Scientists have predicted a new phase of superionic ice, a special form of ice that could exist on Uranus and Neptune, thanks to a computer solution performed by a team of researchers at Princeton University. 

A team of scientists recently developed a new strategy to determine monocyte subsets involved in diseases. The results could help facilitating the diagnosis of sarcoidosis and may improve the respective patient management.

Monocytes are white blood cells that are crucial to human immune defense. They are precursor cells of macrophages and dendritic cells and are circulating in the blood until they invade their respective target tissue where they defend the body against exogenous structures. So far, scientist categorized subtypes of monocytes only with regards to the surface markers CD14 and CD16 - however, this might change in the future.

Nature reserves and national parks play a crucial role in sheltering wildlife, such as African elephants, from hunting and habitat destruction, but they have no problem at all exhausting the wildlife around them.

Researchers have examined the effect elephants have on the woody plant life in Kruger National Park, the largest protected area in South Africa, and found that elephants are the preserve's leading causes of fallen trees.

Scientists call them toxins but these bacterial proteins don't poison us, at least not directly. Instead, they restrain the growth of the bacteria that make them, establishing a dormant "persister cell" state that is tolerant to antibiotics.

Researchers at Emory University School of Medicine have obtained precise pictures showing how a toxin protein, called HigB, recognizes and rips up RNA as part of its growth-inhibition function. Their findings could lead to a better understanding of the formation of persister cells and how they maintain themselves.

Citations are a time-honored measure now used to assess scholarly standing and evaluate academic productivity by funding committees that control government research.

For that reason, citations that are critical in nature, and point out limitations, inconsistencies or flaws in previous work, can be detrimental. A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that negative citations were more likely to criticize highly-read papers, they tended to originate from scholars who were close to the authors of the original articles in academic discipline and social distance - but at least 150 miles away geographically. 

Samples of permafrost soil are providing new ways to anticipate what may happen if northern regions of the world warm and begin to thaw.

Florida State University doctoral student Travis Drake and Florida State University Assistant Professor Robert Spencer write in a new paper that permafrost organic material is so biodegradable that as soon as it thaws, the carbon is almost immediately consumed by single-cell organisms called microbes and then released back into the air as carbon dioxide, feeding the global climate cycle. Their findings are laid out in an article published today by the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.

Many transgender people who want to bear children are faced with barriers in the healthcare system, argue Juno Obedin-Maliver and Harvey Makadon in a commentary published in SAGE journal Obstetric Medicine.

Husbands and wives married for a long time don't look at marital problems in the same way. When a marriage has troubles, women worry and become sad and they get frustrated. For men, it's frustration and not much more.

In a new sociology survey published in the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, worry and frustration were among the most common negative emotions reported by older adults but men and women in long-term marriages deal with marriage difficulties differently.

Gastric cancer - stomach cancer - does not respond well to existing treatments and is currently the third leading cause of cancer death in the world, after lung and liver cancer.

Researchers have discovered that certain drugs, currently used to treat breast, ovarian and pancreatic cancers, could also be used to treat certain gastric cancers with a particular pattern of mutations, their genomic molecular fingerprint. 

A new survey of 15,000 patients at drug-treatment centers in 49 statesshows that drug abusers are not completely abandoning prescription opioids for heroin. Instead, many use the two concurrently based on their availability.

The findings also reveal regional variations in the use of heroin and prescription painkillers.

"On the East and West coasts, combined heroin and prescription drug use has surpassed the exclusive use of prescription opioids," said senior investigator Theodore J. Cicero, PhD of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, . "This trend is less apparent in the Midwest, and in the Deep South, we saw a persistent use of prescription drugs -- but not much heroin."