Santa Claus performers struggle with fulfilling the role of jolly old St. Nicholas due to an acute awareness of the sensitivities around interactions with children in modern times, according to 15 formal interviews with Santa performers comprising 14 male Santa performers aged between 52 and 81 and one female grotto assistant who performed in the guise of an elf, aged 32.

A new study challenges the popular idea that sexual cannibalism occurs because a female is unable to alter or 'tone down' her aggressive mindset after foraging and hunting for prey. Instead, females are sexually cannibalistic because they are testing the males, rather than just being inherently aggressive, says University of Melbourne scientist Dr. Mark Elgar.

In the first trial, 11 of 16 female raft spiders (Dolomedes fimbriatus) that copulated then attacked the males during or immediately after copulation. But only four attacks were fatal.

Poisonings from recreational drug and alcohol use account for 9 percent of all poisoning-related hospital admissions,while males and people under 30 are at greatest risk, according to a paper in Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

The lesson: Young people are more inclined to be both experimental and stupid about it, especially at Australian music festivals. The report is based on 13,805 patient records collected between January 1996 and December 2013 using data from the Hunter Area Toxicology Service (HATS). The report finds that stimulants were the drug class most commonly linked to recreational poisonings, followed by alcohol, opioids, sedatives, hallucinogens, cannabis, non-narcotic analgesics, ecstasy and cocaine. 

Multiple sclerosis (MS) may be triggered by the death of brain cells that make myelin, the insulation around nerve fibers, according to research on a novel mouse model developed by scientists from the University of Chicago and Northwestern Medicine. The death of these cells initiates an autoimmune response against myelin, the main characteristic of the disease, which leads to MS-like symptoms in mice.

This reaction can be prevented, however, through the application of specially developed nanoparticles, even after the loss of those brain cells. The nanoparticles are being developed for clinical trials that could lead to new treatments in humans.

A new tree frog species, Dendropsophus bromeliaceus, spends its tadpole stage in pooled water that collects in bromeliad plants in the Brazilian Atlantic forest, according to a study published December 9, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Rodrigo Ferreira from the Utah State University and Universidade Vila Velha and colleagues.

Scientists compared the tree frog molecular data with closely related frogs and found it is a new species in the Dendropsophus genus. They named the species Dendropsophus bromeliaceus and gave it the common name Teresensis' bromeliad treefrog, which refers to the people born in the municipality of Santa Teresa, Brazil where it was found.

The key to helping animals evolve quickly in response to climate change could actually be their predators, according to a new study which says that species interactions, meaning the way species interact with each other in an ecosystem, like in a predator-prey relationship, is important to understanding how animals will respond to climate change.  

"Not only can predators keep prey populations in check but in some cases they can help speed up the evolutionary response to climate change," said Michelle Tseng, a research associate in UBC's Department of Zoology and lead author of the study. "We now understand that species interactions and evolution can play a significant role in preventing animals from going extinct in a rapidly changing climate."

(Boston)--For the first time, CTE has been confirmed as a unique disease that can be definitively diagnosed by neuropathological examination of brain tissue. A consensus panel of expert neuropathologists concluded that CTE has a pathognomonic signature in the brain, an advance that represents a milestone for CTE research and lays the foundation for future studies defining the clinical symptoms, genetic risk factors and therapeutic strategies for CTE.

The neuropathological criteria defining CTE, or the NINDS CTE criteria, which appear in the journal Acta Neuropathologica, had been announced earlier this year at the Foundation of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) board meeting.

They say we can't escape our past--no matter how much we change, we still have the memory of what came before; the same can be said of our cells.

Adult cells, such as skin or blood cells, have a cellular "memory," or record of how the cell changes as it develops from an uncommitted embryonic cell into a specialized adult cell. Now, Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in collaboration with scientists from the Research Institutes of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) and Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna have identified genes that when suppressed effectively erase a cell's memory, making the cell more susceptible to reprogramming and, consequently, making the process of reprogramming quicker and more efficient.

Rats with restricted feeding schedules learn to eat more, helped by the "hunger hormone" ghrelin, according to new research from the University of Southern California.

The insights, to be published in the journal eLife, could be valuable for helping the researchers develop new effective weight-loss therapies.

"We are looking deep into the higher order functions of the brain to unpick not just which hormones are important for controlling our impulses but exactly how the signals and connections work," says lead author Scott Kanoski from the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.