Phones and tumours Italy s highest civil court has stated that mobile phones can cause brain tumours to the dismay of medical experts who say no study has proven a clear causal link between health risks
the court ruled in favour of a commerce manager who claimed his tumour was a consequence of the heavy phone usage demanded by his job.
says the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in Birmingham, Alabama, which issued new guidelines for the controversial practice on 22 Â October.
That change in policy is expected to accelerate the growth of clinics that offer to freeze the eggs of women who face fertility-damaging treatment
The cull was scheduled to start imminently as part of efforts to control bovine tuberculosis, which badgers can transmit to cattle (see Nature 490,317-318;
spent more than a decade developing a spinal-cord-injury treatment derived from human embryonic stem cells
and performed early clinical testing in 2010. But John Scarlett, the company s current chief executive, shut down the programme last November,
saying that Geron s cancer therapeutics are a better investment. See go. nature. com/tihbe6 for more.
Diet-pill concern Europe s drug regulators have recommended against approving a diet pill recently cleared for sale in the United states. The European Medicines Agency s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use
In response, medical charities, drug firms and 15 universities issued a declaration affirming that their research involves animals only where other avenues are not possible,
Chimp haven The US National institutes of health (NIH) said on 17 Â October that it will send 20 Â chimpanzees to permanent retirement in a federally funded sanctuary by August 2013 double the number it announced last month.
The animals are among 110 Â NIH-owned chimpanzees that the agency is removing from the New Iberia Research center in Lafayette, Louisiana Officials at the 80-hectare Chimp Haven sanctuary in Keithville,
WHONEW cases of tuberculosis (TB) fell by 2. 2%between 2010 and 2011, the World health organization said in its annual report on the disease.
But some 3. 7%of new TB cases are now multi-drug resistant. In some countries in Eastern europe and Central asia, multi-drug resistance occurs in more than 20%of cases (see chart.
Because of incorrect diagnoses and a shortage of data in some places, even this is probably an underestimate.
See go. nature. com/pytbbu for more
Primates were always tree-dwellersprimates love to climb and most make their homes high up in the branches of trees,
"The anatomy of these specimens certainly matches that of known Paleocene primates, but a skull or a full skeleton would tell us so much more,
and noticed these lesions that looked like they were from injuries, explains Joseph Peterson, a palaeontologist at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh.
He wondered whether the fossilized injury was one of a kind or whether such lesions were common.
To find out, Peterson and his colleague Collin Dischler started examining more domes. Together, they were able to look at 102 domes from fossil collections around the world.
Of these, 23 had lesions. Fascinated by the presence of so many injuries, Peterson and Dischler produced a three-dimensional computer model of a pachycephalosaur skull
and mapped injuries onto it. They noted that the shape of the dome differed from fossil to fossil
and that the placement of the injuries depended on the shape of the skull. Skulls with low domes tended to have injuries at the front,
whereas skulls with higher domes had distributed lesions evenly between the front and back. The finding hinted that the pachycephalosaurs with differently shaped skulls were bumping heads in different ways.
To find out what those ways were considered, the researchers the butting of sheep, goats and bison."
"The lesions we were seeing were strikingly similar to those that we often see on the skulls of modern mammals that ram heads,
says Peterson. The team found that bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) charge each other head on; that mountain goats (Oreamos americanus) bump one another in the flanks;
On the basis of these examples, Peterson and Dischler speculate that the high-domed pachycephalosaurs with parietal injuries were side-bumping like mountain goats,
and that the frontal injuries are indicative of bison-like wrestling.""It could be that we are seeing two different species bashing in different ways,
whether the lesions really are butt prints.""It is an intriguing study but after examining one of these injuries
I found it hard to rule out the possibility that this might have simply been the skull being chipped after death,
if the lesion sites actually suffered trauma, he says. Whatever the outcome, seven-year-olds will undoubtedly keep on bashing
For Van Eenennaam, a geneticist at the University of California, Davis, the scientifically unfounded assertions that transgenic foods are increased responsible for incidence of autism,
Alzheimer s disease and type 2 diabetes in the United states cannot be taken seriously. But the film reflects attitudes that have thwarted Van Eenennaam s research into the genetic modification of animals to reduce food costs
In one case, James Murray, another geneticist at the University of California, Davis, was told in 2003 that the USDA had rejected his proposal to develop a goat that produces milk rich in human lysozymes enzymes that fight diarrhoeal disease
The US National institutes of health (NIH) occasionally supports research on transgenic pigs that model human diseases, but rarely funds proposals to produce drugs or vaccines in the milk of transgenic livestock.
