Daniel H. Conrad, professor of microbiology and immunology at the
Virginia Commonwealth University
 School of Medicine, and colleagues have uncovered a new connection between allergy and cancer that could potentially lead to therapies involving common antihistamines. 

In the Journal of Leukocyte Biology, their study found that histamine, a component of the immune system that responds to allergens and foreign pathogens and is also linked to inflammation, plays a role in protecting tumors from the immune system. By blocking the production of histamine in animal models, the researchers were able to interrupt a process that promotes melanoma growth. 

This week, the people of Crimea overwhelmingly voted to join Russia. They were jubilant, the Russian people were prideful, and Europe and the United States acted like it was the start of a World War. President Obama levied sanctions on President Vladimir Putin's friends, leading the Russian Deputy Prime Minster to ask if it was some sort of joke.

A study of 235 bereaved parents participating in an online support community revealed that startling 37.4 percent of them were prescribed a psychiatric medication to help them cope with the loss of their child, either during pregnancy or within the first month of life. Some women received prescriptions within a week, which doesn't meet any criteria for depression. 

Of the 88 parents given psychiatric prescriptions, 79.5 percent were for antidepressants and 19.5 percent were only prescribed sedatives or sleep aids. Prescriptions were written shortly after the loss in many cases: 32.2 percent within 48 hours; 43.87 percent within a week; and 74.7 percent within a month. Most women prescribed antidepressants then took them long term, some for years.

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."