Christmas,
narrative,

At 3 pm on Christmas Eve, millions of radios around the world will be tuned to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College Chapel in Cambridge in time to hear the pure voice of a single boy chorister singing one of the hardest solos of the church calendar, the first verse of “Once in Royal David’s City”.

For many, this signals the start of Christmas. Broadcasts of the Christmas Eve service from King’s began in 1928, but arguably it was under the guidance of Sir David Willcocks, who died in September 2015, aged 95, that the service – and the choir – became household names.

Every year, almost without thinking about it, we incorporate certain plant species into our Christmas celebrations. The most obvious is the Christmas tree, linked historically in England to Prince Albert – but its use in British homes goes back to at least 1761 when Charlotte wife of George III put up a tree at the royal court. (It’s probably worth noting here that the first artificial-brush Christmas tree was produced using the same machinery that was originally designed to produce toilet brushes.)

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A number of drugs already approved to treat parasitic infections, cancers, infertility and other conditions also show promise as antibiotic agents against staph and tuberculosis infections, according to a new study by University of Illinois chemists and collaborators. Because these agents act against multiple targets within the bacteria, it may be harder for bacteria to develop resistance.

The new study, led by Illinois chemistry professor Eric Oldfield, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Vultures are poor flappers and need to soar in order to fly, relying on updrafts to gain altitude. Spend enough time watching vultures, though, and you'll notice them wobbling at low altitudes as well as circling high in the air. New research in The Auk: Ornithological Advances shows how vultures use small-scale turbulence to stay aloft even when weather conditions don't favor the formation of thermals. The mechanism and purpose of this behavior, which researchers have dubbed 'contorted soaring,' are explained for the first time in the forthcoming article.

Johns Hopkins has demonstrated in animals that applying a pacemaker's mild electrical shocks to push the heart in and out of normal synchronized contraction for part of each day may be an effective way to slow down the progression of heart failure, a disorder that afflicts millions of Americans.

Surgical castration to remove the testicles (orchiectomy) of men with metastatic prostate cancer was associated with lower risks for adverse effects compared with men who underwent medical castration with gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist (GnRHa) therapy, according to an article published online by JAMA Oncology.

Androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT), which is achieved through surgical or medical castration, has been a cornerstone in the management of metastatic prostate cancer (PCa) for the past 50 years. But the use of bilateral orchiectomy has been nearly eliminated in the U.S. because of cosmetic and psychological concerns.

The back of a tiger could have been a blank canvas. Instead, nature painted the big cat with parallel stripes, evenly spaced and perpendicular to the spine. Scientists don't know exactly how stripes develop, but since the 1950s, mathematicians have been modeling possible scenarios. In Cell Systems on December 23, Harvard researchers assemble a range of these models into a single equation to identify what variables control stripe formation in living things.