Researchers have discovered the molecule that links spontaneous physical activity and food intake in mice.

Scientists from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)say Bsx is the molecular link between spontaneous physical activity and food intake. Mice lacking the molecule show less spontaneous physical activity, perceive hunger signals differently and have a lower concentration of feeding hormones in their brain than normal mice. Being conserved across species Bsx might be a promising target for controlling diet-induced obesity in humans.

Researchers at the University of Illinois are developing panels of microcavity plasma lamps that may soon brighten people’s lives. The thin, lightweight panels could be used for residential and commercial lighting, and for certain types of biomedical applications.

Ecstasy is an illicit recreational drug popular among young people, according to background information in the article. Research in both humans and animals suggests that the drug can harm the brain. Ecstasy may damage nerve cells that respond to the hormone serotonin, which is involved in mood, thinking, learning and memory.

By Chaim M. Bell and Wendy Levinson

Most doctors feel that they provide good to above-average patient care. However, Canadian physicians rarely receive feedback about their clinical performance or patient outcomes. Although both of us believe that we provide excellent patient care, we have never received any data on our clinical performance or patient outcomes compared with other physicians or benchmarks. How can we learn to improve our provision of care without objective measures of our performance?

By Christopher Millett, Jeremy Gray, Sonia Saxena, Gopalakrishnan Netuveli and Azeem Majeed

Many people with diabetes continue to smoke despite being at high risk of cardiovascular disease. We examined the impact of a pay-for-performance incentive in the United Kingdom introduced in 2004 as part of the new general practitioner contract to improve support for smoking cessation and to reduce the prevalence of smoking among people with chronic diseases such as diabetes.

Like hobos on a train, HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, uses a pre-existing transport system to leave one infected cell and infect new ones, Hopkins scientists have discovered. Their findings, published in the June issue of Plos Biology, counter the prevailing belief that HIV and other retroviruses can only leave and enter cells by virus-specific mechanisms.