Contrary to conservative wisdom, exercising up to the end of pregnancy has no harmful effect on the health of the mother or child, and may even be beneficial for both, indicates a study published in the International Journal of Obesity.

160 healthy women between the ages of 25 and 35 took part in the study, all of whom had sedentary habits and no risk of premature birth. Of this group of women, half followed an exercise regime under the supervision of experts in Physical Activity and Sports Science in collaboration with the Gynaecology and Obstetrics Unit of Hospital Severo Ochoa in Madrid.

A team of researchers said this week that they may have identified the genes responsible for bipolar disorder in children. Their study, published in BMC Psychiatry, implicates malfunctioning circadian clock genes, four alterations of the RORB gene to be specific, in the development of the disorder.

Scientists studied the RORA and RORB genes of 152 children with Bipolar and 140 control children. They found four alterations to the RORB gene that were positively associated with being bipolar. "Our findings suggest that clock genes in general and RORB in particular may be important candidates for further investigation in the search for the molecular basis of bipolar disorder," explained co-author Alexander Niculescu.

The controversy surrounding prescription drug advertising is immense. Advocates for prescription drug direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) claim that it educates consumers, improves the quality of care and contributes to better patient adherence. While opponents argue that it leads to inappropriate prescribing and portrays non-medical problems as treatable medical illnesses.

Thanks to a new paper calling for stricter federal regulation of DTCA, the policy debate over the practice is certain to intensify even more. Soon to appear in the American Journal of Public Health, the study suggests that while there are some benefits stemming from (DTCA), there are significant risks that are magnified by its prominence.

Enhancing the effects of dopamine influences how people make life choices by affecting expectations of pleasure, according to new research from the UCL Institute of Neurology.

 Published today in Current Biology, the study confirms an important role for dopamine in how human expectations are formed and how people make complex decisions. It also contributes to an understanding of how pleasure expectation can go awry, for example in drug addiction.

The study builds on earlier research which used brain imaging as participants imagined holiday destinations. An area of the brain called the straitum tracked expectations and the

Cooperation is seen in every corner of life from microbes to humans, many times with no obvious advantages to those that provide it at high costs. Given the existence of “freeloading cheaters” ready to exploit the resources of those cooperating, why is it that cooperation persist? In an article now published in the journal Current Biology Nogueira and colleagues suggest that in bacteria this can result from highly mobile genes that “jump” from one cell to the next carrying the cooperative traits, effectively turning everyone into a cooperator. They also show that, at least in Escherichia coli (E. coli), this new population remains stable through “punisher” genes that impose a mafia-like strategy of “cooperation or death”, ensuring that the new cooperators do not revert to freeloading.

Today's scapegoat for my rant about the place of cephalopods in society is, as I predicted, Squidward Quincy Tentacles, of Spongebob Squarepants fame:




What IS that? Six appendages, a misplaced mouth, and a floppy nose? Where'd the nose come from? Where are his fins and tentacles? But oh, it turns out Squidward isn't even meant to be a squid. The Spongebob wiki quotes Squidward's voice actor: He's an octopus, but they call him Squidward. I never understood. I guess Octoward just never worked for a name, though.

The word on the street is that Jesus is pretty t'd off at NASA.¹ What mortal sin² did the space agency allegedly commit? The non-biological reproduction of an RNA component in a laboratory, of course.

NASA scientists reproduced uracil in a lab under conditions found in space, according to Astrobiology. Uracil is one of the components of the genetic code that makes up ribonucleic acid (RNA); RNA is mainly known for its role in protein synthesis. In other words, NASA was able to create a building block of life in the lab.