A genetic test that can prevent 'killer' bees from spreading around the world has been created in a new research effort.

Africanized honeybees are highly aggressive and very difficult to manage relative to European honeybees used by Canadian and Australian beekeepers. The international trade in honeybees is restricted, due in part to bans on import of queens from countries such as the United States, where Africanized honeybees are present. 

For me, it was hornets.

One summer afternoon when I was 12, I ran into an overgrown field near a friend’s house and kicked a hornet nest the size of a football. An angry squadron of insects clamped onto my leg; their stings felt like scorching needles. I swatted the hornets away and ran for help, but within minutes I realized something else was happening. A constellation of pink stars had appeared around the stings. The hives swelled, and new ones began appearing farther up my legs. I was having an allergic reaction.

Tumor necrosis factor (TNF), an immune system regulatory protein that promotes inflammation, also helps regulate sensitivity to bitter taste, a finding which may provide a mechanism to explain the taste system abnormalities and decreased food intake that can be associated with infections, autoimmune disorders, and chronic inflammatory diseases. 

Because TNF is known to suppress food intake, the current study asked whether TNF affects food intake via the taste system. The findings are published online ahead of print in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.

Many scientists assume that the growing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will accelerate plant growth but a new study suggests much of this growth will be curtailed by limited soil nutrients so that by the end of the century, there may be more 10 percent more CO2 in the atmosphere, which would accelerate climate change.  

Cory Cleveland, a University of Montana associate professor of biogeochemistry, and co-authors looked at 11 leading climate models to examine changes in nitrogen and phosphorous. They found that nitrogen limitation actually will reduce plant uptake of CO2 by 19 percent, while a combined nitrogen and phosphorous limitation will reduce plant uptake by 25 percent. 

Have you ever wondered what those food additive numbers in the ingredients list on your food packaging meant and what they were really doing to your body?

A recent study suggests emulsifiers – detergent-like food additives found in a variety of processed foods – have the potential to damage the intestinal barrier, leading to inflammation and increasing our risk of chronic disease.

The research was done on mice, so it’s too early to say humans should stop eating emulsifiers, but let’s examine the mechanisms involved.

Sweet potatoes, one of the most important food crops for human consumption, contain genes from the bacterium Agrobacterium but that was not done by scientists. The foreign DNA that turned sweet potatoes into a GMO was put there by nature.

The researchers discovered the foreign DNA sequences of Agrobacterium while searching the genome - this is the entire DNA-code - of sweet potato for viral diseases. Instead of contributing this peculiar finding to bacterial contamination of the plant samples, the researchers decided to study these sequences in more detail.

Besides being a giant triumph of theoretical physics and the definitive seal on the correctness of the Standard Model -at least at the energies at which we are capable of investigating particle physics nowadays-, the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations opens the way to new searches of new physics.

The Higgs boson is one more particle we know how to identify now, so we can now focus on new exotic phenomena that might produce Higgs bosons in the final state, and entertain ourselves in their search.

23-year-old "wellness" guru Belle Gibson claimed in spring 2013 to have cured her terminal brain cancer using her diet.  She quickly became Australia's version of Vani Hari, "The Food Babe", so popular with the same demographic likely to buy an Apple Watch that they approached her about putting her app in the new device on release, right next to the Play button.

A study of disease dynamics in a California grassland has shed light on fundamental principles underlying the spread of pathogens among species, according to researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz who measured the amount of disease on the leaves of plants in a meadow on campus.

They found that the amount of disease on each species depended on how common it was, as well as on the abundance of its close relatives. The results were a tight link between the structure of a plant community and the vulnerability of individual species to disease. In addition, when the researchers introduced novel plant species into the grassland, they were able to predict which ones would be most strongly affected by naturally occurring diseases. 

Researchers have determined that the eardrum evolved independently in mammals and diapsids - the taxonomic group that includes reptiles and birds. Published in Nature Communications, the work shows that the mammalian eardrum depends on lower jaw formation, while that of diapsids develops from the upper jaw. Significantly, the researchers used techniques borrowed from developmental biology to answer a question that has intrigued paleontologists for years.