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Self-administered questionnaires sent to 364 Japanese medical journalists allowed them to describe their experiences in selecting stories, choosing angles, and performing research when creating cancer-centered news pieces. The journalists report that they did not find pharmaceutical press releases to be helpful, preferring direct contact with physicians as their most reliable and prized sources of information. This is much different than in America, where it is assumed that the experts know the most about study results and methodology and anecdotes from doctors are less valuable.

Mitochondria produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP), commonly called the universal energy currency of the body. The driver for this process is an electrochemical membrane potential, which is created by a series of proton pumps - positive charges and negative ones. These complex, macromolecular machines are collectively known as the respiratory chain. The structure of the largest protein complex in the respiratory chain, that of mitochondrial complex I, has been examined by scientists from the Frankfurt "Macromolecular Complexes" cluster of excellence, working together with the University of Freiburg, by X-ray diffraction analysis.

What exactly is cometary globule CG4? That's still a bit of a mystery. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with comets. In 1976, several elongated comet-like objects were discovered in pictures taken with the UK Schmidt Telescope in Australia. Because of their appearance, and despite any connection with comets, they became known as cometary globules. They were all located in a huge patch of glowing gas called the Gum Nebula. They had dense, dark, dusty heads and long, faint tails, which were generally pointing away from the Vela supernova remnant located at the center of the Gum Nebula. Although these objects are relatively close by, it took astronomers a long time to find them as they glow very dimly and are therefore hard to detect.

As predators go, cone snails are slow-moving and lack the typical fighting parts. They've made up for it by producing a vast array of fast-acting toxins that target the nervous systems of prey. A new study reveals that some cone snails add a weaponized form of insulin to the venom cocktail they use to disable fish.
"It is very unlikely that it is serving a different purpose," said lead author Helena Safavi-Hemami, a research assistant professor at the University of Utah.
"This is a unique type of insulin. It is shorter than any insulin that has been described in any animal," said senior author Baldomero M. Olivera, a distinguished professor of biology at the University of Utah. "We found it in the venom in large amounts."

Recent research has linked autism with a lack of "pruning" in developing brain connections, but a new Dartmouth study suggests instead it is the excessive growth of new connections that causes sensory overload in people with the disorder.
The results, which have broad implications for understanding the neurobiological basis of autism spectrum disorders, appear in The Journal of Neuroscience. A PDF of the study is available on request.

Every business wants to capitalize on imagination and innovation - but a corporate structure may be the wrong way to promote it. And if you really want to kill creativity, have social authoritarians in government controlling your culture. Collectivism is bad for the imagination. It's hard to think about art when you have to think about the good of the state, according to a paper in the Journal of Business Research, which compared nearly 300 individuals from Taiwan, a collectivist society, and Canada, slightly more individualistic.

Scientists may be on the way to genetically modifying plants to naturally protect against pests in new ways. That is good news for people in developing nations and fans of the environment. Older insecticides present environmental and health risks and insects develop resistance to them, complicating pest-control strategies. Along with that, millions of deaths result from diseases transmitted by insects each year, not to mention economic losses totaling billions of dollars annually.

In 1722, when Europeans arrived on Easter Island, nearly 2,300 miles off the west coast of Chile, the native Polynesian culture known as Rapa Nui were already in a demographic tailspin from which they would not recover. Pick a fad belief of the moment, and someone has correlated it to Easter Island. Environmental damage? Easter Island. Climate change? Easter Island. Add in political partisanship and lifestyle diseases and you can also find a correlation-causation arrow being abused. Will there ever be an answer? Hard to say, but a new paper attempts at least some clarification.

Coating the mouth with foods stored in containers that used bisphenol A
(BPA), like soup, does not lead to high levels of BPA in blood.BPA is used to make some plastics and to seal canned food containers against bacterial contamination. Food which picks up trace amounts of BPA from packaging is the major source of human exposure, according to environmental critics, and the health concerns about BPA center on potential to mimic certain hormones at really high exposures.

Researchers have used human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to generate new hair, the first step toward the development of a cell-based treatment for people with hair loss. In the United States alone, more than 40 million men and 21 million women are affected by hair loss. The research team developed a protocol that induced human pluripotent stem cells to become dermal papilla cells. They are a unique population of cells that regulate hair-follicle formation and growth cycle. Human dermal papilla cells on their own are not suitable for hair transplants because they cannot be obtained in necessary amounts and rapidly lose their ability to induce hair-follicle formation in culture. 

New studies have found that a supplement of ghrelin -
the "appetite hormone"
- increased the sexual activity of mice.
Ghrelin is a gastrointestinal hormone that is released from the stomach, and is involved in the stimulation of our appetite by activating the brain's reward system. Since the brain's reward system also motivates us to seek a partner and to have sex, a group of researchers at the Sahlgrenska Academy decided to investigate whether ghrelin may also affect sexual behaviors. The answer is: yes, at least in mice.

In the largest study of opioids users done to-date, scholars analyzed records of 198,247 people in England who had been involved in drug treatment or the criminal justice system between 2005 and 2009. They found that opioid users were six times more likely to die prematurely than people in the general population. Almost one in ten of these deaths were due to suicide, more than four times the rate in the general population. The data recorded 3,974 deaths and their causes during this period. The study is the first to record age trends in opioid users' mortality and with age, the gap gets even wider. In the oldest 45-64 age-group, homicide was 27 times more common than in the general population.