If we want to see worldwide trends in public health, look to the South Pacific archipelago of Samoa and American Samoa.

About 75 percent of the U.S. territory's adult population is obese, the highest rate in the world. Rates of type 2 diabetes top 20 percent and a recent study found that the elevated obesity rates are now even present in newborns.

This obesity epidemic began there a few decades ago. Brown University epidemiologist Stephen McGarvey has investigated the obvious question: How did all this happen?

Tularemia, also called "rabbit fever",  is, unlike anthrax or smallpox, the bioweapon you are least likely to know about.

But it is common in the northeastern United States and because it has been weaponized in various parts of the world could be a significant risk to biosecurity.

At the Annual Biophysical Society Meeting in San Francisco, Geoffrey K. Feld, a Postdoctoral researcher in the Physical&Life Sciences Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), described the team's work to uncover the secrets of the bacterium Francisella tularensis, which causes tularemia.

Some people don't remember dreams at all while some remember them frequently. What separates them?

Images in brain scans, at least, though that may lead to a more meaningful answer also. 

A small minority of religious and scientific communities insist the two can't get along. If you see 'scientocracy' or 'Galileo' invoked, you can be sure rationality has left the discussion.

Almost 50 percent of scientists consider themselves religious and almost 50 percent of Evangelicals, the religious demographic least likely to accept evolution, say that science and religion get along just fine.

But among the general public, only 38 percent feel that way.

Monoclonal antibodies directed against tumor antigens have proven effective for treating some forms of cancer. Despite the increasing use of monoclonal antibody therapy, it is not clear how these antibodies drive tumor removal.

In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Marjolein van Egmond and colleagues at the VU University Medical Center found that macrophage populations mediate tumor cell removal following monoclonal antibody treatment by actively phagocytosing tumor cells.

As scientists try to forecast the effects of climate change, one of the missing pieces of the puzzle is what will happen to the carbon in the soil and the microbes too.

Scientists studying grasslands in Oklahoma have discovered that an increase of 2 degrees Celsius in the air temperature above the soil creates significant changes to the microbial ecosystem underground. Compared to a control group with no warming, plants in the warmer plots grew faster and higher, which put more carbon into the soil as the plants senesce. The microbial ecosystem responded by altering its DNA to enhance the ability to handle the excess carbon.