What role do genes have to play in children's exam results? Student test by  wavebreakmedia

John O'Keefe , left, and Edvard and May-Britt Moser. Credits: David Bishop, UCL and NTNU

By Luc Henry, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded with one half to John O'Keefe and the other half jointly to May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser “for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain”.


Just before totality on a total lunar eclipse. Credit: Flickr/John Johnson, CC BY-NC-SA

By Tanya Hill, Museum Victoria

At least twice a year, Earth comes between the sun and the moon. The result is a lunar eclipse, where we see the splendid sight of Earth’s shadow falling across the moon.

In last month’s review of Preparing the Ghost, I mentioned that you can actually learn facts from some fiction. Below is one such novel, crammed with science. As author Ryan Lockwood wrote in an e-mail, “Hopefully, most of the biology described in the book is in-line with real-world scientific data. I want to educate readers to some extent and encourage them to learn more after they finish the book.”

Cerebral palsy is the most common motor disability in childhood, afflicting between between 1 and 4 per 1,000 kids born worldwide. It's more common among boys than girls and only about half of adolescents with it can walk independently but regardless of that, kids with cerbral palsy rate their quality of life pretty high.

Either adolescents with cerebral palsy are doing pretty well or able-bodied adolescents in general invent problems when they have none. 

Researchers are investigating a possible association between breast implants and a form of lymphoma that may develop tumors at a later stage. The researchers conclude that breast implants can cause a new subtype of the rare yet malignant lymphoma known as anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL).

Worldwide there have been 71 documented cases of patients with ALCL in which researchers suspected breast implants to be the cause. ALCL is normally found in the lymph nodes, as well as in skin, lung, liver and soft tissue, but not usually in the breast. 

Clinicians are just like anyone else. As the days goes on, they wear down a little. Numerous patient care decisions each day, and the cumulative demand of those decisions, take their toll.

In primary care, doctors often prescribe unnecessary antibiotics for acute respiratory infections (ARI) and now scholars at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in Boston found that antibiotic prescribing rates increased as the days got later.     

A few years ago there was concern that poor people did not have access to the best health care because of high cost, but two new papers find that spending is actually too high.

The first study examines recent trends in spending and use of oral cancer drugs. They find that average spending on the 47 available oral oncolytics — cancer medication taken specifically by mouth — increased from $940 million in the first quarter of 2006 to $1.4 billion by the third quarter of 2011. 


You're not getting any pudding. Credit: Steve Parsons/PA

By Robert Young, University of Salford


I run 50 kilometers per week on my treadmill and eat a calorie-restricted diet; this is something our ancestors didn’t have to do. But then they didn’t sit at a desk all day and certainly did not have access to such energy rich food.

Unfortunately our animals have joined us on the couch. Take a walk down the pet food aisle in the supermarket and you may be surprised to see rows of diet cat and dog food.

Our fat contains a variety of cells with the potential to become bone, cartilage, or more fat if properly prompted. This makes adipose tissue a key potential resource for regenerative therapies such as bone healing if doctors can get enough of those cells and compel them to produce bone.

In a new study, scientists at Brown University demonstrate a new method for extracting a wide variety of potential bone-producing cells from human fat. They developed a fluorescent tag that could find and identify cells expressing a gene called ALPL. Expression of the gene is an indicator of bone-making potential.