What would make snakes scarier?

For spiders, the answer is easy. If you see one big enough to be feasting on Orc flesh in the caves under Mt. Doom, run, but snakes are tougher to make scary because they are slow.

Not all of them. Snakes may not look aerodynamic but some snakes can fly - literally. They slither in air, creating an S shape as they glide as much as 90 feet.

But how do they generate the lift to stay airborne? Jake Socha has spent much of his career figuring out flying snakes and says  "They look like they are swimming. They turn their whole body into one aerodynamic surface."

The Annals of the American Thoracic Society has released a comprehensive supplement on the 56th annual Thomas L. Petty Aspen Lung Conference entitled "The Lung Microbiome: A New Frontier in Pulmonary Medicine."

More than 170 microbiologists, basic respiratory scientists, and pulmonary clinicians traveled from nine countries to convene at the three-day conference, which took place in June 2013 in Aspen, CO. Research from 12 state-of-the-art speakers, 24 oral research presentations, and 20 posters from pioneers in the emerging field are included in the supplement, as well as an introduction from conference chairs Richard J. Martin, MD, Sonia Flores, PhD, and Monica Kraft, MD, and a conference summary from James Kiley, PhD.

BOSTON (01/23/14)—A young athlete in seemingly excellent health dies suddenly from a previously undetected cardiovascular condition such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in nearly every U.S. state annually. Although these conditions can be detected using electrocardiography (ECG) during a screening exam, the American Heart Association recommends against routine use of ECG, because it has a high false-positive rate. Limiting screening to a history and physical, however, usually fails to identify at-risk athletes. "The sports medicine physical lacks an effective way of ferretting out these heart problems," says Gianmichel Corrado, MD, from Boston Children's Hospital Division of Sports Medicine. Until now.

In laboratory experiments conducted on human cell lines at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, scientists have shown that people carrying certain mutations in two hereditary cancer genes, BRCA2 and PALB2, may have a higher than usual susceptibility to DNA damage caused by a byproduct of alcohol, called acetaldehyde.

The scientists say they suspect that the two genes in their normal forms evolved to protect cells against the damaging effects of acetaldehyde, which can lead to cancer.

While the scientists caution that the research is preliminary, they say their findings suggest that studies on disease risk factors should take into account these particular genetic variations and the use of alcohol.

Currently approved flu vaccines are less effective in the elderly, yet an estimated 90% of influenza-related deaths occur in people over 65. A paper published on January 23rd in PLOS Pathogens reports on the challenges scientists encountered when they were trying to develop a better flu vaccine.

Because immune systems in older people are generally less responsive to vaccination, Jay Evans and colleagues from GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines in Hamilton, USA, were testing so-called adjuvants—vaccine components that provoke a stronger immune reaction—that could be added to the regular flu vaccine cocktail to prompt even weaker immune systems to develop protective immunity against subsequent encounters with the flu virus.

A team of scientists, led by principal investigator David D. Schlaepfer, PhD, a professor in the Department of Reproductive Medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, has found that a protein involved in promoting tumor growth and survival is also activated in surrounding blood vessels, enabling cancer cells to spread into the bloodstream.

The findings are published in this week's online issue of the Journal of Cell Biology.

Blood vessels are tightly lined with endothelial cells, which form a permeability barrier to circulating cells and molecules. "Our studies show that pharmacological or genetic inhibition of the endothelial protein focal adhesion kinase, or FAK, prevents tumor spread by enhancing the vessel barrier function."