MADISON — An international team of researchers has shown that circulating avian influenza viruses contain all the genetic ingredients necessary to underpin the emergence of a virus similar to the deadly 1918 influenza virus.

Searching public databases, the researchers, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, identified eight genes from influenza viruses isolated from wild ducks that possessed remarkable genetic similarities to the genes that made up the 1918 pandemic flu virus. The 1918 or "Spanish flu" pandemic was one of recorded history's most devastating outbreaks of disease, resulting in an estimated 40 million deaths worldwide.

Illegal immigrants from Mexico who move to the United States often face barriers like poorly paying jobs, crowded housing and family separation. Such obstacles, and the migration process itself, may be detrimental to their health. Health even drops for people who enter the US legally.

Two studies presented today at the European League Against Rheumatism Annual Congress (EULAR 2014) have found a relationship between the dietary intake of monounsaturated fatty acids and cholesterol with disease activity in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and osteoarthritis (OA) respectively.

In the TOMORROW study, daily intake of monounsaturated fatty acids as a component of the Mediterranean diet has been shown to be an independent predictor of remission in patients with RA; monounsaturated fatty acids might therefore be suppressing disease activity.

Matter-antimatter asymmetry is one of the greatest challenges in physics - we know antimatter is out there, because it can be created at places like CERN, but the universe seems to be composed entirely of matter.

Theories predict that exactly equal amounts of matter and antimatter would have been created in the Big Bang. So where did all the antimatter go?

New research undertaken by the ALPHA experiment at CERN's Antiproton Decelerator (AD) in Geneva is the first time that the electric charge of an anti-atom has been measured to high precision. Measuring the electric charge of antihydrogen atoms is a way to study any subtle differences between matter and antimatter which could account for the lack of antimatter in the universe.

On the island of Java, in Indonesia, the silvery gibbon, an endangered primate, lives in the rainforests and engages in behavior that's unusual for a primate - it sings long, complicated songs, using 14 different note types, that signal territory and send messages to potential mates and family.

Far from being a mere curiosity, the silvery gibbon may hold clues to the development of language in humans, according to a paper which asserts that by re-examining contemporary human language, we can see indications of how human communication could have evolved from the systems underlying the older communication modes of birds and other primates.

The quirky, tiny state of Vermont is 600,000 people who are simultaneously hard left and hard right. They voted in Bernie Sanders as a Senator, a guy who won't be a Democrat because that party is not socialist enough for him. They passed a law that put warning labels on GMOs - except for those in alcohol, restaurants, delis and cow feed, and thus basically only impacting poor people.

Now they have turned their keen, evidence-based eyes on climate change, claiming that if something isn't done, their skiing will be gone in 25 years, Maple syrup too, and heat stress will mean less milk for cows.

STFC’s Vulcan laser facility has recreated scaled supernova explosions to investigate one of the most energetic events in the Universe.

Supernova explosions, triggered when the fuel within a star reignites or its core collapses, launch a detonation shock wave that sweeps through several light years of space from the exploding star in just a few hundred years. But not all such explosions are alike and some, such as Cassiopeia A which is 11,000 light years from the Earth, show puzzling irregular shapes made of knots and twists.

American science media is constantly going on about evolution and climate change deniers - sometimes even inventing assaults on evolution that don't exist - but when it comes to quasi-religious beliefs about energy and medical science, we get a whole slew of rationalizations about how people just don't trust corporations, or they have ethical issues or whatever.

And then there's food. The intellectual food obfuscation in order to avoid discussing the obvious demographic that embrace food pseudoscience is truly dizzying. American Shamanism is alive and well and its temples are in a Whole Foods store.

A genetic analysis of DNA samples of approximately 3,700 Mexican and U.S. Latino individuals identified a gene variant that was associated with a 5-fold increase in the prevalence of type 2 diabetes, findings that may have implications for screening in this population, according to a study in the June 11 issue of JAMA, a diabetes theme issue.

Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) scientists collaborating with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a "genome-editing" approach for permanently reducing cholesterol levels in mice through a single injection, a development that could reduce the risk of heart attacks in humans by 40 to 90 percent.

"For the first iteration of an experiment, this was pretty remarkable," said Kiran Musunuru of HSCI, an assistant professor in Harvard's Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology (SCRB), and a cardiologist at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital. Musunuru stressed, however, that it could take a decade of concerted effort to get this new approach for fighting heart disease from the laboratory to phase I clinical trials in humans.