The health benefits of the Mediterranean diet are well-known. As well as being healthier, a recent article concludes that the menu traditionally eaten in Spain leaves less of a carbon footprint than that of the US or the United Kingdom.

The consequences of climate change range from species extinction to sea-level increases and the spread of diseases. For this reason, researchers have been struggling for years to alleviate its effects, even limiting the pollution caused by food consumption.

It may sound like the makings of a joke, but answering the question of how chickens crossed the sea may soon provide more than just a punch line.

Michigan State University researcher Eben Gering has collaborated with a team in a study of the mysterious ancestry of the feral chicken population that has overrun the Hawaiian Island of Kauai. Their results, published in the current issue of Molecular Ecology, may aid efforts to curtail the damage of invasive species in the future, and help improve the biosecurity of domestic chicken breeds.

Health information exchanges are supposed to improve the speed, quality, safety and cost of patient care, but there is little evidence of that in existing health information exchange benefit studies, according to a research paper published this month in the prestigious journal Health Affairs.

Researchers synthesized and quantitatively assessed 27 health information exchange benefit studies, said Nir Menachemi, a professor and chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management in the Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and one of the authors of the paper. He was at the University of Alabama at Birmingham while the review of the health information exchange studies study was conducted.

Shakespeare said "to be or not to be" is the question, and now scientists are asking how life forms grow to be the correct size with proportional body parts.

Probing deeply into genetics and biology at the earliest moments of embryonic development, researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center report March 26 in Nature Communications they have found new clues to explain one of nature's biggest mysteries. Their data from fruit flies show the size and patterning accuracy of an embryo depend on the amount of reproductive resources mothers invest in the process before an egg leaves the ovary.

3 percent of younger children and 17 percent of 9-13 year olds skip lunch on a given school day and 23 percent of 9-13 year olds skip lunch on the weekends - yet obesity is a growing problem.

They may be eating more junk food instead. Lunch skippers had lower intakes of nutrients, including calcium and fiber, than lunch consumers. In addition, the data show that for some children, the lunch meal was primarily responsible for the higher essential nutrient intakes of vitamin D, potassium and magnesium, as well as a nutrient of concern, sodium. 

More than 60 percent of the world's population is infected with a type of herpes virus called human cytomegalovirus, which replicates by commandeering the host cell's metabolism, but the details of this maneuver have been unclear.

Researchers have discovered that cytomegalovirus manipulates a process called fatty acid elongation, which makes the very-long-chain fatty acids necessary for virus replication. They identified a specific human enzyme - elongase enzyme 7 - that the virus induces to turn on fatty acid elongation.

"Elongase 7 was just screaming, 'I'm important, study me,'" said John Purdy, a post-doctoral researcher at Princeton and lead author of the study.