A new integrative medicine paper examines the role of gut bacteria on the maturation of the immune system and claims evidence supporting the use of butyrate as therapy for inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn's disease, based on mouse models.

Butyrate, a by-product of the digestion of dietary fiber by gut microbes, is believed to act as an epigenetic switch that boosts the immune system by inducing the production of regulatory T cells in the gut. 

A comprehensive analysis of more than 1 million hospital admissions has found that over 50 percent of non-surgical patients were prescribed 
opioid pain medications
 during their hospitalizations, often at very high doses, and that more than half of those exposed were still receiving these medications on the day they were discharged from the hospital.

Opioids are narcotic pain medications including morphine, oxycodone and fentanyl. In recent years, the problem of opioid addiction and overdoses has grown more acute, with updated figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reporting that the rate of fatal overdoses from opioids nearly quadrupled over the last decade, with estimates of more than 14,000 deaths from opioid overdoses annually.

Panthera blytheae is the oldest big cat fossil ever found and fills a significant gap in the fossil record, according to results announced today.

The Panthera blytheae skull was excavated and described by a team led by Jack Tseng, a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York.

An international team say they know what is inside the enigmatic jets emitted by black holes. Jets are narrow beams of matter spat out at high speed from near a central object, like a black hole.

In the 1990s, the US administration decided the best way to protect wages for American workers was by making it very difficult for those pesky foreign science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduates living here to get work visas. Student visas remained easy to get, it was okay to spend money to live in the US, but getting paid was a no-no.

It's a common enough tale, told throughout the history of literature. A parent prefers their 'real' children and the life of the step-child is miserable as a result, compared to the biological child.

That "Cinderella effect" claims that it is biologically inevitable that parents care less for stepchildren because they do not spread their genes - as you might expect, actual biologists did not come up with it, anthropologists did. And the authors of a new paper recognize something you knew all along; in many cases, the value and personality of a step-child matters more than biological inheritance, just like with biological children. 

Trastuzumab and anthracyclines given concurrently are effective at treating HER-2-positive breast cancer but there is worry that this could lead to increased risk of cardiac toxicity.

New research shows these agents do not need to be given concurrently to achieve a high rate of complete pathological remission. The findings investigated the timing of trastuzumab administration with anthracycline and taxane chemotherapy.

The randomized phase III trial enrolled 280 women with operable HER-2 positive invasive breast cancer at 36 centers across the United States from September 2007 through December 2011.

Type 2 diabetes brings with it a long list of complementary issues: vascular and heart disease, eye problems, nerve damage, kidney disease, hearing problems and Alzheimer's disease.

A new study in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research adds skeletal problems to that list, namely osteoporosis.

Online course platforms are good for easier topics, like manufacturing or history, but they only provide a sort of "X For Dummies" way to get overview knowledge of science (still, free is hard to complain about) but Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory is trying to do what Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare or iTunes U and even Phet Interactive Simulations cannot - let students interact with a real physical experiment.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory has developed software for an experiment that can be observed and controlled from anywhere in the world. And a lot of it has been developed by high school and undergraduate interns.