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Scientists have discovered the oldest fossil evidence of agriculture -- not by humans, but by insects.

The team, led by Eric Roberts of James Cook University along with researchers from Ohio University, discovered the oldest known examples of "fungus gardens" in 25 million-year-old fossil termite nests in East Africa.

The results are published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

Common diseases like allergy, diabetes and other immune diseases have increased dramatically in recent decades. This indicates that the environment may have a more important role than genes in explaining this increase.

An international research team led by the Centre for personalized medicine at Linköping University has therefore searched for possible non-genetic causes of common immune diseases. They examined the chemical signals that regulate how DNA is converted into protein.

Health warnings about complications related to Zika virus significantly increased demand for abortions in Latin American countries, according to a new study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

However, in many of these countries, abortion is either illegal or highly restricted, leaving pregnant women with few options and potentially driving women to use unsafe methods, access abortion drugs without medical supervision or visit underground providers.

Genetic testing has shed new light on the deaths of nearly 500 young Australians and New Zealanders who died from sudden cardiac death in a 3-year period, the New England Journal of Medicine reports today.

"Sudden cardiac death in children and young adults has a devastating impact on families, care providers and the community," says the University of Sydney's Professor Chris Semsarian, who led the multinational study.

"It's a tragedy that claims the lives of two to three young Australians each week.

HODGKIN lymphoma patients can be spared the serious side effects of chemotherapy thanks to high-tech scans that can predict the outcome of treatment, according to a study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine*.

Doctors - funded by Cancer Research UK and international partners in Europe and Australasia - used positron emission tomography (PET)** to scan more than 1200 patients with advanced Hodgkin lymphoma after they had been given two cycles of standard chemotherapy.

Nonmedical use of prescription opioids more than doubled among adults in the United States from 2001-2002 to 2012-2013, based on a study from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health. Nearly 10 million Americans, or 4.1 percent of the adult population, used opioid medications in 2012-2013 a class of drugs that includes OxyContin and Vicodin, without a prescription or not as prescribed (in greater amounts, more often, or longer than prescribed) in the past year.

Though mammals adapted on land, a new study by Maria Chikina and Nathan Clark has shown that during three major independent evolutionary events, a number of mammals harkened back to the sea.

For the manatee, walrus, dolphin, and killer whale, the return to the sea involved many evolutionary trade-offs amongst hundreds of genes: a general loss of the number of sensory genes for smell and taste, new functions for genes forming skin and connective tissue, and genes involved in muscle structure and metabolism.

Each year, an estimated 48 million Americans get sick -- sometimes mortally -- from an all-too common source: foodborne pathogens. Even as the industry looks for ways to curb outbreaks, a new University of Notre Dame study finds that just being able to trace a product through its supply chain is at once critical, and difficult.

PRINCETON, N.J.--Pregnant women in Latin American countries were more likely to seek an abortion after receiving health alerts about Zika virus, according to a study co-authored by Princeton University researchers and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Boston, MA - In a large study conducted by at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), researchers found an association between women who maintain a healthy diet and a reduction in the risk of developing impaired physical function as they age.

The findings are published online and will appear in the July issue of the Journal of Nutrition.

Oxford University research has found that a little-studied and relatively unknown part of the human immune system could be twice as important as previously thought.

Mucosal Associated Invariant T-cells (MAIT cells) were first identified in 1993 but largely ignored until recently. Australian researchers recently found that they had an important role in fighting bacterial infections. Now, the Oxford team, led by Professor Paul Klenerman, say that they also fight viruses. Their results are in the journal Nature Communications.

"Behaviors such as poor diet choices, physical inactivity, excess alcohol consumption and unhealthy body weight could account for more than 20 percent of cancer cases, and could, therefore, be prevented with lifestyle modifications," Kohler said, adding that when tobacco exposure is considered, these modifiable issues are believed to be factors in two-thirds of U.S. cancer deaths.

Cancer cells appear to depend on an unusual survival mechanism to spread around the body, according to an early study led by Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). The discovery could help with future development of novel treatments to prevent metastasis and secondary tumours.

The spread of cancer around the body - metastasis - is one of the biggest challenges in cancer treatment. It is often not the original tumour that kills, but secondary growths. These happen when cancer cells are able to break away from the primary site, travel around the body and 'seed' new tumours.

Young bowhead whales may cease growing lengthwise and undergo severe bone loss to help grow their enormous head and baleen plates, according to a study published June 22, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by John George from North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management, Alaska, and colleagues.

Neutrophil-like cells must balance speed against chemotactic accuracy to win a chemotaxis maze race in the inaugural Dicty World Races, a worldwide competition, according to a study published June 22, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Monica Skoge from Princeton University, Daniel Irmia from the Massachusetts General Hospital, and colleagues.