Scientists call them toxins but these bacterial proteins don't poison us, at least not directly. Instead, they restrain the growth of the bacteria that make them, establishing a dormant "persister cell" state that is tolerant to antibiotics.

Researchers at Emory University School of Medicine have obtained precise pictures showing how a toxin protein, called HigB, recognizes and rips up RNA as part of its growth-inhibition function. Their findings could lead to a better understanding of the formation of persister cells and how they maintain themselves.

Citations are a time-honored measure now used to assess scholarly standing and evaluate academic productivity by funding committees that control government research.

For that reason, citations that are critical in nature, and point out limitations, inconsistencies or flaws in previous work, can be detrimental. A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that negative citations were more likely to criticize highly-read papers, they tended to originate from scholars who were close to the authors of the original articles in academic discipline and social distance - but at least 150 miles away geographically. 

Samples of permafrost soil are providing new ways to anticipate what may happen if northern regions of the world warm and begin to thaw.

Florida State University doctoral student Travis Drake and Florida State University Assistant Professor Robert Spencer write in a new paper that permafrost organic material is so biodegradable that as soon as it thaws, the carbon is almost immediately consumed by single-cell organisms called microbes and then released back into the air as carbon dioxide, feeding the global climate cycle. Their findings are laid out in an article published today by the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.

Many transgender people who want to bear children are faced with barriers in the healthcare system, argue Juno Obedin-Maliver and Harvey Makadon in a commentary published in SAGE journal Obstetric Medicine.

Husbands and wives married for a long time don't look at marital problems in the same way. When a marriage has troubles, women worry and become sad and they get frustrated. For men, it's frustration and not much more.

In a new sociology survey published in the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, worry and frustration were among the most common negative emotions reported by older adults but men and women in long-term marriages deal with marriage difficulties differently.

Gastric cancer - stomach cancer - does not respond well to existing treatments and is currently the third leading cause of cancer death in the world, after lung and liver cancer.

Researchers have discovered that certain drugs, currently used to treat breast, ovarian and pancreatic cancers, could also be used to treat certain gastric cancers with a particular pattern of mutations, their genomic molecular fingerprint. 

A new survey of 15,000 patients at drug-treatment centers in 49 statesshows that drug abusers are not completely abandoning prescription opioids for heroin. Instead, many use the two concurrently based on their availability.

The findings also reveal regional variations in the use of heroin and prescription painkillers.

"On the East and West coasts, combined heroin and prescription drug use has surpassed the exclusive use of prescription opioids," said senior investigator Theodore J. Cicero, PhD of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, . "This trend is less apparent in the Midwest, and in the Deep South, we saw a persistent use of prescription drugs -- but not much heroin."

New data presented at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meetings in Dallas, Texas, implicates early humans in the extinction of large mammals, birds and lizards in Australia.

The "Anthropocene" has been with us for thousands of years, it seems - and the ancestors of Australian Aborigines have been implicated in the demise of a plethora of large-bodied animals, including a huge monitor lizard, large terrestrial birds, a giant wombat, the marsupial lion, and giant kangaroos.

One of the great hypocrisies in climate negotiations a decade ago was exempting China from any agreement by giving them "developing nation" status. The rationale was that their emissions were not that high, according to Europe, who had remained fans of nuclear energy and therefore used less fossil fuels.

But scientists knew that policy-makers and activists were using self-reported claims about the emissions. Soon, better measurement techniques began to show giant streams of CO2 coming out of the communist nation and the problem could no longer be denied. When they hosted the Olympics in Beijing, they banned cars for all but wealthy elites and visiting tourists, which made a difference, but isn't really a solution for countries with freedom.

It's no secret that cigarettes and heavy drinking are linked, people who engage in risky behaviors tend to do so in multiple ways, but a link to e-cigarettes, which have no tobacco, is new. A paper in Addictive Behaviors also found that more women than men use e-cigarettes socially, like when drinking, opposite to patterns seen in regular cigarette smoking.