Scientists have found that people infected by the dengue virus but showing no clinical symptoms can actually infect mosquitoes that bite them. It appears that these asymptomatic people - who, together with mildly symptomatic patients, represent three-quarters of all dengue infections - could be involved in the transmission chain of the virus. 

The ice-covered Arctic Ocean is a more important factor concerning the concentration of the greenhouse gas methane in the atmosphere than previously assumed. Experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) report on the newly discovered interactions between the atmosphere, sea ice and the ocean in a recent online study in the journal Nature's Scientific Reports.

The National Institutes of Natural Sciences National Institute for Fusion Science applied the "Momentary Heating Propagation Method" to the DIII-D tokamak device operated for the United States Office of Science, Department of Energy, by the General Atomics and made the important discovery of a new plasma confinement state. This discovery was introduced in the November 4, 2015, issue of Scientific Reports, a journal of the British science journal Nature group, in an article titled "Self-regulated oscillation of transport and topology of magnetic islands in toroidal plasmas."

Researchers have found more than half of the public datasets provided with scientific papers are incomplete, which prevents reproducibility tests and follow-up studies.

However, slight improvements to research practices could make a big difference.

Lead researcher Dr Dominique Roche from The Australian National University (ANU) said many peer-reviewed biological journals now require authors to publicly archive their data when a paper is published.

This is professor Loeske Kruuk. Credit: Stuart Hay, ANU

A new study strengthens growing evidence that Mycoplasma genitalium (MG) is a sexually transmitted infection (STI). The findings are recently published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Analyses of over 4500 of urine samples from Britain's third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3) showed that MG was prevalent in up to 1% of the general population aged 16-44, who had reported at least one sexual partner. Prevalence was much higher in those who had reported more than four sexual partners in the past year -- 5.2% in men and 3.1% in women. Absence of the infection in over 200 16-17 year olds who had not had vaginal, anal, or oral sex provided further evidence that MG is transmitted sexually.

Human remains dating back to the Late Upper Palaeolithic period over 13,000 years ago has revealed a previously unknown "fourth strand" of ancient European ancestry. 

This new lineage stems from populations of hunter-gatherers that split from western hunter-gatherers shortly after the 'out of Africa' expansion some 45,000 years ago and went on to settle in the Caucasus region, where southern Russia meets Georgia today.

Here these hunter-gatherers remained for millennia, isolated as the Ice Age culminated in the last 'Glacial Maximum' some 25,000 years ago. They weathered the cold in the relative shelter of the Caucasus mountains until eventual thawing allowed movement and brought them into contact with other populations, likely from further east. 

A recent paper examined the changing nature of family living situations. University of Melbourne
Associate Professor Cassandra Szoeke and Katherine Burn, from the University's Faculty of Medicine, Health and Dentistry Sciences, examined both 'boomerang kids' (those who return home) and 'failure to launch' kids (those who never left).

The project reviewed 20 studies involving 20 million people worldwide and was published in Maturitas.

The research shows:

• The shifting economic climate and changes in social norms were driving the phenomenon of kids staying at home for longer.

MINNEAPOLIS - Brain scans of people in a coma may help predict who will regain consciousness, according to a study published in the November 11, 2015, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study looked at connections between areas of the brain that play a role in regulating consciousness.

It may seem like bees are suddenly all the rage in environmental fundraising campaigns today but they have been important to human culture - for almost as long as modern farming, humans have been interested in bees and the products they produce. 

A new analysis of maternal mortality worldwide conducted by the United Nations found that the maternal mortality ratio saw a relative decline of 43.9 percent during the 25-year period of 1990-2015. Details appear in an early online issue of The Lancet.

The study analyzed levels and trends in maternal mortality in 183 countries and found that the maternal mortality ratio declined from 385 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1990 to 216 in 2015. They also saw great variability in progress toward reducing mortality.