Holidays abroad may hold the key to tackling Scotland's vitamin D deficiency, research suggests.

People who take foreign breaks have higher levels of vitamin D in their blood, which has been linked to wide-ranging health benefits, a study has found.

Farmers also have higher levels of the vitamin -- which is produced in the skin after exposure to sunlight -- according to the findings.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh surveyed the vitamin D levels of around 2000 people in Orkney -- 1 in 10 of the population -- as part of the ORCADES study.

The team were interested to see whether widespread vitamin D deficiency in Orkney might explain why rates of multiple sclerosis are higher there than anywhere in the world.

Visitors to the 2016 Olympics and Paralympics Summer Games (5-21 August and 7-18 September 2016) in Rio de Jan, Brazil will be most at risk of gastrointestinal illness and vector-borne infections. Consequently, travellers are advised to pay attention to standard hygiene measures and protect themselves against mosquito and other insect bites using insect repellent and wearing long-sleeved shirts and trousers. It should be noted though that the Games will take place during the winter season in Rio de Janeiro when the cooler and drier weather will reduce mosquito populations, thus lowering the risk of mosquito-borne infections.

Retroviral DNAs integrate into host genomes, but their expression is normally repressed by cellular defense mechanisms. As an Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich team now shows, when these measures fail, accumulation of viral proteins may trigger programmed cell death.

Scientists from KU Leuven, Belgium, present a new therapeutic approach that may make it possible for HIV patients to (temporarily) stop their medication. The findings shed a completely new light on the search for a cure for HIV.

Existing antiviral inhibitors can suppress the replication of the HIV virus, but they cannot fully remove it from the human body. As a result, HIV patients have to take inhibitors for the rest of their lives. HIV researchers worldwide are currently developing new methods to eliminate the virus.

The HIV virus uses the cellular protein LEDGF as a kind of grappling-hook to attach itself to specific locations in our genetic material. Once its DNA is inside the cells of its human host, the virus can multiply and make the patient sick.

Most living organisms adapt their behavior to the rhythm of day and night. Plants are no exception: flowers open in the morning, some tree leaves close during the night. Researchers have been studying the day and night cycle in plants for a long time: Linnaeus observed that flowers in a dark cellar continued to open and close, and Darwin recorded the overnight movement of plant leaves and stalks and called it "sleep". But even to this day, such studies have only been done with small plants grown in pots, and nobody knew whether trees sleep as well. Now, a team of researchers from Austria, Finland and Hungary measured the sleep movement of fully grown trees using a time series of laser scanning point clouds consisting of millions of points each.

In a study appearing in the May 17 issue of JAMA, Andrew M. Ibrahim, M.D., of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and colleagues compared the surgical outcomes and associated Medicare payments at critical access hospitals vs non-critical access hospitals.

Critical access hospital designation was created to help ensure access to the more than 59 million people living in rural populations. Previous reports suggest these centers provide lower quality of care for common medical admissions. Little is known about the outcomes and costs of patients admitted for surgical procedures.