An NIH spokesperson says that decisions are based on many factors, including the needs of the research community.
For GE animals that have been developed despite these hurdles market approval has stalled. On 27 september, Van Eenennaam was a panellist at a meeting in WASHINGTON DC,
where advocates of GE animal research aired their frustrations with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA),
A brief history of some of the genetically engineered food animals submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for review.
The FDA evaluates animals as strictly as it does drugs. In the 17 Â years that the salmon has been under review
the childhood diarrhoea that the goats milk is intended to treat is a serious problem in the north of the country.
including chickens engineered to be resistant to the bird-flu virus. A BBSRC spokesperson told Nature:"
it is a menace that infects their cattle with bovine tuberculosis (TB). The disease, caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium bovis,
could cost the government £1  billion (US$1. 6  billion) in control measures and compensation over the next decade.
Yes, counters David King, a chemist and director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, also at Oxford."
To control the disease, which can spread to humans through contaminated milk, cattle are screened routinely
but they hope that it will at least help to stabilize infection rates. Boyd insists that the new policy is rooted in the science of the RBCT.
and conservationists concede that badgers are a major reservoir for the disease.""They may not be singing from the same hymn sheet,
Roundup, showed increased incidences of cancer (G.-E. SÃ ralini et al. Food Chem. Toxicol. http://doi. org/jgq;
but industry officials continue to question the source of the contamination. see go. nature. com/xzorhp for more. UK funding boost The UK government will add £200 million (US$321 million to a fund to promote research partnerships between universities and industry,
Nobel prizes This year's Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine went to stem-cell experts John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka,
Dystrophy drug hope The experimental drug eteplirsen may help patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a clinical trial of 12 boys with the condition reported on 3 october.
Scientists at biotech firm Sarepta Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which makes the drug, revealed that four boys who had taken a high dose of eteplirsen for nearly a year were able to walk an average of 21 metres farther in six minutes than at the start of the trial.
Those on a placebo showed a decline of 68 metres. The company plans to file for regulatory approval with the US Food and Drug Administration.
About 1 in 3, 600 boys develops DMD, which is caused by mutations in a gene on the X chromosome and eventually leads to paralysis and death.
Private spaceflight California firm Spacex launched its first mission to resupply the International Space station on 7 october, a milestone in commercial spaceflight.
As Nature went to press, the Dragon craft was due to dock with the space station on 10 october.
The launch saw one engine fail, but the craft reached orbit. Spacex based in Hawthorne,
One of those animals, a cow, secretes milk that lacks an allergy-inducing protein because researchers accurately blocked its production using the technique of RNA interference1.
For years, researchers tried to remove the allergy-inducing milk protein beta-lactoglobulin from cow's milk
which can cause diarrhea and vomiting in some toddlers. They tried replacing the gene encoding beta-lactoglobulin with a defective form,
LDLS build up and lead to atherosclerosis. Pigs with this condition may be reliable models of human atheroscelerosis in biomedical research.
The TALEN-modified pig is not the first model of human heart disease (see Model pigs face a messy path),
but the technique makes genetic engineering less costly and more efficient.""I d be exaggerating if
Breast-milk molecule raises risk of HIV transmissiona type of sugar that occurs naturally in breast milk can double the likelihood of a HIV-negative baby acquiring the virus through breast feeding
if the mother has HIV. The molecule, called 3'-sialyllactose (3'-SL), is found in varying concentrations in the milk of different women.
In a study in Zambia, HIV-negative newborns breastfed by HIV-positive mothers are twice as likely to catch the virus during their first month of life
HIV-negative infants who consumed these sugars had a better chance of reaching their second birthday than did HIV-negative babies who drank breast milk lacking those sugars irrespective of their mothers'HIV status. Once a baby had caught HIV, however
Several labs are trying to identify how variation in the prevalence of the large sugar molecules in breast milk, collectively known as human milk oligosaccharides (HMOS), influences infant health.
clinical trials to test HMOS as health-boosting additives in infant formula milk can be drawn up.
