Researchers have developed a new technique to control populations of a major livestock pest in Australia and New Zealand.

They genetically modified lines of female Australian sheep blowflies (Lucilia cuprina), making female flies dependent upon a common antibiotic -
tetracycline
- to survive. 

Dr. Max Scott, professor of entomology at North Carolina State University, and colleagues say that female blowflies that did not receive the antibiotic died in the late larval or pupal stages, before reaching adulthood. Several genetically modified lines lacking tetracycline showed 100 percent female deaths.

In 2003, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued warnings about a potential danger for young people taking antidepressants. The warnings drew intense and outright exaggerated media coverage.

Result: A sudden, steep decline in the number of prescriptions for antidepressants and an increase in suicide attempts by teens and young adults.

Writing in BMJ, researchers at Harvard Medical School's Department of Population Medicine and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute report that in the year following the warnings, when antidepressant prescriptions fell by more than a fifth among young people, there was a relative increase of 21.7 percent in suicide attempts by overdose with psychotropic drugs, and 33.7 percent among young adults.

Parents of children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis go on to have fewer kids after the first signs of the disorder manifest or a diagnosis is made, according to an article in JAMA.

Chronic tissue inflammation is typically associated with obesity and metabolic disease, but new research finds that a level of "healthy" inflammation is necessary to prevent metabolic diseases, such as fatty liver.

Researchers have created a noninvasive way to detect heart-transplant rejection weeks or months earlier than previously possible. The test relies on the detection of increasing amounts of the donor's DNA in the blood of the recipient and does not require the removal of any heart tissue.

The test, called a cell-free DNA test, is different from another blood test, AlloMap, used to detect rejection. The commercially available AlloMap uses a blood sample to analyze the expression of immune-system genes involved in rejection. The researchers found that the cell-free DNA test outperformed AlloMap by a substantial margin.

Spiders are traditionally viewed as predators of insects but zoologists have published a study that finds spiders all over the world also prey on fish. 

That spiders are not exclusively insectivorous and larger-sized species supplement their diet by occasionally catching small fish is somewhat new.