A new study has found that lungs become more inflammatory with age and that ibuprofen can lower that inflammation - and the difference can be dramatic.

Immune cells from old mouse lungs, after lung inflammation was reduced by ibuprofen, fought tuberculosis bacteria as effectively as cells from young mice. The ibuprofen had no effect on the immune response to TB in young mice. The researchers already knew that old mice had a harder time clearing TB from the lungs than young mice, but had not investigated the role of lung inflammation in that response. 

The idea of evolutionary imbalance when it comes to invasive species is not new, Charles Darwin articulated it. 

The concept is that species from regions with deep and diverse evolutionary histories are more likely to become successful invaders in regions with less deep, less diverse evolutionary histories. Darwin's original insight was that the more challenges a region's species have faced in their evolution, the more robust they'll be in new environments.

To predict the probability of invasiveness, ecologists
Dov Sax of Brown University and Jason Fridley of Syracuse University

Researchers recently used audio and video recording tools to record larval orientation behavior in the pelagic environment. 

In their field experiment, the scientists put the recording devices i a drifting in situ chamber called DISC  near Fowey Rocks lighthouse in the northern Florida Keys. In total 58 deployments were conducted, 27 during the day and 31 at night. The team also recorded sounds in a laboratory setting to confirm that the sounds observed in the field were from gray snapper larvae. The researchers also referred to the public sound archive at the Macaulay Library to compare the larval sounds to those produced by adult L. griseus.

Fibromyalgia is a symptom-based disorder that manifests itself as chronic pain. Its underlying causes are unknown.

The results of a new study compares brain activity in individuals with and without fibromyalgia and indicate that decreased connectivity between pain-related and sensorimotor brain areas could contribute to deficient pain regulation in fibromyalgia, according to an article published in Brain Connectivity.

In the new study by Pär Flodin and coauthors from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, they add on to previous findings from other fibromyalgia papers that used brain imaging and found abnormal neuronal activity in the brain associated with poor pain inhibition.

Some sharks are more 'gregarious' than others and have strong social connections while others are solitary and prefer to remain inconspicuous. That's not an exception, according to a new study, these notorious predators have personality traits.

Personalities obviously exist in many animals but they are usually defined by individual characteristics such as how exploratory, bold or aggressive an individual animal is. The paper in
the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology involved testing for social personality by recording the social interactions of groups of juvenile small spotted catsharks in captivity under three different habitat types.  

We are stardust - scientists and citizen scientists alike

Physics Today's Ashley Smart describes a huge recent win for citizen science: some 30,000 volunteers pored over millions of microscopic images looking for dust collected a decade ago by NASA's Stardust probe, and their efforts have helped identify candidate interstellar grains: