If successful in humans, vaccine could eliminate annual flu shot

Globally, the influenza virus, or flu, is thought to cause between three and five million cases of severe illness and between 250,000 and 500,000 deaths annually, according to the World Health Organization. New strains of the virus emerge each year, so that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and other public health services must produce and distribute a new vaccine against the new flu strains each year. And each year,

Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University this week announced preliminary study results showing smallpox vaccine protection lasts longer than previously thought. Until now, it was widely accepted that smallpox vaccine protection lasted approximately three to five years. However, early study data shows that significant, partial protection may last many decades after inoculation.

“More than 90 percent of Americans older than 35 have already been vaccinated against smallpox. This trans

One barrier to protecting biodiversity is that there are no good ways of figuring out how many species there are in large areas. Now we may finally be able to find out: a new method accurately predicts the total number of North American butterfly species even when only a tenth of the ecoregions are sampled.

This could “at last enable ecology to estimate worldwide species diversity,” say Michael Rosenzweig, Will Turner and Jonathan Cox of the University of Arizona, Tucson, and Taylor Rickett

New research reveals a surprising risk factor for extinction: monogamy. Large mammals that live in pairs or have small harems are far more likely to die out than those with big harems in reserves in Ghana.

“In avoiding extinction, it pays to be promiscuous,” says Justin Brashares of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who presents this work in the June issue of Conservation Biology. “This study is the first to show a strong link between social behavior and risk of extinction in

Maybe you really are what you eat. This would solve the long-time mystery of why so many of Guam’s Chamorro people – up to a third per village — suffered a devastating neurological disease. A new study suggests that they gorged on flying fox bats that in turn had feasted on neurotoxin-laden cycad seeds.

“Through the consumption of cycad-fed flying foxes, the Chamorro people may have unwittingly ingested large quantities of cycad neurotoxins,” say Clark Monson of the University of Hawaii,

Researchers at Emory University and Argonne National Laboratory have discovered a new method to manipulate the self-assembly and formation of amyloid fibrils, a major component of brain plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease, thereby opening new avenues for examination of their formation and for the construction of robust nanotubes that have potential applications in research, industry and medicine.

Certain short amino acid chains, the building blocks of proteins, are capable of self-a