Blood stem cell transplantation, widely known as bone marrow transplantation, is a powerful technique that potentially can provide a lifelong cure for a variety of diseases. But the procedure is so toxic that it is currently used to treat only the most critical cases.

Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have come up with a way of conducting the therapy that, in mice, dramatically lowers its toxicity. If the method eventually proves safe and effective for humans, it potentially could be used to cure autoimmune diseases like lupus, juvenile diabetes and multiple sclerosis; fix congenital metabolic disorders like "bubble boy" disease; and treat many more kinds of cancer, as well as make organ transplants safer and more successful.

How to be a healthy eater depends on culture. A recent study shows that in the U.S. and Japan, people who fit better with their culture have healthier eating habits. The results appear in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

"Our results suggest that if you want to help people to eat healthier--or if you want to promote any type of healthy behavior--you want to understand what meaning that behavior has in that culture, and what motivates people to be healthy in that culture," says lead author Cynthia Levine.

Healthy eating can help reduce one's risk for a number of different diseases down the line, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain types of cancer.

Health researchers predict that the transmission of dengue could actually decrease in a warmer climate, countering previous apocalyptic cocktail projections which included that the lethal virus would spread more easily.

Hundreds of millions of people are already infected with dengue each year, with some children dying in severe cases, so increasing a significant global health problem is an alarming concern. The model instead finds that a warmer climate would mean the ecologically useless mosquitoes that carry Dengue (and also Zika) would die off in the drier sections of the wet tropics of northeast Australia.

Nagoya, Japan - During cultivation of wild cereals such as rice for human agricultural use, a number of domestication-related traits have been selected for over time. These include an upright growth habit, the ability of the plant to keep its seed when ripe rather than dispersing it, and a lack of awns, which are bristles that grow from grass ears. Both Asian and African cultivated rice species share these traits despite their geographical isolation from each other. This suggests the traits' usefulness in promoting agriculture. Indeed, awnlessness aids planting, harvesting, and storage of seeds. It was recently shown that awn development has been lost through human selection on sets of genes that differ between Asian and African rice.

In recent years in Britain, we have heard much about bovine tuberculosis, which affects a wide variety of mammalian species, including mustelids, including the European badger Meles meles. There has been much argument over whether badgers should be culled to control the spread of the disease among cattle: indeed, badger culling in the United Kingdom has been a fraught and controversial subject.

Heavy users of partisan media outlets are more likely than others to hold political misperceptions that are in defiance of facts. So if you think Republicans blocked Zika funding by withholding money for Planned Parenthood, or that Hillary Clinton is having DNC staffers whacked, it is a good indication you partake in fringe media sites.

Tumor shrinkage is not the only measure of a successful anti-cancer therapy. A University of Colorado Cancer Center article published in the journal Frontiers in Oncology describes a promising alternative: metabolic imaging. Tumors rush their metabolism to grow and proliferate. By recognizing a drug's ability to stop this energy overuse, doctors may be able to determine a patient's response to a new, targeted therapy far earlier and with far more precision than watching and waiting for a tumor to shrink.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--With a trick of engineering, scientists at the Gladstone Institutes improved a potential weapon against inflammation and autoimmune disorders. Their work could one day benefit patients who suffer from inflammatory bowel disease or organ transplant rejection.

The Body's Natural Defense

Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) reside in bone marrow and have been found to secrete anti-inflammatory proteins that help regulate the immune system. More than 500 clinical trials are trying to use these cells to fight diseases, but so far, many have failed.

Malignant cancers strike certain organs, such as the colon or breast, more often than others. In an Opinion publishing August 9 in Trends in Cancer, researchers propose that this vulnerability in some organs may be due to natural selection. Humans can tolerate tumors in large or paired organs more easily than in small, critical organs, such as the heart, and so the larger organs may have evolved fewer mechanisms to defend against cancerous cells.