GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- The human brain has a remarkable defense system that filters bacteria and chemicals. For brain tumor patients, the barrier works almost too well by blocking most chemotherapy drugs.

Now, a team led by a University of Florida Health researcher has found that a laser system already used to kill brain tumors has another benefit: It opens a temporary "window" in the blood-brain barrier that enables crucial chemotherapy drugs to pass into the brain for up to six weeks. The findings are published today (Feb. 24) in the journal PLOS ONE.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- One of the great joys in mathematics is the ability to use it to describe phenomena seen in the physical world, says University at Buffalo mathematician Gino Biondini.

With UB postdoctoral researcher Dionyssios Mantzavinos, Biondini has published a new paper that advances the art -- or shall we say, the math -- of describing a wave. The findings, published Jan. 27 in Physical Review Letters, are thought to apply to wave forms ranging from light waves in optical fibers to water waves in the sea.

The study explores what happens when a regular wave pattern has small irregularities, a question that scientists have been trying to answer for the last 50 years.

Agriculture is one of the few areas where government regulations have not caused costs to boom with little value to the public. In the past few decades, American science and technology have produced more food on less land with less environmental strain than ever thought possible. There is so much food people can self-identify with the organic growing process, something that would have meant starvation when organic was the only solution.

There is nothing so compelling as a story about falling down, recovering your footing, and then charging over the goal line completely redeemed … unless it is two such stories. The Denver Broncos’ Super Bowl 50 victory and the laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory’s (LIGO’s) detection of gravity waves offer parallel examples. What, football and physics? Yep. I watched the big game on TV, like tens of millions of others. But as a technical consultant to LIGO, I had a Goodyear blimp’s view of their gridiron when the collaboration fumbled its funding, recovered its mojo, and then sprinted to victory by observing gravitational radiation generated more than a billion years ago.

Self-organizing social behaviour in the so-called plant-animal, a 'solar-powered' species of marine flat worm that gains all its energy from the algae within its own body, has been demonstrated by researchers from the University of Bristol, UK.

Professor Nigel Franks in the School of Biological Sciences and colleagues, especially Dr Alan Worley, formerly of the School of Physics, made direct comparisons between videos of the real worms and computer simulations of virtual worms with different patterns of behaviour. This showed that individual plant-animal worms (Symsagittifera roscoffensis) interact with one another to coordinate their movements.

Microbirthing, which involves taking a swab from the mother's vagina and wiping this over the baby's mouth, eyes, face and skin shortly after birth by Cesarean section, is a growing fad, but there is no evidence this 'vaginal seeding' does anything positive, according to an editorial in the BMJ. Around one in four babies are born via caesarean section in the UK. 

Fish and other important resources are moving toward the Earth's poles as the climate warms, and wealth is moving with them, according to a new paper by scientists at Rutgers, Princeton, Yale, and Arizona State universities.

Climate change is forcing some species of migrating fish to shift their range toward the poles, which means big changes for people whose livelihoods depend on those fish.

APEX, the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment telescope, is located at 5100 metres above sea level on the Chajnantor Plateau in Chile's Atacama region. The ATLASGAL survey took advantage of the unique characteristics of the telescope to provide a detailed view of the distribution of cold dense gas along the plane of the Milky Way galaxy [1]. The new image includes most of the regions of star formation in the southern Milky Way [2].

A new editorial warns that newborns may develop infections from exposure to vaginal bacteria, and suggest that encouraging breast feeding and avoiding unnecessary antibiotics may be a much better idea for creating a healthy immune system in infants.

The term vaginal seeding, also called microbirthing, describes wiping babies with vaginal fluid after they have been born by Cesarean. The belief is that this boosts poorly-defined beneficial gut microbes that keep our immune systems healthy and so may reduce the risk of developing conditions such as asthma, food allergies, and hay fever in later life.

NASA currently has Mars sample return as their priority flagship mission not just for this decade but for the next one as well. They were recommended to do this in the 2012 decadal review. It is good for geology, nobody doubts that. But it is motivated mainly by the search for ancient life on Mars. Some exobiologists have warned that it is likely to be no more conclusive than the Mars meteorites we already have. They regard it as is little more than a technology demo for the search for life.