A new study raises the question, do barriers to health care for undocumented immigrants increase the public health risk of tuberculosis?

As millions of Americans gear up for the Thanksgiving holiday, a new report published online in the FASEB Journal, may provide some relief for those leery second helpings. Researchers describe a discovery that may allow some obese people avoid common obesity-related metabolic problems without losing weight: they make a common antioxidant, melanin, in excess. Even more promising is that some of the antioxidant drugs that can mimic the melanin effect are FDA-approved and available.

More than 150 newspapers across the country have already endorsed Sen. John McCain or Sen. Barack Obama for president, with more to come in the remaining days before the election. Do these endorsements really matter? In a new paper, economist Brian Knight investigates the effect of endorsements on voter decision making and finds that they are, in fact, influential.

Popular media coverage of infectious diseases greatly influences how people perceive those diseases, making them seem more dangerous, according to a new study from McMaster University.

A new article in the December issue of the Quarterly Review of Biology provides strong evidence that allergies are much more than just an annoying immune malfunction. They may protect against certain types of cancer.

Women beware. Men are better at detecting their partner's infidelities than women. In a US study of heterosexual couples, 80 percent of women's inferences about fidelity or infidelity were correct, while men were accurate 94 perCent of the time. However, men were also more likely to suspect infidelity even when there was none. Researchers say the results make evolutionary sense because, unlike women, men can never be certain a baby is theirs.

UC San Diego bioengineers have created the first stable, fast and programmable genetic clock that reliably keeps time by the blinking of fluorescent proteins inside E. coli cells. The clock's blink rate changes when the temperature, energy source or other environmental conditions change, a fact that could lead to new kinds of sensors that convey information about the environment through the blinking rate. The researchers published their synthetic biology advance in the journal Nature.

While scholars may be a long way from predicting the ins and outs of the economy, University of Calgary biologist Edward McCauley and colleagues have uncovered fundamental rules that may govern population cycles in many natural systems. Their discovery is published today in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.

A quarter-million people were killed when a tsunami inundated Indian Ocean coastlines the day after Christmas in 2004. Now scientists have found evidence that the event was not a first-time occurrence.

Environmental changes implemented at 12 Dow Chemical Company worksites helped employees' there achieve modest improvements in health risks, including weight management, decreasing tobacco use and blood pressure, says Emory University public health researcher Ron Goetzel, Ph.D.

Offering another reason why eating red meat could be bad for you, an international research team, including University of California, San Diego School of Medicine professor Ajit Varki, M.D., has uncovered the first example of a bacterium that causes food poisoning in humans when it targets a non-human molecule absorbed into the body through red meats such as lamb, pork and beef.

UC San Diego computer scientists have built a software program that can perform key duplication without having the key. Instead, the computer scientists only need a photograph of the key.

Dr. Christian Rosenmund, professor of neuroscience and molecular and human genetics at Baylor College of Medicine, and graduate student Mingshan Xue use that analogy to describe the action of synaptotagmin-1, which acts to catalyze the fusion of the membranes of tiny neurotransmitter-filled bubbles called vesicles with the wall membrane of a neuron. This action allows signals to flow between neurons.

A novel technique under development at NIST uses a relatively inexpensive optical microscope to quickly and cheaply analyze nanoscale dimensions with nanoscale measurement sensitivity.

Marrying a sensitive detector technology capable of distinguishing hundreds of different chemical compounds with a pattern-recognition module that mimics the way animals recognize odors, NIST researchers have created a new approach for 'electronic noses' that is more adept than conventional methodologies at recognizing molecular features even for chemicals it has not been trained to detect.