Though Britain has consistently been part of formal European trading, it was with some hesitation that they entered the European Union (EU) in 1993, and they famously balked at adopting the Euro currency in 1999.

During that time, fears about giving a lot more than they get have been realized. 

Some claims have been that science in the UK would be impacted by Britain's exit from the EU - "Brexit" for short. So is that fact or hype?

A new study, published in Biochemistry this week, examines the biomechanics of sugar-seeking proteins. Specifically, it delves into galectin-3's interaction with glycosaminoglycans (GAG) and proteoglycans. Tarun Dam, an associate professor of chemistry at Michigan Technological University, led the study.

"Seeing galectin-3 interact with GAGs and proteoglycans is like finding a rose in the petunias--it's very unexpected," Dam says. "It's fair to say that this requires revisiting the reported biological functions of GAGs, proteoglycans and galectin-3."

It's summertime, and the fields of Yolo County are filled with ranks of sunflowers, dutifully watching the rising sun. At the nearby University of California, Davis, plant biologists have now discovered how sunflowers use their internal circadian clock, acting on growth hormones, to follow the sun during the day as they grow.

"It's the first example of a plant's clock modulating growth in a natural environment, and having real repercussions for the plant," said Stacey Harmer, professor of plant biology at UC Davis and senior author on the paper to be published Aug. 5 in the journal Science.

Back in the good old days, most deaths were due to infectious diseases. Today, thanks to modern technology,life expectancy has increased and the pattern of deaths has changed. 

According to the CDC, today’s top ten leading causes of death only include two due toinfection. Both are infections of the lungs  - one is a mixture of infections (#3) and the other is influenza plus pneumonia (#8).

So, by now we all know it - there is no 750 GeV resonance in LHC data. But will we ever learn the lesson ?
The facts

Let me start this post by recalling the bare facts, and a quick-and-dirty introduction for anybody who has been on the Moon in the last eight months or so. Last December, the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the CERN LHC collider presented in two back-to-back seminars their first results on data collected at unprecedented proton-proton collision energy of 13 TeV. The 60% higher center-of-mass energy with respect to collisions analized in the previous years left hopes alive for the discovery of some new physics process, which could have been hiding until then thanks to the large required energy to turn on the reactions. 

A group of Russian physicists, with the contribution from their Swiss colleagues, developed a way to use the therapeutic effect of heating or cooling the tissues due to the magnetocaloric effect. The article with the results of the work was published in the latest issue of the International Journal of Refrigeration.

A team of the Lomonosov Moscow State University scientists proposed a new way to use the magnetocaloric effect for the targeted delivery of drugs to the implants. Vladimir Zverev, one of the authors (Lomonosov Moscow State University, Faculty of Physics) claims that this is a unique method that uses a negative magnetocaloric effect.

SILVER SPRING, Md. - The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), in collaboration with the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, has completed a second round of preclinical studies on a promising Zika vaccine candidate and found it to completely protect rhesus monkeys from experimental infection with Zika virus.

Washington, DC--Women risk having their vitamin D levels fall when they stop using birth control pills or other contraceptives containing estrogen, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Vitamin D is a hormone involved in the immune system and managing calcium levels in the blood. Proper calcium levels are necessary for bone health.

Recent legislation is encouraging clinical trials in children, including the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act and the Pediatric Research Equity Act. Yet clinical trials in children commonly go either uncompleted or unpublished, finds a comprehensive study conducted by researchers at Boston Children's Hospital. Results were published online August 4 by the journal Pediatrics.

In all, 19 percent of trials were discontinued early, and 30 percent of completed trials remained unpublished in the medical literature several years later. "We feel there is a lot of inefficiency and waste that could be addressed," says senior investigator Florence Bourgeois, MD, MPH, of Boston Children's Hospital.

Mucous membrane pemphigoid is an autoimmune disease that causes inflammation and scarring in mucosal tissues. Affected individuals frequently exhibit scarring in the eye, which can lead to blindness in as many as 20% of patients. In this issue of JCI Insight, two related studies report on the underlying cause of fibrosis in the eye and implicate an important role for vitamin A metabolism. A group of researchers led by John Dart at UCLA show that the enzyme aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH), which produces the vitamin A metabolite retinoic acid, is elevated in mucous membrane tissue in the eye from mucous membrane pemphigoid patients.