What’s the News: Forget masking our scent or making us taste bad—sensory overload might be our most potent tool in repelling mosquitoes. And we might someday have a repellent for the job: Scientists have just discovered a molecule that zaps all of a mosquito’s odor receptors at once, overwhelming it. The molecule’s not ready to be deployed yet, but early tests indicate it could be thousands of times more effective than DEET.

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Video games might do more than get you off your fanny.

What’s the News: Getting in shape with Wii Bowling was just the beginning: scientists are now studying whether videogames that use breath as a controller can encourage healthy habits in children with cystic fibrosis.

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Aplysia californica

What’s the News: Researchers have considerably weakened—and perhaps even erased—long-term memories in Aplysia, a type of marine slug, and in neurons in a lab dish, by blocking the activity of a particular enzyme. Understanding how to weaken and erase such memories could one day lead to new treatments for people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, who are haunted by memories of traumatic events.

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What’s the News: Going undercover can require some sacrifices–burning off your fingerprints, for instance, a la Gattaca. It’s the same story with bacteria: they can slip below antibiotics’ radar without any mutations, but only using an elaborate system of self-sabotage. A new study reveals the workings of this biochemical disguise.

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Metastatic melanoma cells

What’s the News: Souped-up cells from a patient’s own immune system could one day be used to treat advanced melanoma, according to a preliminary study published in Science Translational Medicine investigating the safety of the technique. The researchers manipulated a patient’s immune system cells to better recognize cancer cells in the lab and then re-introduced those cells into the body—an approach called “adoptive T-cell therapy.”

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What’s the News: Please back away from the armadillo, ma’am. You can watch them from a distance, even take pictures, but don’t play with or eat Texas’s state mammal: scientists have just confirmed that it is a source of leprosy infections in humans.

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What’s the News: As a European court looks poised to ban the patenting of technologies using human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), a group of prominent scientists has issued a warning: regenerative medicine is never going to leave the lab if no one can make money on it.

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What’s the News: Engineers and patients dream of mechanical prosthetic limbs that can talk and listen to the brain, moving in response to thought and sending back sensory information. For that dream to become reality, electrodes from the prosthetic have to connect with nearby nerve cells—a tricky proposition, given that nerve cells in an amputated limb won’t grow without proper structural support. A new tubular scaffold, described in detail by Technology Review, has tiny grooves that fit bundles of nerve cells, which could provide the support nerves need to interface with a mechanical limb better than current designs.

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What’s the News: Researchers have known for decades that what a woman eats during her pregnancy can impact her child’s weight later in life. Now, a new study shows a possible mechanism for how mom’s diet affects baby’s weight: Epigenetic changes—changes that can increase or decrease the expression of a particular gene but don’t alter the genetic sequence—to a gene involved in fat metabolism can be passed from mother to child during pregnancy.

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What’s the News: Anxiety. Insomnia. Hallucinations. Methamphetamine’s effects on the human brain are well documented, but researchers know relatively little about how the drug affects the body on the molecular scale. Looking at fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), scientists have detailed how meth disrupts chemical reactions associated with generating energy, creating sperm cells, and regulating muscles. Most interestingly, they discovered that meth-exposed fruit flies may live longer when they eat sugar. “We know that methamphetamine influences cellular processes associated with aging, it affects spermatogenesis, and it affects the heart,” says University of Illinois entomologist Barry Pittendrigh. “One could almost call meth a perfect storm toxin because it does so much damage to so many different tissues in the body.”

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Selfish genes could help destroy mosquitoes’ ability to carry malaria.

What’s the News: Many scientists have played with the idea of creating a genetically modified mosquito that won’t transmit malaria, which kills about 850,000 people a year, and releasing it into the wild. But in the face of the millions of mosquitoes out there that do ferry malaria around, how would the trait spread fast enough to make a difference?

Now, scientists have developed a way to cause a “selfish” gene to spread to more than half of a mosquito population over just a few generations, suggesting a method to quickly and broadly disrupt genes required for carrying malaria.

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Swapping chromosomes among eggs could keep
embryos from inheriting genetic diseases.

What’s the News: Babies with three parents and fewer genetic diseases might soon be possible: A UK national health panel has found that techniques for swapping chromosomes between eggs so offspring don’t inherit disease-causing mutations from their mother’s mitochondria are not dangerous. The techniques, which have been tested in mice, monkeys, and human cells, still need to be studied more before making the transfer to the clinic, though, and as with all genetic engineering techniques, there’s a complex ethical maze ahead of researchers. 

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What’s the News: A much-anticipated trial in African women of an HIV drug found to be effective in preventing infection in men has washed out—researchers announced today that women taking Truvada were no more likely to evade HIV infection than women taking a placebo.

The result is especially disappointing because Truvada, which is an oral pill combining two drugs, emtricitabine and tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, has been shown to be 90% effective in preventing infection in gay men who took it religiously. (more…)

What’s the News: In long space flights, such as a mission to Mars, astronauts will have more time during which they could get injured or sick. And the same apparently goes for the medicine aboard spaceships: According to a NASA-funded study, medicines degrade faster in space than they do on Earth. As the researchers conclude in their paper, “this information can facilitate research for the development of space-hardy pharmaceuticals and packaging technologies.”

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What’s the News: Alzheimer’s is getting an update: for the first time in 27 years, the national criteria for diagnosing the disease have been revised. The new criteria are intended only for use by researchers studying the disease, but they are important because they acknowledge growing evidence for an early stage of Alzheimer’s that could be detectable with biological tests before cognitive impairment sets in. (more…)