A study by researchers at Ludwig Maximilian University and the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology shows that birds in an urban environment have fewer and smaller offspring than in rural settings.

Potential outbreaks of diseases such as Ebola and Lassa fever may be more accurately predicted thanks to a new mathematical model developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge. This could in turn help inform public health messages to prevent outbreaks spreading more widely.

The ancestors of leaf-cutter ants swapped a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for a bucolic existence on small-scale subsistence farms. A new study at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama revealed that living relatives of the earliest fungus-farming ants still have not domesticated their crop, a challenge also faced by early human farmers.

Encouraging hospital births are an important component of reducing maternal mortality in low-resource settings. Now, new research shows certain factors, including age and income, determine whether women living in rural Nepal have home births or hospital deliveries.

At the dinner table, babies do a lot more than play with their sippy cups, new research suggests.

Scientists say the more foreign languages we learn, the more effectively our brain reacts and processes the data accumulated in the course of learning.

Inhibiting a protein called Sclerostin could probably help treating the bone-loss disease osteoporosis. New findings at the University of Würzburg could stimulate this research.

Individuals who are born with a low birth weight are less likely to be good at sports at school or participate in exercise later on in life. The study, published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, used data from the Medical Research Council National Survey for Health and Development, a unique birth cohort that closely monitors a group of people all born in the same week in the UK in March 1946. This particular research involved data from 2,739 of study participants.

Tumors also differ among patients with the same type of cancer, so how is a physician able to prescribe a tailored regimen for the patient? Researchers developed Canopy, an approach to infer the evolutionary track of tumor cells by surveying two types of mutations -- somatic copy number alterations and single-nucleotide alterations -- derived from multiple samples taken from a single patient.

The heat shock protein Hsp70, known for helping cells withstand stress, may also act as a switch that triggers free-swimming Schistosoma larvae to begin penetrating the skin and transforming into the parasitic flatworms that infect more than 240 million people worldwide with schistosomiasis. The finding could lead to targets for disease-preventing medicines and opens the possibility other disease-causing parasites use the protein to invade hosts.

In a novel controlled clinical trial, participants in a six-day Ayurvedic-based well-being program that featured a vegetarian diet, meditation, yoga and massages experienced measurable decreases in a set of blood-based metabolites associated with inflammation, cardiovascular disease risk and cholesterol regulation.

New research from The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai identifies a protein that may be an unexplored target to develop new cancer therapies. The protein, known as kinase suppressor of Ras, or KSR, is a pseudoenzyme that plays a critical role in the transmission of signals in the cell determining whether cells grow, divide, or die.

Community characteristics play an important role in perpetuating teen suicide clusters and thwarting prevention efforts, according to a new study by sociologists at the University of Chicago and University of Memphis who examined clusters in a single town.

New research has shown that the corticosteroid deflazacort is a safe and effective treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The findings, which appear this month in the journal Neurology, could pave the way for first US-approved treatment for the disease.

New understanding may allow doctors and researchers to stop bladder cancer's ability to stop the tumor-suppressing gene RhoDGI2, thus allowing its initial action to proceed.

Elevated levels of perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) in drinking water can persist in water supplies for long periods and present an important health risk for millions of Americans, from hormone suppression to potentially cancer. A comprehensive review of the latest research on innovative and cost-effective ways to remove or destroy PFAS from drinking water, groundwater, and wastewater is published in Environmental Engineering.

Many acute and chronic liver diseases, including alcoholic hepatitis, result from apoptotic (programmed) cell death mediated by the enzyme caspase. Caspase inhibitors have therapeutic potential to treat and prevent apoptosis-mediated liver injury, and some are currently in clinical trials. However, a new study published in The American Journal of Pathology raises serious safety concerns regarding the clinical use of caspase inhibitors by demonstrating the occurrence of delayed-onset necrotic, non-caspase-dependent liver cell injury.