The trillions of bacteria that live in the gut - helping digest foods, making some vitamins, making amino acids - may help determine if a person is fat or thin.

The evidence is from a novel experiment involving mice and humans that is part of a growing fascination with gut bacteria and their role in health and diseases like irritable bowel syndrome and Crohn's disease. In this case, the focus was on obesity. Researchers found pairs of human twins in which one was obese and the other lean. They transferred gut bacteria from these twins into mice and watched what happened. The mice with bacteria from fat twins grew fat; those that got bacteria from lean twins stayed lean.

The study, published online Thursday by the journal Science, is "pretty striking," said Dr.Jeffrey S. Flier, an obesity researcher and the dean of the Harvard Medical School, who was not involved with the study. "It's a very powerful set of experiments."

Preventing seasonal sniffles may be more complicated than researchers suspected. A vaccine that protects piglets from one common influenza virus also makes them more vulnerable to a rarer flu strain, researchers report today in Science Translational Medicine¹.

The team gave piglets a vaccine against H1N2 influenza. The animals responded by making antibodies that blocked that virus - but aided infection with the swine flu H1N1, which caused a pandemic among humans in 2009. In the study, H1N1 infected more cells and caused more severe pneumonia in vaccinated piglets than unvaccinated ones.

The root of the different immune responses lies with the mushroom-shaped haemagglutinin protein found on the outside of influenza-virus particles, which helps them to attach onto cells in the airways. The protein occurs in all types of flu, but the make-up of its cap and stem vary between strains.

In the study, a vaccine for H1N2 spurred pigs to produce antibodies that bound the cap and the stem of that virus's haemagglutinin. But some of those antibodies also targeted the stem of H1N1's haemagglutinin protein, helping that virus fuse to cell membranes. That made H1N1 more efficient at infecting pigs and causing disease.

Public advocacy groups and farmers have joined forces to challenge biotech giant Monsanto's claims on genetically engineered seed patents, and to halt the company's aggressive lawsuits against anyone whose fields are contaminated by their GMOs.

Seventy-three US farmers, seed companies, and public advocacy groups appealed their case against Monsanto Co. to the Supreme Court on Thursday.

The case seeks to challenge Monsanto's aggressive claims on patents of genetically-engineered seeds and aims to bar the chemical and biotech company from suing anyone whose field is contaminated by such seeds.

Monsanto has in the past sued over 100 farmers for patent infringement and won cases against farmers who were found to have used seeds without paying the company royalties.

In June, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a previous ruling which states that the group of organic and otherwise non-GMO farmers and other plaintiffs do not have standing to prohibit Monsanto from suing them should the company's genetic traits end up on their holdings "because Monsanto has made binding assurances that it will not 'take legal action against growers whose crops might inadvertently contain traces of Monsanto biotech genes (because, for example, some transgenic seed or pollen blew onto the grower's land).'"

But the company's assurances did not assuage the plaintiffs' fear of future alleged patent infringement.

The numbers of people with dementia are expected to more than double in 30 years and outpace both heart disease and cancer in terms of cost. Because dementia can take root in the brain years or decades before symptoms appear, you can take action now to avoid becoming part of this skyrocketing statistic.

Today, nearly 15 percent of people aged 71 or older have dementia - almost 4 million people. Experts predict that number will more than double to 9 million people by 2040, costing the country more than $500 billion.

What's worse is these statistics do not include mild cognitive impairment (MCI), or "pre-dementia," which accounts for another 22 percent of people over 71.

How to lower your risk of dementia

Some experts say there is no way to prevent dementia, but studies show diet and lifestyle influence brain health. We can use that knowledge to lower the risk for dementia.

For instance, poor diet and lifestyle choices can cause inflammation throughout the body, which ultimately inflames the brain and accelerates the degeneration of brain tissue. It may cause symptoms such as brain fog or a gradual decline in cognition, but the average person will not connect this with an increased risk of dementia later in life.

The good news is you can slow the rate of brain degeneration and lower your risk of dementia with the following tips:

The pharmaceutical industry, and many doctors, appear to be making great efforts by to get as many people as possible vaccinated against shingles. Even if such an intervention was highly effective in preventing shingles, which certainly has not been shown to be the case, the information below should make it clear that such vaccinations are unnecessary. The side effects that would be suffered by a significant number of individuals need never occur in the first place. The real problem is that what is discussed below generates relatively little income for anybody in the healthcare industry. Regardless, you need to decide for yourself.

Shingles is an infection resulting from the varicella zoster virus, usually manifesting in areas supplied by spinal nerves, known as dermatomes. More commonly known in medical circles as Herpes zoster, the infection is typically characterized by a blistering skin rash of extraordinary pain for most individuals. The initial infection with the virus is usually remote from the shingles outbreak, typically occurring in childhood when chickenpox is contracted. For years the virus remains latent in nerve cell bodies or autonomic ganglia. It is when the virus, for unclear reasons, breaks out of these storage sites and travels down the nerve axons that shingles occurs.

Left to itself along with mainstream therapies that include analgesics, antiviral agents like acyclovir, and corticosteroids, the rash will generally resolve in two to four weeks. The pain is generally lessened little by analgesics. Some unfortunate individuals can experience postherpetic neuralgia, a syndrome of residual nerve pain that can continue for months or years following a shingles outbreak.

Two recent studies provide fuel for both camps: They both find the association between brain cancer and cell phone use is dubious. Does this mean they found no associations? Hardly.

The debate about whether cell phones cause brain tumors continues as two new studies appear to illustrate that brain cancers do not rise as a result to increased cell phone use - at least until the data is looked at more closely.

In the first of the two - from the University of Oxford's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) - followed 791,710 middle aged-women for seven years - after they reported their cell phone use in 1999, 2005 and 2009.

