Major depression comes with an unexpected metabolic signature, according to new findings.

Authors in search of genes that increase depression risk analyzed thousands of women. those with recurrent major depression and healthy controls, and found that many of the women with depression also had experienced adversity in childhood, including sexual abuse. 

The researchers noticed something rather unusual in the DNA. The samples taken from women with a history of stress-related depression contained more mitochondrial DNA than other samples.

"Our most notable finding is that the amount of mitochondrial DNA changes in response to stress," says Professor Jonathan Flint of the University of Oxford.

More than 100 drugs have been approved to treat cancer but predicting which ones will help a particular patient hasn't really been possible.

A new device may change that. It is an implantable device, about the size of the grain of rice, and can carry small doses of up to 30 different drugs. After implanting it in a tumor and letting the drugs diffuse into the tissue, researchers can measure how effectively each one kills the patient's cancer cells. Such a device could eliminate much of the guesswork now involved in choosing cancer treatments, says Oliver Jonas, a postdoc at MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and lead author of the paper in Science Translational Medicine.

Everyone discusses ways to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere (or not) but less considered is that there is a massive storehouse of carbon that has the potential to significantly alter the climate change picture. 

Ancient carbon, locked away in Arctic permafrost for thousands of years, could transformed into carbon dioxide and released into the atmosphere by warmth. 

The first malaria vaccine candidate (RTS,S/AS01) to reach phase 3 clinical testing is partially effective against clinical disease in young African children up to 4 years after vaccination, according to final trial data published in The Lancet.

Science topics in culture, be they vaccines, GMOs or global warming, may seem to be about science but they are more about politics, including identity politics, and sometimes about economics. 

Nonetheless, only one of those topics is hot in academia - ironically, the reason for that is also political. An impartial analysis of Congressional testimonies shows that, politics or not, most of the experts that the Republican majority requests to speak during hearings support the consensus on climate change - which means resistance to taking action is not because they are against science, it is just economics. 

In 2012 the US saw a resurgence of pertussis (whooping cough) cases. the highest since 1955. Like in engineering, the reason a small increase in anti-science beliefs can lead to a big change in the number of cases comes down to degrees of freedom and the math of networks.