 27 times more common than in the general population.