Researchers have carried out the largest study of differences between human and chimpanzee genomes, identifying regions that have been duplicated or lost during evolution of the two lineages. The study, published in Genome Research, is the first to compare many human and chimpanzee genomes in the same fashion.

The team show that particular types of genes - such as those involved in the inflammatory response and in control of cell proliferation - are more commonly involved in gain or loss. They also provide new evidence for a gene that has been associated with susceptibility to infection by HIV.

Three million Americans suffer from stuttering.  It afflicts  5% of all children and most eventually overcome it but childhood suffering from stuttering can be traumatic, producing educational, social, and occupational disadvantages.   Bruce Willis, Marilyn Monroe and Carly Simon all suffered from stuttering  as children and it can affect children of all ages but boys are three times more likely to stutter than girls.

A 19th-century historian traveling in southern Ohio later wrote about his first glimpse of Union Village, a Shaker community located near Harrison, Ohio: "When I caught sight of the first house, my opinion was confirmed that I was on the lands of the Shakers, for the …style of architecture, solid appearance and want of decorative art was before me.

A new study in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that serial cohabiters are less likely than single-instance cohabiting unions to result in marriage and, if serial cohabiters do marry, divorce rates are very high.

Daniel T. Lichter of Cornell University and Zhenchao of Ohio State University used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to track the experiences of serial cohabiters, or women who have cohabited with more than one partner.  

Fenfluramine, the appetite suppressant drug banned in the US in 1997 due to fears over its links to heart conditions, has been shown to have serious long-term effects. In a report published today in BMC Medicine, researchers have shown that people who stopped using fenfluramine eleven years ago had damaged heart valves up to seven years later.

Dark matter is believed to account for 85 per cent of the Universe’s mass but has never been detected.   Scientists inferred its existence from gravitational effects of objects in space more than 75 years ago and it has become quite prominent in physics, for something that's never been seen or verified.

The international Virgo Consortium  say they can change that and have used a massive computer simulation showing the evolution of a galaxy like the Milky Way to “see” gamma-rays given off by dark matter.  They say their findings, published in Nature, could help NASA’s Fermi Telescope in its search for the dark matter and open a new chapter in our understanding of the Universe.