Antibiotics are a part of nature, as is antibiotic resistance. A study on how a powerful antibiotic agent gets made in nature solved a decades-old mystery and opens up new avenues of research into thousands of similar molecules.

The team focused on a class of compounds that includes dozens with antibiotic properties. The most famous of these is nisin, a natural product in milk that can be synthesized in the lab and is added to foods as a preservative. Nisin has been used to combat food-borne pathogens since the late 1960s.

Though the Centers for Disease Control has been a little confused about dealing with Ebola, Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness has guidelines for volunteers who want to help. 

Some are obvious. If you deal with Ebola patients, quarantine yourself for a little while. People in the bowling alley don't need to know right now that you were with Doctors Without Borders and that you just got back from helping overseas.

Common sense is needed, though The World Health Organization has asked for more volunteers to aid in the outbreak. More is not better if they are not trained and prepared, so it is best to have trained emergency response clinicians instead of medical students and trainees. 

A recent survey found that 50% of final year veterinary students in the UK don't feel confident discussing dental problems or doing oral cavity examinations of small pets.

Most vets just dread the idea of seriously discussing feline dental procedures.

UK veterinarians Rachel Perry and Elise Robertson have taken it upon thenselves to plug this educational and fee gap and have coordinated a ground-breaking two-part special issue of the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery devoted to feline dentistry.

When obese children with asthma run out of breath it could be due to poor physical health related to weight, yet it is considered asthma often enough that there could be high and unnecessary use of rescue medications, finds a paper in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. 

The researchers reviewed the lung function, treatment uses, symptom patterns, healthcare utilization, quality of life and caregiver perceptions of asthma-related quality of life in overweight/obese children with asthma (BMI ≥ 85th percentile) and lean counterparts (BMI 20-65th percentile). In total 58 children participated in the study's three clinical visits. 

Three years ago, a patient at Sahlgrenska University Hospital received a blood vessel transplant grown from her own stem cells. Two other transplants were performed in 2012. The patients, two young children, had the same condition as in the first case – they were missing the vein that goes from the gastrointestinal tract to the liver. 

Professors
Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson, Professor of Transplantation Biology at The Univerisity of Gothenburg, and Michael Olausson, Surgeon/Medical Director of the Transplant Center and Professor at Sahlgrenska Academy, came up with the idea, planned and carried out the procedure.

Focus on greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has led to a lot of confusion among the public: bad storms are caused by global warming but a lack of warming is not.

There may be a reason things don't add up, according to a paper in Science. The circulation of the ocean plays an equally important role in regulating the earth's climate, it finds. In their study, the researchers say the major cooling of Earth and continental ice build-up in the Northern Hemisphere 2.7 million years ago coincided with a shift in the circulation of the ocean – which pulls in heat and carbon dioxide in the Atlantic and moves them through the deep ocean from north to south until it's released in the Pacific.

Though Ebola tends to occur in waves, the filoviruses family to which Ebola and its lethal relative Marburg belong, are at least 16 million years old.

Filoviruses likely existed in the Miocene Epoch, and at that time, the evolutionary lines leading to Ebola and Marburg had already diverged, according to a paper inl PeerJ. It was once believed that the viruses only came into being some 10,000 years ago, coinciding with the rise of agriculture but now it is believed to have developed at the time when great apes arose.