The hygiene hypothesis and its cousins, like that rural settings make children microbiologically stronger, now has a study that vegetarian activists are not going to like: sleeping on animal fur in the first three months of life has been linked to reduced risk of asthma.  

Previous studies have suggested that exposure to a wider range of environments from young age could be protective against asthma and allergies - urban settings have not found that to to be so. But in a new study, researchers investigated children from a city environment who had been exposed to animal skin by sleeping on the material shortly after birth. 

In order to understand the genesis and treatment of cancer scientists are searching for links between genetic alterations and those diseases. 

Historically, most of those studies have focused on the portion of the human genome that encodes protein – about 2 percent of human DNA overall. The vast majority of genomic alterations associated with cancer lie outside protein-coding genes, in what biologists call "junk DNA" and that colloquially became considered junk to the public, even though that is no more accurate than the Higgs boson being an actual God Particle. "Junk DNA" is anything useless rubbish – much of it is transcribed into RNA, for instance - but finding meaning in the sequences remains a challenge. 

Materials made from nano-particles have long been touted as the future viable solar energy production and better touch screens.

The black box between the present and the future of these wonder-materials is organizing the nanoparticles into orderly arrangements. Nanoparticles of magnetite, the most abundant magnetic material on earth, are found in living organisms from bacteria to birds. Nanocrystals of magnetite self-assemble into fine compass needles in the organism that help it to navigate.

The number of California blue whales has rebounded to near historical levels - and they would be even higher if they didn't run into or get hit by commercial shipping.

Blue whales, nearly 100 feet in length and weighing 190 tons as adults, are the largest animals on earth. And they are the heaviest ever, weighing more than twice as much as the largest known dinosaur, the Argentinosaurus. As a species, they were considered hunted nearly to extinction but new international laws have put enforceable limits on catches of whales and blue whales seem to be the first to have recovered.

The coffee plant has a newly sequenced genome and that can tell scientists what they really want to know about: the evolution of caffeine.

The sequences and positions of genes in the coffee plant show that they evolved independently from genes with similar functions in tea and chocolate, which also make caffeine. Coffee did not inherit caffeine-linked genes from a common ancestor, but instead developed the genes on its own.

Why Coffee?

Doctors in Australia are reporting 61 percent fewer cases of genital warts among young women since the introduction of the national human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination program.

The study reviewed more than a million patient encounters between 2000 and 2012 and found a significant year-on-year reduction in the management rate of genital warts in women aged 15-27 years since the vaccination program started. 

The HPV vaccination program was introduced in 2007, and the rate of genital wart presentation fell dramatically from 4.33 per 1,000 encounters pre-program (2002-2006) to 1.67 per 1,000 encounters in the post-program period (2008-2012).