Plant scientists at the University of Cambridge have found that the cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) alters gene expression in the tomato plants it infects, causing changes to air-borne chemicals - the scent - emitted by the plants. Bees can smell these subtle changes, and glasshouse experiments have shown that bumblebees prefer infected plants over healthy ones.

Scientists say that by indirectly manipulating bee behaviour to improve pollination of infected plants by changing their scent, the virus is effectively paying its host back. This may also benefit the virus: helping to spread the pollen of plants susceptible to infection and, in doing so, inhibiting the chance of virus-resistant plant strains emerging.

Researchers at Technical University of Munich discovered that our brain actively takes sugar from the blood. Prior to this, researchers around the world had assumed that this was a purely passive process. An international team led by diabetes expert Matthias Tschöp reported in the journal 'Cell' that transportation of sugar into the brain is regulated by so-called glia cells that react to hormones such as insulin or leptin; previously it was thought that this was only possible for neurons.

You shouldn't believe everything you read. The CDC insists salt is a problem, and the FDA asked for voluntary warning labels after the sue-and-settle lawyer group Center for Science in the Public Interest kept harassing them. Yet the evidence shows salt in a normal diet is no problem. And no quote on Facebook that has a picture of Einstein included is any more accurate. The US government promotes a prediabetes designation that has the rest of the world scratching their heads.

Even textbooks are often wrong. That is the problem with voting on science. 

Being hospitalized with infection was associated with an increased risk of suicide death and the highest risk of suicide was among those individuals with hepatitis and HIV or AIDS, according to a study published online by JAMA Psychiatry.

While psychological predictors of suicide have been studied extensively, less attention has been paid to the effect of biological factors, such as infection.

Helene Lund-Sørensen, B.M., of Copenhagen University Hospital, Denmark, and coauthors used Danish nationwide registers to investigate associations between infectious diseases and the risk of death by suicide.

Eight people who have spent years paralyzed from spinal cord injuries have regained partial sensation and muscle control in their lower limbs after training with brain-controlled robotics, according to a study published Aug. 11 in Scientific Reports.

The patients used brain-machine interfaces, including a virtual reality system that used their own brain activity to simulate full control of their legs. Videos accompanying the study illustrate their progress.

Blood stem cell transplantation, widely known as bone marrow transplantation, is a powerful technique that potentially can provide a lifelong cure for a variety of diseases. But the procedure is so toxic that it is currently used to treat only the most critical cases.

Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have come up with a way of conducting the therapy that, in mice, dramatically lowers its toxicity. If the method eventually proves safe and effective for humans, it potentially could be used to cure autoimmune diseases like lupus, juvenile diabetes and multiple sclerosis; fix congenital metabolic disorders like "bubble boy" disease; and treat many more kinds of cancer, as well as make organ transplants safer and more successful.

 By assessing electronic medical records (EMR) of 32,835 unique individuals from six Dallas-Fort Worth area hospitals, and noting abnormalities in temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation within 24 hours of discharge, scholars determined that nearly 20 percent had one or more abnormalities, with elevated heart rate being the most common vital sign instability (affecting about 10 percent.) About 13 percent were readmitted or died, and individuals with three or more instabilities had a nearly four-fold increase in the odds of death.  

How to be a healthy eater depends on culture. A recent study shows that in the U.S. and Japan, people who fit better with their culture have healthier eating habits. The results appear in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

"Our results suggest that if you want to help people to eat healthier--or if you want to promote any type of healthy behavior--you want to understand what meaning that behavior has in that culture, and what motivates people to be healthy in that culture," says lead author Cynthia Levine.

Healthy eating can help reduce one's risk for a number of different diseases down the line, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain types of cancer.

The Piltdown Man scandal is arguably the greatest scientific fraud ever perpetrated in the UK, with fake fossils being claimed as evidence of our earliest ancestor.

Published 100 years on from Dawson's death, new research reveals that the forgeries were created using a limited number of specimens that were all constructed using a consistent method, suggesting the perpetrator acted alone.

It is highly likely that an orang-utan specimen and at least two human skeletons were used to create the fakes, which are still kept at the Natural History Museum.

Health researchers predict that the transmission of dengue could actually decrease in a warmer climate, countering previous apocalyptic cocktail projections which included that the lethal virus would spread more easily.

Hundreds of millions of people are already infected with dengue each year, with some children dying in severe cases, so increasing a significant global health problem is an alarming concern. The model instead finds that a warmer climate would mean the ecologically useless mosquitoes that carry Dengue (and also Zika) would die off in the drier sections of the wet tropics of northeast Australia.