And, potentially, those women whose milk is found to contain less favourable biochemical characteristics such as HIV-positive mothers who make lots of 3'-SL might consider giving their infants donor breast milk in place of their own.
whether a HIV-positive woman in Zambia who learns that she produces 3'-SL-rich breast milk should switch to formula feeding,
which would raise the chance of her baby succumbing to other intestinal and respiratory infections.
The often confusing literature on breast feeding's impact on disease will be explained largely by this underestimation.
Newberg was part of a team that reported2 an association between a dangerous gut disease in babies called necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC)
A quick milk test for this sugar might be able to tell physicians how much they should worry about infants developing NEC. In a step towards that approach,
five US hospitals are set to monitor DSLNT concentration in the breast milk of mothers whose premature babies develop NEC,
and those whose premature infants remain NEC-free. But adding DSLNT to the diets of premature babies is still a long way off.
It is longer than any oligosaccharide that has so far been synthesized in the lab and extracting it from breast milk would be prohibitively expensive."
and a six-year drug war. Enrique Pe  a Nieto will have his hands full
and many saw Brazil as a model for how the world could shed its addiction to oil,
and to try to create more faithful models of human disease. This week s draft sequence of T. J. s genome (see page 393
and perhaps even allow pigs to be engineered to provide organs for transplant into human patients."
or deleted to mimic human diseases.""Making such pigs has got increasingly easier as knowledge of the genome increases,
which is funded by the National institutes of health (NIH). Geneticist Martien Groenen, part of the team that sequenced the pig genome, chews the fat with Thea Cunningham.
The NIH launched the NSRRC in 2003 to encourage research in pig disease models. Pigs are more expensive to keep than rodents,
But the similarities between pig and human anatomy and physiology can trump the drawbacks. For example, their eyes are a similar size,
So the pig became the first model for retinitis pigmentosa, a cause of blindness. And four years ago, researchers created a pig model of cystic fibrosis2 that
and then suffer for it to develop models of diabetes. One pig model carries a mutant transgene that limits the effectiveness of incretin,
Mice with the transgene developed unexpectedly severe diabetes, but the pigs have a more subtle pre-diabetic condition that better models the human disease."
"This shows the importance of using an animal with a relevant physiology, says Wolf. Pig models are now being developed for other common conditions,
including Alzheimer s disease, cancer and muscular dystrophy. This work will be enriched by the discovery, reported in the genome paper,
of 112 gene variants that might be involved in human diseases. Knowledge of the genome is also allowing scientists to try to engineer pigs that could be the source of organs,
including heart and liver, for human patients. Pig organs are roughly the right size, and researchers hope to create transgenic pigs carrying genes that deceive the immune system of recipients into not rejecting the transplants.
early knowledge about the pig genome led to the discovery in 1991 of a gene involved in porcine stress syndrome, in
which the stress of overheating, being moved or even having sex causes the animals to die suddenly4.
Having the full genome should also help investigators to breed out susceptibility to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS),
a viral disease costing the US pig industry US$600 Â million per year. The PRRS Host Genetics Consortium, a network of US research groups
a genome researcher from Wageningen University in The netherlands, has resequenced the genomes of scores of different strains of wild and domestic pigs,
Fungal meningitis pathogen discovers new appetite for human brainsthe nation's ongoing fungal meningitis outbreak has killed 30
But just how a pathogen typically associated with the great outdoors got into the three lots of injectable steroids prepared inside an admittedly filthy laboratory
and was similarly found growing in unopened vials of the steroid alleged to have caused the outbreak, according to the U s. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Glenn Roberts, a retired medical mycologist, says that in his 40 years of experience at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
when he heard the identity of the pathogen in the epidemic that originated with the New england Compounding Center pharmacy in Framingham, Mass."
an emeritus professor in the Department of Plant pathology at the University of Minnesota who retired in 2001 from the U s. Department of agriculture's Cereal Disease Lab (then the Cereal Rust Lab). Early in his career,
but only distantly related, fungi with multicellular dark spores that were causing disease in grains such as corn.
Plant defenses which can include induced cell fortification, cell suicide, toxic chemicals, and defensive enzymes and proteins typically were sufficient to keep the infection in check,
but not strong enough to eliminate it. The payoff came when the plant died the fungus was first in line to feed on its decaying remains.
