By Robert Young, University of Salford

I run 50 kilometers per week on my treadmill and eat a calorie-restricted diet; this is something our ancestors didn’t have to do. But then they didn’t sit at a desk all day and certainly did not have access to such energy rich food.

Unfortunately our animals have joined us on the couch. Take a walk down the pet food aisle in the supermarket and you may be surprised to see rows of diet cat and dog food.

Our fat contains a variety of cells with the potential to become bone, cartilage, or more fat if properly prompted. This makes adipose tissue a key potential resource for regenerative therapies such as bone healing if doctors can get enough of those cells and compel them to produce bone.

In a new study, scientists at Brown University demonstrate a new method for extracting a wide variety of potential bone-producing cells from human fat. They developed a fluorescent tag that could find and identify cells expressing a gene called ALPL. Expression of the gene is an indicator of bone-making potential.

By studying identical twins, researchers from Lund University in Sweden have identified mechanisms that could be behind the development of type 2 diabetes. This may explain cases where one identical twin develops type 2 diabetes while the other remains healthy.

The study involved 14 pairs of identical twins in Sweden and Denmark. One twin had type 2 diabetes and the other was healthy. Fat tissue can release hormones and regulate metabolism in different organs in the body. The question the researchers posed was whether epigenetic changes in the DNA lead to changes in the fat tissue that in turn can lead to the development of type 2 diabetes. 

The way neurons are interconnected in the brain is very complicated. This holds especially true for the cells of the hippocampus. It is one of the oldest brain regions and its form resembles a see horse (hippocampus in Latin).

The hippocampus enables us to navigate space securely and to form personal memories. So far, the anatomic knowledge of the networks inside the hippocampus and its connection to the rest of the brain has left scientists guessing which information arrived where and when.

Signals spread through the brain

The director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, is worried about the lack of reproducibility and 'secret sauce' in a large number of studies funded by their $30 billion government agency. 

Fraud happens everywhere, as does cherry-picking of results, but the more scientific the field, the less it happens. It's hard to get 2,000 people to be fraudulent about an experimental physics result while a lone psychologist writing about surveys of college students is difficult to catch.

Carnegie-Mellon and Stanford scholars say they have a solution for Dr. Collins, at least - use 

Sexting may be a new "normal" part of adolescent sexual development and not strictly limited to at-risk teens, according to a paper in Pediatrics, which the authors say is the first survey to address the relationship between teenage sexting, or sending sexually explicit images to another electronically, and future sexual activity. 

The  results indicate that sexting may precede sexual intercourse in some cases and further cements the idea that sexting behavior is a credible sign of teenage sexual activity. Further, the researchers did not find a link between sexting and risky sexual behavior over time, which may suggest that sexting is becoming a part of growing up. 

A snaking, extended filament of solar material currently lies on the front of the sun-- some 1 million miles across from end to end. Filaments are clouds of solar material suspended above the sun by powerful magnetic forces. Though notoriously unstable, filaments can last for days or even weeks.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, which watches the sun 24 hours a day, has observed this gigantic filament for several days as it rotated around with the sun. If straightened out, the filament would reach almost across the whole sun, about 1 million miles or 100 times the size of Earth.

A team of engineers have built a new system that protects Internet users' privacy while increasing the flexibility for web developers to build web applications that combine data from different web sites, dramatically improving the safety of surfing the web.

The system, Confinement with Origin Web Labels, or COWL, works with Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome web browsers and prevents malicious code in a web site from leaking sensitive information to unauthorized parties, while allowing code in a web site to display content drawn from multiple web sites – an essential function for modern, feature-rich web applications.

A tool for editing the DNA instructions in a genome can now also be applied to RNA, the molecule that translates DNA's genetic instructions into the production of proteins, according to a team of researchers who demonstrated a means by which the CRISPR/Cas9 protein complex can be programmed to recognize and cleave RNA at sequence-specific target sites. 

A team led by biochemist Jennifer Doudna or Lawrence Berkeley National Lab showed how the Cas9 enzyme can work with short DNA sequences known as "PAM," for protospacer adjacent motif, to identify and bind with specific site of single-stranded RNA (ssRNA). They are designating this RNA-targeting CRISPR/Cas9 complex as RCas9. 

Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory have created a new simulator to more accurately estimate the greenhouse gases likely to be released from Arctic peatlands if they warm.

Their model is based on how oxygen filters through soil and it estimates that previous models probably underestimated methane emissions and overrepresented carbon dioxide emissions from those regions. 

Peatlands, common in the Arctic, are wetlands filled with dead and decaying organic matter. They are the result of millions of years of plants dying and breaking down into rich soil, so they contain a massive amount of carbon.