I would like to nominate Arvind Mahankali to be the next head of the USDA.   Why? He is obviously very smart, has an outstanding work ethic, and a superb vocabulary. He may have even reached puberty. And if he hasn’t, give it a year or so. Arvind is 13. 

But if you are concerned that he may not yet have what it takes to run an agency with a $24 billion budget and the responsibility of protecting us from unsafe foods, fear not. Last May, Arvind won the 86th National Spelling Bee championship. The word that gave him the championship was knaidel. For fans of irony, a knaidel is a type of Jewish dumpling.   

An analysis of 100 million US medical records published in PLOS Computational Biology concludes that autism rates are correlated (at the county level) with incidence of genital malformations in newborn males - and the authors say that may be due to harmful environmental factors such as pesticides. They even say that more regulations can fix it.

The authors found that after adjusting for gender, ethnic, socioeconomic and geopolitical factors, autism rates jumped by 283 percent for every one percent increase in frequency of malformations in a county. Intellectual disability rates increase 94 percent. Slight increases in autism and ID rates are also seen in wealthier and more urban counties.

Human mouths contain a balanced mix of microbes which, when disrupted, can lead to oral diseases. A study published on March 13th in PLOS Pathogens compares the bacteria and fungi present in the mouths of healthy individuals with those from patients infected with HIV, and illustrates why oral candidiasis (aka "thrush") is a common complication of HIV infection.

 Cryoablation, also called cryosurgery and cryotherapy, is an energy-based, minimally invasive surgical technique that has been investigated to treat a variety of diseases including cancer. It involves freezing the diseased tissue to subzero temperature to induce irreversible damage.  

A new paper finds that in combination with free doxorubicin (fDOX) and nanoparticle-encapsulated doxorubicin (nDOX) nanodrug-based chemotherapy, cryoablation provides an effective strategy to eliminate cancer stem-like cells (CSCs) the root of cancer resistance and metastasis. 

Populations of endangered salmonids are supported by releasing large quantities of hatchery-reared fish, but the fisheries' catches have continued to decrease. Earlier research has shown that certain behavioural traits explain individual differences in how fish survive in the wild. A new Finnish study conducted on brown trout now shows that there are predictable individual differences in behavioural traits, like activity, tendency to explore new surroundings and stress tolerance. Furthermore, certain individual differences were observed to contain heritable components.

Amazing as it may seem, algorithmic methods for generating music go back at least as far as 1757 (see: Musikalisches Würfelspiel). But algorithmic methods for generating US ‘Country Music’ are far more recent.

Indeed, Jim Suruda and professor Norman Carver of the Department of Computer Science, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale IL, USA, are still in the process of refining the development of an Artificial-Intelligence-based software application called the ‘Automated Country Music Engine’ (ACME).

Mutations within the gene FTO have been implicated as a genetic determinant of obesity risk in humans, but the mechanism for any link remains unknown.

A new paper says that the obesity-associated elements within FTO interact with IRX3, a distant gene on the genome that appears to be the functional obesity gene. The FTO gene itself appears to have only a peripheral effect on obesity. 

Vibrations in chemical bonds can be used to predict chemical reactions. That means chemists could design better catalysts to speed reactions that make medicines, industrial products and new materials.

Cell metabolism is a crucial biological function for all living organisms but understanding how life may have emerged is difficult. And learning some answers may make it possible to learn whether it is possible for life to have emerged in similar environments on other worlds. 

Researchers writing in Astrobiology
detail their new approach to simulating the energetic processes that may have led to the emergence of cell metabolism.

Dr. Terry Kee from the School of Chemistry at the University of Leeds, one of the co-authors of the research paper, said, "What we are trying to do is to bridge the gap between the geological processes of the early Earth and the emergence of biological life on this planet."

While there's no genetic basis for anorexia nervosa, psychiatrists say there may be a chemical treatment - oxytocin, the 'love hormone'.