An extract from the thunder god vine, long used in traditional Chinese medicine, reduces food intake and causes up to a 45% decrease in body weight in obese mice. The weight-loss compound, called Celastrol, produces its potent effects by enhancing the action of an appetite-suppressing hormone called leptin. The findings are an early indicator that Celastrol could be developed into a drug for the treatment of obesity.

A new assistance system wants to help users in a wide variety of situations and it will do so by measuring user brain activity to determine whether they are pleased or displeased with system-initiated help.

NeuroLab is measuring brain activity as part of the EMOIO project that will run until the end of 2017. The project scientists use electroencephalography and functional near infrared spectroscopy to try and measure emotions, focusing on how far a combination of the two methods can improve the accuracy of classification algorithms that can enable emotion recognition in real time, during the interaction process.

Female journalists in Norway between the ages of 25 and 35 are twice as likely to be bullied and threatened as male colleagues of the same age, and nearly half of all Norwegian journalists and editors have experienced bullying during the past five years.

25 percent have been threatened and the majority were men but there are clear gender differences to be found in online harassment, according to Aina Landsverk Hagen of KILDEN - Information Centre for Gender Research in Norway.

Water behaves in mysterious ways, especially below zero before it turns into ice. Physicists have recently observed the spontaneous first steps of the ice formation process, as tiny crystal clusters as small as 15 molecules start to exhibit the recognizable structural pattern of crystalline ice.

A new study finds that liquid water does not become completely unstable as it becomes supercooled, prior to turning into ice crystals, because of an energy barrier for crystal formation in which supercooled water's compressibility continues to rise. Interestingly, liquid water becomes easier to compress, the colder it gets - unlike other substances, which become harder to compress as temperature drops.

Malaria is a disabling disease that targets victims of all ages, it kills one child every minute. DDT is quite effective, and insecticide-treated bed nets also, but the African malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is developing resistance to insecticides such as pyrethroid.

Genetic modification is the solution of the future, though there are clearly obstacles to that, in the form of developed world activists who scare those in developing nations about science.

Brian Foy and Jacob Meyers from Colorado State University decided to test whether antibodies targeted at a key component of the malaria mosquito's nervous system could be fed to the insects in a blood meal to kill them.

Many illegal aliens from Latin America risk migrating to the United States because they are fleeing from desperate situations and see opportunities to help their families, even though they will be stuck low-paying, labor-intensive jobs.