The research discovered 51,680 invasive cancers and 1,261 central nervous system cancers during the period.

The research found that there was no increase in any cancers - including brain cancers - for those women who used cell phones versus those who did not.

However, when non-cell phone users were compared with cell users who had used cell-phone users for more than ten years, there was a 10% increase in meningioma risk. While the results were clear, the researchers did not consider the finding as significant enough.

In addition to this, compared to non-cell phone users, the long-term (10+ years) use of cell phones increased the risk of acoustic neuroma by two-and-a-half times. Perhaps they didn't think this was significant because acoustic neuromas are considered non-malignant, and thus not a true cancer. That may be true, but this is not a reason to ignore the increased risk.

Last spring, a pipeline carrying diluted bitumen from Alberta's oil sands ruptured in a small Arkansas town. People began to get sick. And now they want answers.

Yahtzee!" cries April Lane when she spots me in the carpool lot off the highway, where I've arranged to meet her. "How was your flight from Tor-on-to?" she asks, spelling out the syllables in her warm southern drawl as I climb into the passenger seat beside her and we begin the drive to the town of Mayflower, Ark., about 30 minutes northwest of Little Rock, the state capital.

Lane is likely wondering why I've come 1,800 kilometres from Canada to write a story about a sleepy rural town with a population of 2,300. On the surface, there's nothing remarkable about the place: a few churches and a high school; a tobacco store and a deli; a couple of gas stations.

We hook into a subdivision called Northwoods. It looks just like any suburban neighbourhood: comfortable new homes, a few cars parked on the street, a basketball net. But almost every house here has a for-sale sign on its neat green lawn. An industrial storage bin sits on one of the yards. There are patches of new asphalt everywhere.

We turn a corner. Lane points a manicured finger at a tree with a dark stain around its trunk. "This entire ditch was completely chock full of oil. It looked like a pool of Hershey's syrup," she says. "It's by no means gone or cleaned up; it's just covered up. Every time it rains, you can smell it."

"And this is Ruth's home," she continues. "Before the spill, she had a common cold. After the spill, her symptoms got much worse and her doctor diagnosed her with pneumonia."

People like Ruth have been getting sick ever since the accident. If Lane or anyone else asks why I'm here, I tell them it's because I'm Canadian and I want to learn more about what spilled Canadian oil is doing to the town and its people.

Early last spring, on March 29, ExxonMobil's 65-year-old Pegasus pipeline burst in the Northwoods subdivision. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil spewed out of a six-metre gash, running down the street and across yards and driveways.

Several Republican-led states at the forefront of the campaign to undermine President Obama's health-care law have come up with new ways to try to thwart it, refusing to enforce consumer protections, for example, and restricting federally funded workers hired to help people enroll in coverage.

And in at least one state, Missouri, local officials have been barred from doing anything to help put the law into place.

The actions have drawn less attention than congressional efforts to cut off funding for the law, or earlier state decisions to refuse to set up online insurance marketplaces or reject an expansion of Medicaid, which sharply limited the law's reach.

But the moves could impede Obama's most significant domestic accomplishment, which, despite having withstood a Supreme Court challenge and a presidential election, still faces doubts about its viability. And they could affect implementation at a crucial time, just as some of the major provisions of the law, also known as Obamacare, are set to go into effect.

Under the law, millions of uninsured Americans will be able to shop for health plans and apply for subsidies to buy them, beginning Oct. 1. The policies will take effect in January, when most Americans will be required to have insurance or face a penalty.

Advocates worry that continued resistance by some states could hinderefforts to coax many of the nation's 50 million uninsured to sign up for coverage.

People who were deprived of one night's sleep purchased more calories and grams of food in a mock supermarket on the following day in a new study published in the journal Obesity, the official journal of The Obesity Society. Sleep deprivation also led to increased blood levels of ghrelin, a hormone that increases hunger, on the following morning; however, there was no correlation between individual ghrelin levels and food purchasing, suggesting that other mechanisms - such as impulsive decision making - may be more responsible for increased purchasing.

Researchers in Sweden were curious as to whether sleep deprivation may impair or alter an individual's food purchasing choices based on its established tendency to impair higher-level thinking and to increase hunger.

"We hypothesized that sleep deprivation's impact on hunger and decision making would make for the 'perfect storm' with regard to shopping and food purchasing - leaving individuals hungrier and less capable of employing self-control and higher-level decision-making processes to avoid making impulsive, calorie-driven purchases," said first author Colin Chapman, MSc, of Uppsala University.

Researchers have found that apoptosis, a natural process of programmed cell death, can reactivate latent herpesviruses in the dying cell. The results of their research, which could have broad clinical significance since many cancer chemotherapies cause apoptosis, was published ahead of print in the Journal of Virology.

Human herpesviruses (HHV) are linked to a range of childhood and adult diseases, including chickenpox, mononucleosis, cold sores, and genital sores, and are of a particular concern for patients who are immunosuppressed due cancer or AIDS. Some HHV types are so common they are nearly universal in humans. A key feature of these viruses is their ability to remain latent for long periods of time, and then reactivate after the latent phase. Previously, reactivation was thought to be primarily due to waning immunity, immunosuppression, or exposure to certain inducing agents.

This study began when principal investigator Steven Zeichner of Children's National Medical Center and George Washington University in Washington, DC, followed up earlier findings that high concentrations of the antibiotic doxycycline can induce apoptosis, and can also activate replication by the Kaposi's Sarcoma-associated Herpesvirus (KSHV), and a study by his former mentor, Bernard Roizman of the University of Chicago, which showed that apoptosis also triggers replication of herpes simplex virus-1, which causes cold sores in the mouth.