"Keeping up with the Joneses" is a colloquialism for developing world desire to have the same or better status in society than peers. If someone gets a new car, you get a new car.

In some people, status is so important they suffer psychological distress if they lack status.

But it isn't just for the middle class in Western nations, say anthropologists at U.C. Santa Barbara, who found that the same need exists among the Tsimane, an egalitarian society of forager-farmers in the Bolivian Amazon. 

Image: Genetic Literacy Project

By Tabitha M. Powledge, Genetic Literacy Project

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Eric Betzig of Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stefan W. Hell of the 
Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and William E. Moerner of Stanford University “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”.

Optical microscopy was once held back by a limitation: that it could never obtain a better resolution than half the wavelength of light. Helped by fluorescent molecules the Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 2014 ingeniously circumvented this limitation and brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension.

The 21st century promises to bring a kind of science warfare only dreamed about in science fiction. Already it's become clear that it is possible to paralyze a large chunk of America and get policymakers in perpetual crisis mode, even with something as well-known as ebola.(1)

That kind of threat is getting mainstream attention now, but it has long been researched by government agencies that are in the business of predicting threats. And scientists working for them have recently created a hybrid bacteria - a cyborg mix of computer chip and genetically modified organism - that can not only detect infectious diseases but automatically mobilize to defeat them. This ain't your daddy's Deathlok.(2)

Though numerous experts and policy makers have called for hospitals to screen patients for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections and isolate anyone testing positive to prevent the spread "Superbugs" in healthcare settings, it's too economically burdensome.
 
Several states have enacted laws requiring patients be screened for MRSA upon admission but  two new abstracts, scheduled for presentation on Friday at IDWeek, the annual scientific meeting for infectious disease specialists, found universal MRSA screening and isolation of high-risk patients will help prevent MRSA infections but may be too economically burdensome for an individual hospital to adopt. 

Sauropods,  large, long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs such as Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus, are the largest animals to have ever walked the Earth, with the biggest weighing 80 tons.

Clearly, a single creature the size of 11 elephants would have needed vast amounts of food. How did multiple sauropod species live alongside one another in prehistoric ecosystems between 210 and 65 million years ago?

New research from the University of Bristol and the Natural History Museum, London details the community of the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation, a distinctive sequence of sedimentary rock in the western United States from which over 10 species of sauropod are known.

Researchers have created a molecule known as a peptide mimic that displays a functionally critical region of the virus that is universally conserved in all known species of Ebola. This new tool can be used as a drug target in the discovery of anti-Ebola agents that are effective against all known strains and likely future strains. 

Ebola is a lethal virus that causes severe hemorrhagic fever with a 50 percent to 90 percent mortality rate. There are five known species of the virus. Outbreaks have been occurring with increasing frequency in recent years, and an unprecedented and rapidly expanding Ebola outbreak is currently spreading through several countries in West Africa with devastating consequences.

Emphasizing weight in health definitions could be harmful to patients, finds an article in the Journal of Obesity. 

Dr. Rachel Calogero of the School of Psychology at the University of Kent and colleagues recommend that this approach, known as 'weight-normative', is replaced by health care professionals, public health officials and policy-makers with a 'weight-inclusive' approach.