Memories are fragile and dependent on any number of factors, including changes to various types of nerves. In the common fruit fly, these changes take place in multiple parts of the insect brain.

Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have been able to pinpoint a handful of neurons where certain types of memory formation occur, a mapping feat that one day could help scientists predict disease-damaged neurons in humans with the same specificity.

There is a belief that online social behavior related to video gaming replaces real life but scholars found that is not so; instead of making the social circle smaller, it expands the social lives of gamers.

The authors traveled to more than 20 public gaming events in Canada and the United Kingdom, from 2,500-player events held in convention centers to 20-player events held in bars. The researchers observed the behavior of thousands of players, and had 378 players take a survey, with a focus on players of massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as EVE Online and World of Warcraft.

Generations are generally useless, aside from marketing plans. The Baby Boom happened in 1946, after soldiers returned home from war (the occupying soldiers came from a different, supplemental draft so they often already had kids) and it was later that marketing groups changed them into a generation stretching to 1964 and even 1965.

In 2007, members of the Haystack Group in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory released a set of Web development tools called Exhibit, which lets novices quickly put together interactive data visualizations, such as maps with sortable data embedded in them, sortable tables that automatically pull in updated data from other sites, and sortable displays of linked thumbnail images.

Medicine stopped being symptom-based over 50 years ago but psychology still uses it. Little is known about why or how the brain works the way it does, much less personality variation, so if a psychological therapy works, it works.

Heart attack death has declined across all regions of the United States but it remains proportionately higher in the South, according to a paperat the American College of Cardiology's 63rd Annual Scientific Session.

In previous research (Nature, July 2013), UC Berkeley scientists Beatriz Vicoso, Ph.D., and Doris Bachtrog, Ph.D., determined that genes on the so-called "dot chromosome," or fourth chromosome, of the fruit fly Drosophilia melanogaster are X-linked in three other related fly species.

These and other findings revealed that the fruit fly's "dot chromosome" had descended from a differentiated X chromosome and suggests that several of the chromosome's puzzling features are remnants of its heritage as a sex chromosome. For example, the expression levels of genes on the "dot chromosome" generally are higher in female than in male fly embryos during early development.

Four years ago, University of Iowa scientists discovered that mutations in the prickle gene in Drosophila were responsible for much more than merely altering the bristles on the fly's body to point them in the wrong direction.

Prompted by a colleague's finding that PRICKLE gene mutations were responsible for triggering a form of epilepsy in humans, John Manak, Ph.D., who led the fly research team, took a closer look at the Drosophila prickle mutants. (PRICKLE refers to the human gene, while prickle is the Drosophila form of the gene.)

On bmj.com today, Angela Coulter, Associate Professor at Oxford University and colleagues argue that this is "unethical" and call for a coordinated approach to use the information to help improve services.

Their views follow recent news of hospital trusts "helping" patients to write favourable reports of their experience of their services – and a report by Healthwatch England warning that the complaints system for the NHS in England is "hopelessly complicated" and needs an overhaul.

Although the targeted cancer treatment drug crizotinib is very effective in causing rapid regression of a particular form of lung cancer, patients' tumors inevitably become resistant to the drug. Now a new drug called ceritinib appears to be effective against advanced ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), both in tumors that have become resistant to crizotinib and in those never treated with the older drug. The results of a phase 1 clinical trial conducted at centers in 11 countries are reported in the March 27 New England Journal of Medicine.