Populating the gastrointestinal (GI) tracts of mice with Bacteroides species producing a specific enzyme helped protect the good commensal bacteria from the harmful effects of antibiotics, according to a new paper in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

Yes, in some cases antibiotic resistance is a friend.

Antibiotics are powerful weapons against pathogens but most are relatively indiscriminate, killing the good bacteria along with the bad. Thus, they may render patients vulnerable to invasion by virulent, antibiotic-resistant pathogens that frequently populate hospitals.

Tamoxifen is a widely used breast cancer drug but  some women with advanced, postmenopausal estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer
don't respond to it. 

A study in Clinical Cancer Research found that the inexpensive anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) reverses resistance to tamoxifen in mice, meaning that adding HCQ to tamoxifen could provide a new treatment option for women with the ER+ subtype, which accounts for an estimated 70 percent of all breast cancers. While many of these women are treated with tamoxifen, which blocks estrogen from fueling the tumor, 50 percent of these cancers will either not respond or will become resistant to tamoxifen over time. 

Hydrogen as a fuel source sounds wonderful - its byproduct is water and it releases no CO2. The problem is that compressed hydrogen is scary while uncompressed hydrogen means hauling a container the size of a bus behind your car.

Some people are okay with long charging times and short driving distances for electric cars so if the charging times are eliminated, distance may not be a problem. But adoption is tough - people don't want to buy something before it is viable but it won't become viable until a lot of people buy it. It's the technology variation on the chicken-egg problem.

For some cigarette smokers, quitting is relatively easy. Some people never even really get addicted while for some, strategies to aid quitting like e-cigarettes or nicotine patches or even hypnosis work while for others nothing does. 

Do they just not want to quit? Are they weak? Or do they need a better motivation. Psychologists using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) say they have identified an aspect of brain activity that helps to predict the effectiveness of a reward-based strategy as motivation to quit smoking.

The researchers observed the brains of nicotine-deprived smokers with fMRI and found that those who exhibited the weakest response to rewards were also the least willing to refrain from smoking, even when offered money to do so.

The first cases of Mad Cow disease in humans - properly known as variant Creutzfeld Jakob Disease, or vCJD, though no one recognizes that name - occurred in the late 1990s and were thought to be the consequence of eating contaminated beef products.

Since then, several cases of secondary infections caused by transfusions with blood from donors who subsequently developed vCJD have been reported, raising concerns about the safety of blood and blood products. A new paper describes an assay that can detect prions in blood samples from humans with vCJD and in animals at early stages of the (asymptomatic) incubation phase.

Phone dating apps used by gay men to find a sexual partner lead to a higher risk of getting common sexually transmitted infections than meeting online or in bars and clubs, suggests a new paper in Sexually Transmitted Infections.

Previous research has suggested that gay and bi-curious men who meet online are more likely to indulge in unprotected sex and to have more partners than men meeting potential partners in other ways. Smartphone apps such as Grindr, Scruff, and Recon have become an increasingly popular way to hook up with potential sexual partners. They allow registered users to use their smartphone's GPS (global positioning system) to locate and network with other users in the vicinity.