The human microbiota -- the entirety of bacteria which live e.g. on the skin or in the intestinal tract -- has an unknown influence on health. A team led by Prof. Tilo Biedermann, the director of the Clinic for Dermatology and Allergology at Rechts der Isar Hospital, examined the role microbiota plays in the digestive system in the case of food allergies and found that they may also play a role in determining the strength of anaphylactic reactions to food allergens. 

New Orleans, LA - Dr. Robert Zura, the Robert D'Ambrosia Professor and Head of Orthopaedic Surgery at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine, was part of a research team that identified risk factors which may help orthopaedic surgeons better predict a serious complication of bone fractures. Fracture nonunion may be increasing as more patients survive serious fractures. The paper was published September 7, 2016, in the Online First section of JAMA Surgery, available at http://archsurg.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2547685.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Released on Sept. 4, 1957, Ford dubbed its Edsel "the car of the future." It was designed to stand out, but most people didn't like the way it looked. Add "ugly" to a laundry list of problems from poor performance to a high price tag and the car tanked--its only lasting legacy being a lesson in how not to develop a product.

But what does the ideal car look like?

University of California, Riverside professor Subramanian "Bala" Balachander and his collaborators explored that question in a study that is forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing. Balachander is the Albert O. Steffey Chair and Professor of Marketing at UCR's School of Business.

Medication is an important part of treatment for many patients with major depressive disorder, but the transition to antidepressants isn't always smooth.

It can take six weeks for a person to respond to pharmacotherapy. And with remission rates at about only one-third, the majority of patients with depression could also benefit from better overall response to medication.

Researchers at the University of Michigan who specialize in both psychiatry and sleep medicine found a potential way to help. A precise sleep schedule could affect antidepressant remission rates and response time, researchers found. But not in the way they thought.

A new car is a big expense for anyone -- but it will cost some people more than others, even at the same dealership.

A new U of T study, which is the first of its kind to reliably show large differences in the price paid for a new car, reveals that age and even in some cases gender can be a factor.

"We were surprised by the magnitude of the difference in how much people paid for an identical car that was bought in the same month in even the same city," says Ambarish Chandra, Assistant Professor of Business Economics in U of T Scarborough's Department of Management and the Rotman School of Management.

Sexually active transgender youth have pregnancy rates similar to their non-transgender peers--dispelling the notion that trans youth are less at risk for pregnancy, according to new UBC research.

In the first study of its kind, researchers used data from the 2014 Canadian Transgender Youth Health Survey, focusing on a subset of 540 youth aged 14-25 who had previously had sex. They found that five per cent (26) had been involved in a pregnancy at least once - comparable to B.C.'s pregnancy rate of about five per cent among sexually active young people.

The solar system could be thrown into disaster when the sun dies if the mysterious 'Planet Nine' exists, according to Dr. Dimitri Veras in the Department of Physics at University of Warwick, who says he has discovered that the presence of Planet Nine - the hypothetical planet which may exist in the outer Solar System - could cause the elimination of at least one of the giant planets after the sun dies, hurling them out into interstellar space through a sort of 'pinball' effect.

When the sun starts to die in around seven billion years, it will blow away half of its own mass and inflate itself -- swallowing the Earth -- before fading into an ember known as a white dwarf. This mass ejection will push Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune out to what was assumed a safe distance.

Researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen found proof that psychopathic individuals can feel fear, but have trouble in the automatic detection and responsivity to threat. For many decades fear has been put forth as a hallmark feature of psychopathy, the impairments in which would lead to bold risk-taking behavior. Sylco Hoppenbrouwers (VU Amsterdam), Erik Bulten and Inti Brazil (Radboud University) reviewed theoretical and empirical brain and behavioral data pertaining to fear and psychopathy and found that psychopathic individuals have trouble detecting threats. There was however little evidence that the conscious experience of fear was affected, indicating that the experience of fear may not be completely impaired in psychopathy.

DURHAM, N.C. -- All humans are 99.9 percent identical, genetically speaking. But that tiny 0.1 percent variation has big consequences, influencing the color of your eyes, the span of your hips, your risk of getting sick and in some ways even your earning potential.

Although variants are scattered throughout the genome, scientists have largely ignored the stretches of repetitive genetic code once dismissively known as "junk" DNA in their search for differences that influence human health and disease.

In the August 31 issue of Science Translational Medicine, new research from the University of Chicago shows how deficits in a specific pathway of genes can lead to the development of atrial fibrillation, a common irregular heartbeat, which poses a significant health risk.

Researchers describe a complex system of checks and balances, including the intersection of two opposing regulatory methods that work to maintain normal cardiac rhythm, and offer insights that could lead to individualized treatment in humans.