Biologists have developed a nonsurgical method to deliver long-term contraception to both male and female animals with a single shot - but only in mice.-

The road map is to as an alternative to spaying and neutering feral animals.

The approach was developed in the lab of Bruce Hay, professor of biology and biological engineering at Caltech, who leveraged work conducted in recent years by David Baltimore and others showing that an adeno-associated virus (AAV)--a small, harmless virus that is unable to replicate on its own, that has been useful in gene-therapy trials--can be used to deliver sequences of DNA to muscle cells, causing them to produce specific antibodies that are known to fight infectious diseases, such as HIV, malaria, and hepatitis C. 

Washington, DC--When a pregnant woman has gestational diabetes, her unborn child tends to react more slowly to sounds after the mother consumes sugary foods or drinks compared to the offspring of a woman who does not have the condition, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology&Metabolism.

A pair of neurons that cause males to remember and seek sex even at the expense of food. These neurons, which are male-specific, are required for sex-based differences in learning, suggesting that sex differences in cognitive abilities can be genetically hardwired. 

The study by UCL (UK) and Albert Einstein College of Medicine (USA), published today in Nature and funded by the Wellcome Trust, NIH, Marie Curie, and the G. Harold&Leila Y. Mathers Charitable Foundation, shows a direct link between contrasting behavior of male and female worms and differences in brain development and structure in areas involved in higher order processing.  

Warming ocean temperatures a third of a mile below the surface, in a dark ocean in areas with little marine life, might attract scant attention. But this is precisely the depth where frozen pockets of methane 'ice' transition from a dormant solid to a powerful greenhouse gas.

New University of Washington research suggests that subsurface warming could be causing more methane gas to bubble up off the Washington and Oregon coast.

The study, to appear in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, shows that of 168 bubble plumes observed within the past decade, a disproportionate number were seen at a critical depth for the stability of methane hydrates.

Researchers at the Tulane National Primate Research Center (TNPRC) are leading efforts to find a new vaccine for tuberculosis, one of the world's deadliest diseases. Tuberculosis, a contagious infection of the lungs, affected more than nine million people in 2013, killing more than one million.

A team of researchers led by the TNPRC used a modified strain of TB to show that monkeys could generate better protective immunity than when vaccinated with BCG, a common TB vaccine.

Psychologists writing in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience claim that both belief in God and prejudice towards immigrants can be reduced by directing magnetic energy into the brain.

The team used transcranial magnetic stimulation, a way of temporarily shutting down specific regions of the brain, and targeted the posterior medial frontal cortex, a part of the brain located near the surface and roughly a few inches up from the forehead that is associated with detecting problems and triggering responses that address them.