A new type of single-dose vaccine comes in a nasal spray and doesn't require refrigeration.

The latest design and testing of these "nanovaccines" sets the stage to dramatically alter the public health landscape because it can get more people vaccinated around the world squash the looming threats of emerging and re-emerging diseases. 

Trust is an essential basis for business relationships but it can be easily shaken if one business partner exhibits dishonest behavior.  And so a subconscious strategy to help avoid the negative emotions associated with any breaches of trust may cause some to prefer computers over people, according to a new paper.

When individuals engage in risky business transactions with each other, they may end up being disappointed and so they'd rather leave money decisions to a computer, says Prof. Dr. Bernd Weber from the Center for Economics and Neuroscience (CENs) at the University of Bonn. "As a result, people are not all that eager to put their trust in others." 

This news release is available in German.

Humans didn't cause problems for everything we get blamed for but DNA evidence in a paper suggests that the ancient New Zealand megaherbivore, moa, a distant relative of the Australian Emu, did go extinct shortly after Polynesians arrived  in the late 1200s.

All nine species of New Zealand moa, the largest weighing up to 250 kilograms, have been gone for centuries and other studies suggest that huge populations of moa had collapsed before people arrived and hence influences other than people were responsible for the extinction, like climate change killing the vegetation. Instead, the authors say humans killed the environment and that killed the moa.

In 2011, Rice Religious Studies graduate student Grant Adamson was doing a summer internship at Brigham Young University and tackled something that no one had been able to do in a hundred years - he deciphered 1,800-year-old letter from an Egyptian solider serving in a Roman legion in Europe.

While young people always think their situation is exceptional and previous generations just don't understand, the letter shows the Roman soldier had many feelings similar to what some soldiers feel today.

Researchers have found the earliest fossil evidence for the presence of bone marrow in the fin of a 370 million-year-old fish,
Eusthenopteron, a Devonian lobe-finned fish from Miguasha in Canada that is closely related to the first tetrapods.

According to Dr. Fletcher, typical approaches for evaluating anti-obesity type drugs rely on more subjective methods—like having test subjects self-report their ratings of hunger and cravings.

"When a person is asked how much they subjectively desire a food, they may feel pressured to give a 'correct' rather than a true answer," said Dr. Fletcher, "[Our] grip force task may, under certain circumstances, present a more accurate reflection of what they really want."

The heart disease drug perhexiline is one of 101 compounds predicted to prevent cancer growth in most patients suffering from our most common liver cancer, HCC. This is an outcome from a novel simulation-based approach using personal sets of proteins of six HCC patients.

"This is the first time personalized models have been used to find and evaluate new potential drugs," says Professor Jens Nielsen at Chalmers University of Technology.
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I would like for my son, Leif, to play the violin. I’m a serious ex music geek and so in addition to pegging me as an abhorrent tiger parent intent on thrusting my offspring into the one-percent where they can be hedge fund managers and own things like furniture coasters, I also happen to think that music is an enriching skill that adds depth to a life well lived.

That’s beside the point.

The popular belief is that religion and being poor are the biggest risk factors for violent radicalization but a new analysis by Queen Mary University of London has instead found that youth, wealth, and being in full-time academia are more common in the UK.

The pioneering research assessed population prevalence of sympathies for terrorist acts – a key marker of vulnerability to violent radicalisation – and their relationship with commonly assumed causes of radicalisation. The community study surveyed over 600 men and women of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Muslim heritage in London and Bradford, aged 18-45.