Signals from the immune system that help repel common parasites  like tapeworms, roundworms and other helminths can inadvertently cause a dormant viral infection to become active again, which may explain how complex interactions between infectious agents and the immune system have the potential to affect illness.

The scientists identified specific signals in mice that mobilize the immune system to fight parasites that infect nearly a quarter of all humans. The same signals cause an inactive herpes virus infection in the mice to begin replicating again.

The researchers speculated that the virus might be taking advantage of the host response to the worm infection, multiplying and spreading when the immune system's attention is fixed on fighting the worms.

How bad is western music? Chimps in a study published by the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition preferred silence - yet they liked music from Africa.

And music from India. What is the reason for that?

Music in the east is structured differently, notation is everything from Swara Kalana to Chôngganbo, but African music is not all that different. Why would chimps like it more? It may be tempo. The current findings say this may be the first to show that they display a preference for particular rhythmic patterns. If the authors aren't sure, none of the rest of the world can be.

Scientists working to make gene therapy a reality say they have figured out how to bypass a blood stem cell's natural defenses and efficiently insert disease-fighting genes into the cell's genome.

The drug rapamycin, which is commonly used to slow cancer growth and prevent organ rejection, enables delivery of a therapeutic dose of genes to blood stem cells while preserving stem cell function. The findings in Blood could lead to more effective and affordable long-term treatments for blood cell disorders in which mutations in the DNA cause abnormal cell functions, such as in leukemia and sickle cell anemia.

Chemists have constructed liquid crystals with optical properties that can be instantly and reversibly controlled by an external magnetic field and that paves the way for display applications using instantaneous and contactless nature of magnetic manipulation - like a poster that customizes based on the people around it.

Commercially available liquid crystals in electronic displays are composed of rod-like or plate-like molecules. When an electric field is applied, the molecules rotate and align themselves along the field direction, resulting in a rapid tuning of transmitted light.

The sign of a bad gambler is the belief that they are on a winning streak, that luck is just going their way.

Gambling is math and luck. If you can afford to keep doubling, you will win. And as long as you stop after you win, you can never lose. That is why casinos have table minimums and maximums, to prevent winning. 

But humans have a well-documented tendency to see instead winning and losing streaks in situations that, in fact, are random. Psychologists disagree about whether this "hot-hand bias" is a cultural artifact picked up in childhood or a predisposition deeply ingrained in the structure of our cognitive architecture. 

Advocates for subsidized health care insist we face a black and white issue - the rich have health care and the poor do not.

Yet poor people in developing nations are healthier than wealthier countries. 

Hans Rosling,  Professor of International Health at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, is giving a presentation at
the 64th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting where he intends to underscore the fact that false assumptions regarding the reality of life for people throughout the world are an impediment to the urgently needed potential solutions to the rising global demand for health care. 

That the world of health is divided between rich and poor is more cliché

A small, drab and highly inconspicuous moth has been flitting nameless about its special niche among the middle elevations of one of the world's oldest mountain ranges, the southern Appalachian Mountains in North America. A team of American scientists has now identified this new to science species as Cherokeea attakullakulla.

It was frequenting these haunts for tens of millions of years before the first humans set foot on this continent, all the while not caring in the least that it had no name or particular significance, but it will probably still get listed as endangered. 

A new form of neurotransmission influences the long-lasting memory created by addictive drugs, like cocaine and opioids, and the subsequent craving for these drugs of abuse, according to a recent study.

Loss of this type of neurotransmission creates changes in brains cells that resemble the changes caused by drug addiction so targeting it might lead to new therapies for treating drug addiction.

As hormone levels change during the transition to menopause, the quality of a woman's cholesterol carriers degrades, leaving her at greater risk for heart disease, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. 

Their evaluation was done using an advanced method to characterize cholesterol carriers in the blood and was published in the Journal of Lipid Research. They believe the results call for further research to evaluate the menopause-related dynamic changes in sex hormones on the quality of cholesterol carriers over time, as well as increased emphasis on the importance of healthy diet and exercise for women undergoing menopause.