Direct-to-consumer advertising for commercial genetic testing is on the rise and may be problematic, according to a Massachusetts General Hospital physician. In the December issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology, Erin Tracy, MD, MPH, warns that such testing is poorly regulated and may present potential pitfalls for patients and physicians.

“Some of the tests that are being offered have no proven clinical validity whatsoever and are quite costly,” says Tracy. “So patients spend money trying to identify a particular gene to figure out if their child is prone to addictive behavior, for example.

Water chemistry and mineralogy are scientific fields that have been around long enough to develop extensive knowledge and technologies. The boundary of water and rock, however, is not a thin wet line but the huge new field of nanoparticle science.

Scientists are discovering that aquatic nanoparticles, from 1 to 100 nanometers, influence natural and engineered water chemistry and systems differently than similar materials of a larger size. “Nanoparticles are in an awkward intermediate state, between elements dissolved in water and minerals that you can hold in your hand,” said Michael Hochella Jr., University Distinguished Professor of geosciences at Virginia Tech. “The nanoscale represents a transition zone.

Even after more than a year of maintaining a normalized body weight, young women who recovered from anorexia nervosa show vastly different patterns of brain activity compared to similar women without the eating disorder, Walter H. Kaye, M.D., professor of psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and colleagues report in the December issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Studying these differences in brain function could lead to a better understanding of why some young women, who are typically worriers and perfectionists in childhood, are at greater risk of developing the disorder. Evidence also shows that such patterns of temperament persist even after recovery.

Messier 74, also called NGC 628, is a stunning example of a 'grand-design' spiral galaxy that is viewed by Earth observers nearly face-on. Its perfectly symmetrical spiral arms emanate from the central nucleus and are dotted with clusters of young blue stars.

In the new Hubble image we can also see a smattering of bright pink regions decorating the spiral arms. These are huge, relatively short-lived, clouds of hydrogen gas which glow due to the strong radiation from hot, young stars embedded within them; glowing pink regions of ionized hydrogen (hydrogen that has lost its electrons).

Right in time for the festive season, ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory has discovered a huge cloud of high-temperature gas resting in a spectacular nearby star-forming region, shaped somewhat like the silhouette of Santa Claus.

An early present for astronomers, the cloud suggests that hot gas from many star-forming regions leaks into the interstellar medium.

The Orion nebula is the nearest dense star-forming region to Earth that contains stars much more massive than the Sun. XMM-Newton’s newly-discovered gas cloud is composed of winds blowing from these high-mass stars that are heated to millions of degrees as they slam into the surrounding gas.

A study carried out in the Department of Evolutionary and Education Psychology of the University of Granada (UGR) has revealed that Latin American immigrant adolescents are more likely to become infected with HIV than the Spanish, as they use methods of birth control less frequently, start having sex earlier and have more sex partners than Spanish adolescents. In addition, foreigners consume drugs more frequently when having sex with penetration, according to this work.

For the performance of this research work, professors Mª Paz Bermúdez Sánchez and Ángel Castro Vázquez used a sample of 218 adolescents aged between 14 and 19 years, half of them Spanish and half of them Latin Americans.

It can crush ice sideways and stay precisely on station to an accuracy of one meter. It can drill a hole 1,000 meters deep into the seabed while floating above 5,000 meters of ocean and can generate 55 megawatts of power. So far, Aurora Borealis is the most unusual ship that has never been built, and it represents a floating laboratory for European science, a breakthrough for polar research and a very big headache for international lawyers.

Aurora Borealis will be the first ever international ship, the brainchild of the European Science Federation, the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Maritime Research in Germany and the Germany Federal Ministry of Research and Education.

Scientists at Duke University have created the first map of imprinted genes throughout the human genome and they say artificial intelligence called machine learning was the key to their success. The study revealed four times as many imprinted genes as had been previously identified.

In classic genetics, children inherit two copies of a gene, one from each parent, and both actively shape how the child develops. But in imprinting, one of those copies is turned off by molecular instructions coming from either the mother or the father. This process of “imprinting” information on a gene is believed to happen during the formation of an egg or sperm, and it means that a child will inherit only one working copy of that gene.

With the urgent need to find energy sources that are renewable and don't emit greenhouse gases, geothermal energy is ideal. Accessible geothermal energy in the United States, excluding Alaska and Hawaii, has been estimated at 9 x 1016 (90 quadrillion) kilowatt-hours, 3,000 times more than the country's total annual energy consumption.

"A good geothermal energy source has three basic requirements: a high thermal gradient -- which means accessible hot rock -- plus a rechargeable reservoir fluid, usually water, and finally, deep permeable pathways for the fluid to circulate through the hot rock," says Mack Kennedy, a staff scientist in Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's Earth Sciences Division.