The brains of babies 'light up' like adults when exposed to the same painful stimulus, according to a small brain imaging study, and that suggests babies experience pain much like adults.

The study looked at 10 healthy infants aged between one and six days old and 10 healthy adults aged 23-36 years. Infants were recruited from the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford and adult volunteers were Oxford University staff or students.

The first national investigation of Medicare coverage of biologic disease-modifying drugs (DMARDs) found that in starting a single biologic DMARD, patients face more than $2,700 in co-payments each year before receiving relief from catastrophic coverage.

During the initial phase of coverage, most people are expected to pay a striking 29.6% of total biologic drugs costs (just under one-third) out-of-pocket, creating an enormous financial burden for patients with chronic, rheumatic diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. 

It's a dilemma many working parents: your child has a cough or a cold, do you send them to daycare?

Researchers from the University of Bristol have investigated the process of decision-making that parents go through when faced with this situation and find that parents viewed coughs and colds as less serious and not as contagious as sickness and diarrhea symptoms. This resulted in parents sending their child to daycare with a respiratory tract infection (RTI), which can result in the spread of similar illnesses in the wider community. 

Suicide remains the second leading cause of death for adolescents in the United States, this year nearly 5,000 adolescents will commit suicide and advocates claim over 500,000 will make an emergency room visit that is or could be a suicide attempt.

Better tools to evaluate, identify, and treat at-risk adolescents are crucial for the development and implementation of effective preventive strategies and a series of articles explores key factors that may contribute to suicidal risk and presents new assessment and treatment approaches.

The mosquito transmitted Chikungunya virus, which causes Chikungunya fever, is spreading continuously. No vaccine is so far available. Researchers of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut have experimentally recombined segments of the virus surface protein E2, thus creating artificial proteins. The domain generated that way - "sAB+" - was able to confer a protective effect against Chikungunya virus to the animal. An immunization by means of this small protein fragment could thus provide a suitable approach to developing a Chikungunya vaccine.

Dropping off a child at kindergarten for the first time can be one of the most memorable yet terrifying experiences of parenthood. Among the many concerns parents face is the worry whether your child will make friends - a key factor, research shows, in reducing anxiety, depression and the likelihood of being bullied.

For parents of children with disabilities, the concern is even greater as four-out-of-10 of their children will enter kindergarten without the social skills necessary to develop close friendships. The response from schools has been to create inclusive classrooms, where a significant number of students with disabilities now receive the majority of their education and are believed to have a better chance at developing close relationships with peers.

Scientists have discovered that neurons use minor "DNA surgeries" to toggle their activity levels all day, every day, and since these activity levels are important in learning, memory and brain disorders, it could shed light on a range of important questions. 

"We used to think that once a cell reaches full maturation, its DNA is totally stable, including the molecular tags attached to it to control its genes and maintain the cell's identity," says Hongjun Song, Ph.D., a professor of neurology and neuroscience in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's Institute for Cell Engineering. "This research shows that some cells actually alter their DNA all the time, just to perform everyday functions."

Bees play an invaluable role in maintaining biodiversity and in pollinating the crops that feed the world, so it is essential to improve our understanding of their biology and to investigate how they respond to environmental threats. Despite their often slow and apparently bumbling flights from flower to flower, bumblebees are anything but lazy. With over 250 bumblebee species globally, these important insects perform the laborious task of pollinating flowers in both wild and agricultural settings. A large number of fruits and vegetables would be missing from our plates had a bumblebee not done its job. 

Researchers gave bumblebees the option to choose between a sugar solution with nicotine in it and one without and found that bees infected with the Crithidia bombi parasite were more likely to go for the nicotine-laced nectar than those that weren't infected.

Happy Meals for broccoli?

A paper presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in San Diego says that because poor food choices in school cafeterias are a risk factor for childhood obesity, students will make better choices if healthy foods are labeled with smiley faces and have prizes - similar to what fast food corporations do to try and make lunch more fun.