February 3, 2016 - How has new legislation affected marijuana use in the United States? The best available data suggest that marijuana use is increasing in adults but not teens, with a decrease in marijuana-related arrests but an increase in treatment admissions, according to an update in the January/February Journal of Addiction Medicine, the official journal of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM). The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer.

Researchers have for the first time witnessed the death of a female orangutan at the hands of another female. Even more extraordinary is that the perpetrator recruited a male orangutan as a hired gun to help her corner and attack the victim. Before this observation, lethal fights between females had never been observed in orangutans; in other primates such fights occur mainly between males, according to Anna Marzec of the University of Zurich in Switzerland. She is the lead author of a report on the fatal incident, which appears in Springer's journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

Depression is a serious issue for expecting mothers. Left untreated, depression could have implications for a fetus's health. But treating the disease during pregnancy may carry health risks for the developing fetus, which makes an expecting mother's decision whether to take medication a very difficult one. To better understand how antidepressants affect fetuses during pregnancy, scientists studied exposure in mice. They report their findings in the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience.

The undefined blanket term "dark matter", what must exist in the universe to account for missing mass, is invoked for just about everything, and so a lot of claims are made affirming they have evidence for it. But one claim, that bursts of gamma rays are such, is instead  other astrophysical phenomena such as fast-rotating stars called millisecond pulsars, according to two new studies in Physical Review Letters.

Previous papers suggested that gamma rays coming from the dense region of space in the inner Milky Way galaxy could be caused when invisible dark matter particles collide. But using new statistical analysis methods, two research teams independently found that the gamma ray signals are uncharacteristic of those expected from dark matter. 

Researchers have shown that an enzyme key to regulating gene expression -- and also an oncogene when mutated -- is critical for the expression of numerous inflammatory compounds that have been implicated in age-related increases in cancer and tissue degeneration,

Inhibitors of the enzyme are being developed as a new anti-cancer target.

Aged and damaged cells frequently undergo a form of proliferation arrest called cellular senescence. These fading cells increase in human tissues with aging and are thought to contribute to age-related increases in both cancer and inflammation. The secretion of such inflammatory compounds as cytokines, growth factors, and proteases is called the senescence-associated secretory phenotype, or SASP.

The term "schizophrenia," with its connotation of hopeless chronic brain disease, should be dropped and replaced with something like "psychosis spectrum syndrome," argues Professor Jim van Os at Maastricht University Medical Centre in The BMJ.