Sometimes viruses do not attack right away, they instead find a way to enter the cells of the human body without tripping the alarm, and stay there without notice until it is time to strike. It’s how viruses in the herpesvirus family, like human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), do their business.

HCMV infects people at high rates all around the world. People with compromised or weakened immune systems are especially vulnerable. In newborn babies, the virus can cause deafness, intellectual disability and learning disorders. Other viruses in the herpesvirus family can cause cancer, shingles and mononucleosis. Once people are infected, they will have the virus their entire lives, due to its ability to cycle between latent and active states in the body.

There has long been evidence that lifestyles of parents could influence offspring - a parent who smokes or does drugs has a greater chance of having a child with a birth defect - but epigenetics is a brand new world of how choices can be passed through generations, because it says that the environment may affect how cells read genes instead of causing changes in the DNA sequence.

It isn't obvious that sign language, gestures to replace hearing words, would have regional dialects - accents - but it is so, according to Jami Fisher, a lecturer in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Linguistics, who is working on a project to document what they're calling the Philadelphia accent of this language.

What differentiates one region of American Sign Language from other such dialects? Why do those in the deaf community have an intuition that it's different? And how could scientists understand the regional variation?

PHILADELPHIA - For years, researchers have noted a tantalizing link between some neurologic conditions and certain species of the herpes virus. In patients with Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, and cerebellar ataxia, among other neuropathies, the cerebrospinal fluid teems with Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). Yet, the nature of that link has remained unclear, as it has been assumed that EBV, as well as other viruses in the same sub-family, called gammaherpesviruses, cannot infect neurons.

The first mention of the bagel is in a 1610 text in a sumptuary law from the city of Krakow but in the late 19th century doughnut-shaped bread and smoked meat became popular in the New World thanks to successive waves of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Why did Jews take up bagels in the first place?

"The addition of other ingredients besides flour and water makes them something other than bread," explains Olivier Bauer, a professor at the University of Montreal's Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies. "So Kashrut allows Jews to buy them and eat them right away without performing the ritual blessing over bread."

Astronomers discovered a nest of monstrous baby galaxies 11.5 billion light-years away and they speculate that the galaxies seem to reside at the junction of gigantic filaments in a web of dark matter. 

Since dark matter is the umbrella term for matter that inference says must exist but which has never been detected, how can they know the galaxies are surrounded by it? Read on. Thugh things are relatively quiet now, ten billion years ago, long before the Sun and Earth were formed, areas of the Universe were inhabited by monstrous galaxies with star formation rates hundreds or thousands of times what we observe today in our Milky Way galaxy.