Chronic inflammation in the bloodstream can 'fan the flames' of depression, much like throwing gasoline on a fire, according to a new paper from researchers at Rice University and Ohio State University.

'Inflammation: Depression Fans the Flames and Feasts on the Heat' appeared in a recent edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry. The study reviewed 200 existing papers on depression and inflammation.

Some biologists resist the idea of intelligence in evolution because they are in a culture war against religious opponents who believe descent with modification was guided by a higher being. By being forced to abandon terms in response to encroachment by a few in the religious movement, they are missing the point that evolution is intelligent by its very nature; evolution 'learns' by experience, that is what survival of the fitter means.

When it comes to trust in their physicians, minority groups in the United States are less likely than white people to believe their doctors care about them, according to research by University of Pennsylvania's Abigail Sewell.

"That's one of the biggest takeaways of this work," said Sewell, a Vice Provost Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Penn's Population Studies Center in the School of Arts&Sciences. "African-Americans and Latinos are more likely to think this," though the latter group, she showed, has even deeper mistrust of physicians, likely because one or both Latino parents originally came from somewhere else.

It's not enough to stay fit as you age if you want to avoid falls, according to an analysis of how many hours older people exercised and how well they performed on four balance tests.

Every year around 30 percent of all people aged 65 and older experience a fall. In the same age group, falls account for 40 percent of all injury-related deaths worldwide. Injuries from falls can have serious consequences. One in four seniors who break their hip die within a year, and quality of life can be greatly reduced for survivors.

SAN DIEGO, CA--Commonly, we think of cancer as anarchy, a leaderless mob of deranged cells, storming through the body. Pedro Lowenstein, Sebastien Motsch, and colleagues at the University of Michigan and University of Arizona think that cancer is highly organized--self-organized. In brain cancer, the Michigan and Arizona researchers report that glioma cells build tumors by self-organizing into streams,10-20 cells wide, that obey a mathematically predicted pattern for autonomous agents flowing together. These streams drag along slower gliomas, may block entry of immune cells, and swirl around a central axis containing glioma stem cells that feed the tumor's growth.

Gillnetting around the world is ensnaring hundreds of thousands of small cetaceans every year, threatening several species of dolphins and porpoises with extinction, according to research presented at the Society of Marine Mammalogy's 21st biennial conference in San Francisco this week.

But there is one bright spot in the Gulf of California, where Mexican authorities earlier this year instituted an emergency two-year ban on gillnetting to help save the critically endangered vaquita, now the rarest marine mammal species on the planet. Fewer than 100 vaquita remain, scientists speaking at the conference said.