An epidemiological study in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics by H.U. Wittchen and collaborators at the University of Dresden examined the 10-year natural course of panic attacks (PA), panic disorder (PD) and agoraphobia (AG) in the first three decades of life, their stability and their reciprocal transitions.

DSM-IV syndromes were assessed via Composite International Diagnostic Interview - Munich version in a 10-year prospective-longitudinal community study of 3,021 subjects aged 14-24 years at baseline. At the end of the study, incidence patterns for PA (9.4%), PD (with and without AG: 3.4%) and AG (5.3%) revealed differences in age of onset, incidence risk and gender differentiation.

The "Large Molecule Heimat" is a very dense, hot gas clump within the star forming region Sagittarius B2. In this source of only 0,3 light-year diameter, which is heated by a deeply embedded newly formed star, most of the interstellar molecules known to date have been found, including the most complex ones such as ethyl alcohol, formaldehyde, formic acid, acetic acid, glycol aldehyde (a basic sugar), and ethylene glycol.

Starting from 1965, more than 140 molecular species have been detected in space, in interstellar clouds as well as in circumstellar envelopes. A large fraction of these molecules is organic or carbon-based. A lot of attention is given to the quest for so-called "bio"-molecules, especially interstellar amino acids. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and therefore key ingredients for the origin of life, have been found in meteorites on Earth, but not yet in interstellar space.

Astrophysicists say may be one step closer to understanding how new planets form. A circumstellar disk with telltale signs of planet formation around the star AB Aurigae could be a new planet in the works.

Ben R. Oppenheimer, assistant curator in the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Astrophysics, and colleagues have used the Lyot Project coronograph attached to a U.S. Air Force telescope on Maui, Hawaii, to construct an image of material that seems to be coalescing into a body from the gas and dust cloud surrounding AB Aurigae, a well-studied star.

The body is either a planet or a brown dwarf - something with mass between a star or a planet. Brown dwarfs have been found orbiting stars since a team that included Oppenheimer first discovered one in 1995.

Scientists have reconstructed changes in Earth’s ancient ocean chemistry from about 2.5 to 0.5 billion years ago and say that a deficiency of oxygen and the heavy metal molybdenum in the ancient deep ocean may have delayed the evolution of animal life on Earth for nearly 2 billion years.

This research was motivated by a review article published in Science in 2002 by Ariel Anbar, one of the authors of the study and an associate professor at Arizona State University with joint appointments in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Andy Knoll, a colleague at Harvard University. Knoll was perplexed by the fact that eukaryotes didn’t dominate the world until around 0.7 billion years ago, even though they seemed to have evolved before 2.7 billion years ago.

The brain can sense the calories in food, independent of the taste mechanism, researchers have found in studies with mice. Their finding that the brain’s reward system is switched on by this “sixth sense” machinery could have implications for understanding the causes of obesity.

For example, the findings suggest why high-fructose corn syrup, widely used as a sweetener in foods, might contribute to obesity.

In their experiments, Ivan de Araujo and colleagues genetically altered mice to make them “sweet-blind,” lacking a key component of taste receptor cells that enabled them to detect the sweet taste.

Nearly ten years ago an article published in Science [Lockless SW, Ranganathan R (1999) Science 286:295–299] got a lot of attention. It described a method of demonstrating signal transfer in proteins by comparing their amino acid sequence.

The authors recorded a statistical method of showing how certain parts of proteins change together through evolution, i.e. if a change had taken place in one part a change simultaneously took place in another part of the protein. They found a network of parts that seemed to belong together and, within this network, signal transfer was deemed to take place.

In a new PNAS article, Uppsala researchers present results of experiments they say contradicts that theory.