It's summertime, and the fields of Yolo County, Calif., are filled with rows of sunflowers, dutifully facing the rising sun.

At the nearby University of California, Davis, plant biologists have now discovered how sunflowers use their internal circadian "clocks," acting on growth hormones, to follow the sun during the day as they grow.

"It's the first example of a plant's clock modulating growth in a natural environment, and having real repercussions for the plant," said Stacey Harmer, a plant biologist at UC Davis and senior author of a paper reporting the discovery published this week in the journal Science.

Are e-cigarettes harmful? It's probably the wrong question. Caffeine is quite toxic but the Centers for Disease Control doesn't promote concern about Red Bull energy drinks. What is known to be harmful, the weight of evidence is indisputable, are cigarettes. With 200 toxic chemicals being inhaled into lungs, they are linked to every form of cancer and disease for good reason.

While preventing cancer is impossible, what will be possible soon is making cancer far more manageable, like diabetes, and treatment far less debilitating. A new drug delivery system called a "metronomic dosage regimen," uses significantly lower doses of chemotherapeutic drugs but at more frequent time intervals. This would have multiple goals of killing cancer cells, creating a hostile biological environment for their growth, reducing toxicity from the drug regimen and avoiding the development of resistance to the cancer drugs being used.

Lake Nona, Fla., August 25, 2016 -- Scientists at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP) have identified a previously unknown way that stress hormones (glucocorticoids) shut off genes in the liver to help the body adapt to the fasting state. The study, published today in Cell Metabolism, describes an obscure protein, SETDB2, that's increased during times of fasting and alters the genome to help turn on genes needed to adjust to the absence of food.

New Haven, Conn.-- The Zika virus reproduces in the vaginal tissue of pregnant mice several days after infection, according to a study by Yale researchers. From the genitals, the virus spreads and infects the fetal brain, impairing fetal development. The findings suggest that the Zika virus may replicate more robustly in the female reproductive tract than at other sites of infection, with potentially dire consequences for reproduction, said the researchers.

The study was published online Aug. 25 in Cell.

During the 2016, after 8 years of politicians refusing to work together, it may surprise you to learn that other groups do consult experts outside their own circles. It won't surprise you to learn a group of academics think that's a bad thing, and that cancer care guidelines should never meet with the companies that actually create cancer care.

Yet that's what the University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center sets out to do, and does; they think that any consulting means scientists and doctors are for sale.