Body

It has now been 15 years since scientists celebrated the completion of the human genome. At that point, scientists had determined the entire sequence of the genetic letters making up our DNA. It is now known that this was only an initial step in a long journey: in addition to the chemical letters, information is also encoded in the manner in which the DNA is packed inside the cell nucleus.

Switzerland: The world's first guidelines for chronic fungal lung infections for doctors and laboratories have been published today, by the European Respiratory Society (ERS) and the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID).

Published today (23 December, 2015) in the European Respiratory Journal, these new guidelines describe the important features of this disease and provide comprehensive treatment recommendations.

Heritage scientists at UCL have developed demographic models of decay and loss to predict when a large library or archival collection might age beyond repair.

Lead author, Professor Matija Strlic (UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage) explained: "Although some library materials might easily survive thousands of years some have internal clocks triggering faster decay. Using the demographic models we can now easily predict how much more degradation will be induced by a hotter and more humid climate in the future, and perhaps more importantly, how this can be mitigated."

Dr Jolyon Troscianko, from the University of Exeter, and Dr Christian Rutz, from the University of St Andrews, have captured first video recordings documenting how these tropical corvids fashion these particularly complex tools in the wild.

The pair developed tiny video 'spy-cameras' which were attached to the crows, to observe their natural foraging behaviour.

The first case report of a professional footballer tearing his teres major -- an extremely rare injury -- is captured in a series of images published in the online journal BMJ Case Reports.

The complete rupture of the teres major, one of seven muscles of the upper limb that connects the long bone in the arm to shoulder blade, is an extremely rare injury that tends to occur in baseball players -- mostly pitchers who throw the baseball.

TORONTO, Dec. 22--The largest study of survivors of the largest recorded outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease found they commonly reported complications such as vision, hearing and joint pain problems up to months after they were discharged from an Ebola treatment facility.

The findings, published today in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, are based on clinical and laboratory records from patients at the EVD Survivor Clinic in Port Loko, Sierra Leone, one of the West African countries hardest hit by the Ebola outbreak that began in December 2013.

A 17-year-old woman was infected with the rare, but treatable rat-bite fever, that developed from pet rodents that lived in her bedroom, report the doctors who treated her in the online journal BMJ Case Reports.

Rat-bite fever has been reported in writings dating as far back as 2300 years. It was originally described as a disease of the poor, but these days most cases occur in lab workers or in children with pet rodents.

The condition is often goes unrecognised and undiagnosed. Only 200 cases of rat-bite fever have been recorded in the USA since 1839.

Washington, DC (December 22, 2015) -- Screening male kidney transplant candidates for prostate cancer may be more harmful than protective because it does not appear to prolong their survival but may interfere with the transplant process. The findings come from a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN).

Cold Spring Harbor, NY - A doctor treating a patient with a potentially fatal metastatic breast tumor would be very pleased to find, after administering a round of treatment, that the primary tumor had undergone a change in character - from aggressive to static, and no longer shedding cells that can colonize distant organs of the body. Indeed, most patients with breast and other forms of cancer who succumb to the illness do so because of the cancer's unstoppable spread.

Athens, Ga. - University of Georgia research has found that inorganic mercury, which was previously thought to be a less harmful form of the toxic metal, is very damaging to key cell processes.

UNH Research Shows Helmetless-Tackling Drills Significantly Reduce Head Impact

DURHAM, N.H. - The national debate around football-related head impacts, and their relationship to concussions and spinal injuries, continues to raise concern in the United States. Sparked by efforts to help make the sport safer for players, research at the University of New Hampshire has found that a novel set of helmetless-tackling drills are effective in reducing head impacts by 28 percent in one season.

DALLAS, December 22, 2015 -- People scoring well on the American Heart Association's Life's Simple 7 checklist for a healthy heart are less likely to develop heart failure, a condition that reduces blood and oxygen flow to the body, according to new research in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation: Heart Failure.

University of Hawai'i Cancer Center researchers discovered members of four families, apparently unrelated and living in different states across the US, shared the identical mutation of a gene called BAP1 that causes mesothelioma, melanoma, renal carcinoma and other cancers.

This raised two possibilities for the researchers: these four families were related although they did not know it, or researchers had found a hot spot for BAP1 mutations.

Low levels of vitamin D have long been identified as an unwanted hallmark of weight loss surgery, but now findings of a new Johns Hopkins study of more than 930,000 patient records add to evidence that seasonal sun exposure -- a key factor in the body's natural ability to make the "sunshine vitamin" -- plays a substantial role in how well people do after such operations.

Researchers from FIU's Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine Barry P. Rosen and Jian Chen, both from the Department of Cellular Biology and Pharmacology, are part of an international team that has identified how arsenic gets into the seeds of plants such as rice. The discovery holds the promise of healthier rice grains.