A new editorial warns that newborns may develop infections from exposure to vaginal bacteria, and suggest that encouraging breast feeding and avoiding unnecessary antibiotics may be a much better idea for creating a healthy immune system in infants.

The term vaginal seeding, also called microbirthing, describes wiping babies with vaginal fluid after they have been born by Cesarean. The belief is that this boosts poorly-defined beneficial gut microbes that keep our immune systems healthy and so may reduce the risk of developing conditions such as asthma, food allergies, and hay fever in later life.

NASA currently has Mars sample return as their priority flagship mission not just for this decade but for the next one as well. They were recommended to do this in the 2012 decadal review. It is good for geology, nobody doubts that. But it is motivated mainly by the search for ancient life on Mars. Some exobiologists have warned that it is likely to be no more conclusive than the Mars meteorites we already have. They regard it as is little more than a technology demo for the search for life.

WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb. 23, 2016 -- Musical styles and genres differ around the world, but the emotional power of music is universally felt. To understand this evocative force, researchers in many fields, including information science, neural perception, and signal processing, investigate music's underlying structure, examining features such as the tone, timbre, and auditory and rhythmic features of a piece.

Now a team of Japanese scientists from the University of Tokyo has developed a new approach to analyzing musical structure. The new method overcomes many of the limits of previous tools. The researchers publish their results in the journal Chaos, from AIP Publishing.

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, a condition closely linked to obesity, affects roughly 25 percent of people in the U.S. There is no drug treatment for the disease, although weight loss can reduce the buildup of fat in the liver.

Now, studying mice, new research shows that a natural sugar called trehalose prevents the sugar fructose -- thought to be a major contributor to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease -- from entering the liver and triggers a cellular housekeeping process that cleans up excess fat buildup inside liver cells.

The research, by a team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, appears Feb. 23 in the journal Science Signaling.

A new study of a protein found in cilia - the hair-like projections on the cell surface - may help explain how genetic defects in cilia play a role in developmental abnormalities, kidney disease and a number of other disorders.

The researchers at Princeton University and Northwestern University found that the protein, which goes by the name C21orf59 or "Kurly," is needed for cilia to undulate to keep fluid moving over the surface of cells. They also found that the protein is needed during development to properly orient the cilia so that they are facing the right direction to move the fluid.

Given its huge success in describing the natural world for the past 150 years, the theory of evolution is remarkably misunderstood. In a recent episode of the Australian series of “I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here”, former cricket star Shane Warne questioned the theory – asking “if humans evolved from monkeys, why haven’t today’s monkeys evolved”?

The Louisiana Scholarship Program has widely varying effects on students, according to a series of studies released jointly by the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas and the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans at Tulane University.

The studies address the effects of the Louisiana voucher program on the achievement and non-cognitive skills of voucher recipients, as well as broader effects on school segregation and public school students. It is the first evaluation to examine such a wide range of outcomes, or to consider the effects over the first two years of this specific program. Key findings include:

Do you know what a lucid dream is ? It is the experience of being aware of your asleep state during a dream. Lucid dreaming occurs during the REM phase of sleep, and it is usually created when, while dreaming, one suddenly realizes his or her dreaming state. The dream may then continue, but the individual has some degree of control over what happens. Laws of physics continue to not apply, of course, and one has the power of "writing the script", to some extent. In a sense, one's desires are the driver of the script.

For the first time experts have been able to eliminate external factors and specifically pinpoint television as having a direct link with female body ideals.

It is known that the perception of a woman's perfect body shape is influenced by images of celebrities and models seen in the media.

However, in the past, there has been little attempt to control variables in order to isolate the effects of media exposure from other cultural and ecological factors.

Scientists examined preferences for body size in relation to television consumption of men and women in Nicaragua, Central America. Findings are published in the British Journal of Psychology.

Use of positron emission tomography (PET) showed no association with two-year survival in lung and esophageal cancer patients and may possibly be overused in the hopes of detecting cancer recurrence, according to a study published February 22 in the JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

PET scans, which are primarily used in cancer patients for staging, restaging, and monitoring patients' response, are also frequently used to detect recurrence in asymptomatic patients. Despite this frequent secondary use, there has been little evidence showing that PET scans improve survival.