Bacteria in our digestive tract have evolved to help us break down and digest the complex carbohydrates that make up the yeast cell wall that give beer and bread their bubbles - and that could support the development of new treatments to help people fight off yeast infections and autoimmune diseases such as Crohn's disease, according to a new study.

Evolving over the 7,000 years that we have been eating fermented food and drink, the ability of a common gut bacterium called Bacteroides thetaiotomicron to degrade yeasts is almost exclusively found in the human gut. The team says the discovery of this process could accelerate the development of prebiotic medicines to help people suffering from bowel problems and autoimmune diseases.

Headshaking in horses, a neuropathic facial pain syndrome, often leaves affected horses impossible to ride and dangerous to handle, and can result in euthanasia.

It affects between 10,000 and 20,000 animals in the UK each year and there are no consistently safe and effective methods for it.  A new study has found a treatment called percutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (PENS) could reduce signs of the condition in horses. The same PENS therapy is used in people to manage neuropathic pain. There are clinical similarities between facial pain syndromes in people, most notably trigeminal neuralgia, and headshaking in horses. 

Winter weather can mean treacherous driving across much of the country. Road crews spread rock salt all over the highways and byways.

Though environmentalists and the academics who give them cultural ammunition don't like salt on roads, it works a whole lot better than the expensive vegetable juice alternatives that get promoted. But why?

The answer is a fascinating look into the world of chemistry and this week the group at ACS Reactions breaks down how ice keeps the roads safe when bad weather hits.

The heated national debate on complex issues related to costs of health care was ignited by the implementation the Affordable Health Care Act (ACA) in January 2014. There is no national system that adequately records and quantifies the wide range of issues related to health care costs, so the arguments have been based primarily on undocumented opinion.

As always, anecdotal reports related to health issues get the most attention. Since such reports are most often at best unreliable and at worst misleading, accepting them as fact adds to the combative unproductive nature of the public debate. As a result, academic economist estimates of the future costs under the ACA have varied from large increases to considerable reductions.

A new study has found that removing native forest and putting in farms can accelerate erosion so dramatically that in a few decades as much soil is lost as would naturally occur over thousands of years.

Had you stood on the banks of the Roanoke, Savannah, or Chattahoochee Rivers a hundred years ago, you'd have seen a lot more clay soil washing down to the sea than before European settlers began clearing trees and farming there in the 1700s. Around the world, deforestation and food productions have been blamed for increasing erosion above its natural rate.

In 1833, Constantin Wilhelm Lambert Gloger published his key observation that warm-blooded animals tend to be more heavily pigmented or darker the closer they live to the equator.

This week, University of Pittsburgh researchers Matthew Koski and Tia-Lynn Ashman proved that the same phenomenon described by Gloger exists among flowers. One of the reasons investigators had not pursued proof of Gloger's rule in flowers is that pollinators, such as bees, don't see what we see when they look at a flower. They see in the ultraviolet as well as visible ranges. What appears bright yellow to a person can appear dark or patterned to a bee.