The more alcohol an individual drinks, the smaller his or her total brain volume, according to a report in the October issue of Archives of Neurology.

Brain volume decreases with age at an estimated rate of 1.9 percent per decade, accompanied by an increase in white matter lesions, according to background information in the article. Lower brain volumes and larger white matter lesions also occur with the progression of dementia and problems with thinking, learning and memory.

Caffeine consumption does not appear to be associated with overall breast cancer risk, according to a report in the October 13 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. However, there is a possibility of increased risk for women with benign breast disease or for tumors that are hormone-receptor negative or larger than 2 centimeters.

Caffeine is probably the most commonly consumed drug worldwide, present in coffee, tea, chocolate and some medications, according to background information in the article. It was hypothesized that caffeine may increase the risk of breast cancer after a study showed that women with non-cancerous breast disease experienced relief from their symptoms after removing caffeine from their diet.

When it comes to embryo formation in the lowly fruit fly, a little molecular messiness actually leads to enhanced developmental precision, according to a study in the Oct. 14 Developmental Cell from Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.

While the fundamentals of this tiny bug's reproductive biology may seem insignificant, one day they could matter quite a bit to humans. That's because the study provides new information about how cells choose their own fates, especially in maintaining the size relationship and proportionality of body parts during embryonic development, said Jun Ma, Ph.D., a researcher in the divisions of Biomedical Informatics and Developmental Biology at Cincinnati Children's and the study's corresponding author.

By mopping up excess neurotrophic factor from neuronal synapses, astrocytes may finely tune synaptic transmission to affect processes such as learning and memory, say Bergami et al.

The major cellular events of learning and memory are long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD), both of which affect neurons' ability to communicate with one another. Neurons that have undergone LTP display a stronger electrical response to the same level of a stimulus, whereas neurons that have gone through LTD display a weaker response. These changes are thought to result from modifications of the neuronal synapses, such as alterations in the density of postsynaptic receptors, or downstream signaling events.

The transportation of antibodies from a mother to her newborn child is vital for the development of that child's nascent immune system.

Those antibodies, donated by transfer across the placenta before birth or via breast milk after birth, help shape a baby's response to foreign pathogens and may influence the later occurrence of autoimmune diseases.

Images from biologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have revealed for the first time the complicated process by which these antibodies are shuttled from mother's milk, through her baby's gut, and into the bloodstream, and offer new insight into the mammalian immune system.

Chicken soup isn't just good for the common cold and, apparently, our souls, that popular home remedy so ubiquitous it is sometimes known as "Grandma's Penicillin" may also have a new role alongside medication and other medical measures in fighting high blood pressure, scientists in Japan are reporting. Their research is in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Ai Saiga and colleagues cite previous studies indicating that chicken breast contains collagen proteins with effects similar to ACE inhibitors, mainstay medications for treating high blood pressure. But chicken breast contains such small amounts of the proteins that it could not be used to develop food and medical products for high blood pressure. Chicken legs and feet, often discarded as waste products in the U.S. but key soup ingredients elsewhere, appear to be a better source.