The lungs contain a thin layer of fluid known as the airway surface liquid (ASL), which helps protect against pathogens. The appropriate ASL volume, pH, and ionic composition are required for optimal airway defense. Cystic fibrosis (CF) is caused by expression of a dysfunctional cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR), which acidifies the ASL and renders CF patients more susceptible to lung infections. In this issue of JCI Insight, Joseph Zabner and colleagues at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine examined the effect of tromethamine, a drug that is currently approved to treat metabolic acidosis, on ASL pH and bacterial killing activity. They demonstrated that inhalation of aerosolized tromethamine raised ASL pH in both pigs and CF patients.

In the first year that two Florida laws aimed at curbing opioid prescriptions were in effect, the state's top opioid prescribers wrote significantly fewer prescriptions of this type of pain medication, a new analysis led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health finds.

On Memorial Day my sister and brother-in-law took me to visit an extraordinary commercial nursery West of Chicago called “The Planter’s Pallet.”

Underwater divers recently discovered paved floors, courtyards and colonnades, evidence of a long-forgotten civilization that must have perished when tidal waves hit the shores of the Greek holiday island Zakynthos.

The bizarre discovery, found close to Alikanas Bay, was carefully examined in situ by the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities of Greece. After the preliminary mineralogical and chemical analyses, a research team was mobilized to study the ancient underwater remains - only to declare them a naturally occurring phenomenon created by a natural geological phenomenon that took place in the Pliocene era, up to five million years ago.


Credit: UEA

Normal rules of economic behavior would dictate that free upgrades to a particular product would move it out the door in record numbers. Somewhat counterintuitively, new research from Professor Wen Mao reveals that a token upgrade fee, even no more than a penny, is often more attractive to consumers than a freebie.

Using a reverse paint-by-numbers approach, scientists have located another gene that controls the brilliant patterning of Heliconius butterfly wings. Led by former Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) fellow Nicole Nadeau, the researchers identified variations in the gene that correspond to wing color and pattern variation in three different Heliconius species. Published in Nature, June 2016, the discovery puts scientists a step closer to unlocking the code responsible for diversity and evolution in butterflies and moths.

Researchers use accelerators to coax the electron into performing a wide range of tricks to enable medical tests and treatments, improve product manufacturing, and power breakthrough scientific research. Now, they're learning how to coax the same tricks out of the electron's antimatter twin - the positron - to open up a whole new vista of research and applications.

A Johns Hopkins study on data from more than 7,000 older Americans has found that those who show signs of probable dementia but are not yet formally diagnosed are nearly twice as likely as those with such a diagnosis to engage in potentially unsafe activities, such as driving, cooking, and managing finances and medications.

The findings, reported in the June issue of Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, highlight the need, investigators say, to make patients and their families explicitly aware of the memory disorder so that physicians and loved ones can take protective steps.

A new paper in American Journal of Geophysics, Geochemistry and Geosystems criticizes alarming projections of up to 2 meters in sea level rise due to increasing anthropogenic CO2 emissions - and implicitly media that acts as cheerleaders by foregoing critical thinking - because those claims are not based on data. 

Instead of noting that tide gauges with enough information to infer a trend don't show increased relative rate of rise, but instead show small positive negative and positive fluctuations, papers with claims of up to 2 meters in sea level rise are heavily promoted, including by groups who insist policy makers need to include those claims in flood maps. 

Gay men who live outside major Canadian cities are less likely to get an HIV test than their metropolitan counterparts, according to a survey which also finds that the lower testing rates are likely connected to internalized feelings of homophobia and a reluctance to disclose sexual preferences at a doctor's office. 

The team surveyed 153 people recruited through online dating sites and events in the gay community. The results were that 24 percent of men living in smaller communities had never had an HIV test, compared to the 14 to 17 percent of untested men living in large cities such as Vancouver and Toronto.