I think it's just a general weak pathogen of plants, Leonard says, something that can infect plants
although it was not nearly as common as several more severe corn pathogens. It was an opportunist
and protects human skin seem to be generating more human infections for reasons he does not understand.
in addition to causing soft-tissue infections, has provoked also rarely sinus or eye infections, primarily in immunocompromised patients.
Roberts was not surprised by its ability to capitalize on its situation once inside a patient. After the fungus was injected along with the drug into the epidural space the space between the dura mater,
which encloses the spinal fluid and spinal cord, and the inside walls of the vertebrae the fungus's filaments were able to penetrate the dura mater,
an environment where the immune system has a very difficult time eliminating or even just controlling infection.
Those who suffered the worst infections, he speculates, were probably those in whom the needle accidentally penetrated the dura mater,
The fungus's confinement to just three lots of the drug also remains unexplained. If the facility's water or air supplies in general were contaminated,
Another pathway could be the drug itself: Although the water used for making up the final doses was allegedly sterile,
the steroid drug ingredient was not. Using nonsterile components for injection in somebody's spine?
Roberts says. My goodness, that's terrible
South Pacific coconut gene bank under threatthe international collection of the South Pacific's coconut palm species,
held at a field gene bank in Papua new guinea (PNG), is under threat from a disease outbreak close to the gene bank.
The deadly disease, Bogia Coconut Syndrome, is threatening the survival of a gene bank of region's most important tree
the disease appears to be caused by bacteria similar to, but distinct from, the bacteria that cause the better known Lethal Yellowing disease that attacks palm species. Ironically,
PNG was selected as the site for the gene bank in the 1990s because the country was relatively free of coconut pests and diseases.
In an attempt to contain the disease, movement of coconuts and coconut palms, both from the gene bank and for commercial reasons,
out of the affected region has been banned, with roadblocks in place to help enforce this. But these restrictions are preventing the gene bank from fulfilling one of its key roles:
At present, both the pathogen and its epidemiology are understood poorly. We are supporting research to try to identify the Bogia Coconut Syndrome vector
and better understand the host range of this disease. Once we have that information, everyone will be placed better to assess the threat both to coconuts and livelihoods in general
Fungus that controls zombie-ants has own fungal stalkeran article by Scientific American. An unsuspecting worker ant in Brazil's rainforest leaves its nest one morning.
Fossil evidence implies that this zombifying infection might have been happening for at least 48 million years. Recent research also suggests that different species of the fungus might specialize to infect different groups of ants across the globe.
added together, make this parasite one of the most insidious infections or perhaps that honor goes to the parasite that ultimately kills the killer parasite.
Deadly infection This clever Ophiocordyceps fungus depends on ants to reproduce and spread, but it has found an abundant host animal.
displaying convulsions that make them fall down and thus preclude them from returning to the canopy,
Evans suggests that a nerve toxin spurred on by the fungus is at least partly to blame
Ants that have been dissected at this stage of infection reveal heads already full of fungal cells. Eventually, an affected ant will stop on the underside of one leaf, roughly 25 centimeters from the forest floor,
Scientists have found that the fungus also triggers atrophy in its victim's muscles specifically those around its mandibles.
This atrophy is prompted by metabolites that purge the muscle cells of mitochondria and sarcoplasmic reticulum (which provide energy and signals), according to the BMC Ecology research.
when the infected ant bites onto the leaf vein in it's so-called death grip this atrophy causes it to have lockjaw,
As a deadly infection it could severely damage an ant colony. But, if another parasite renders more than half of its mature spores infertile
'a disease caused by the fungus Chalara fraxinea, but this will not stop the pathogen from killing up to 99%of the ash trees in the country,
say scientists. Diseased trees in nurseries and those that have been planted newly will be identified and destroyed. Mature trees will be left standing,
however, will not eradicate the disease from the United kingdom.""There is absolutely no magic wand we can wave to make this disappear,
and with as many as 90 million ash trees at risk, the disease threatens to irreversibly change the shape of The british countryside.
500 square kilometres of British countryside looking for sites of infection, which as of today number 129.
It is possible that the disease reached the United kingdom via infected ash timber or imported plants,
Because the sites of infection are scattered across the country, the spores were blown probably on the wind from continental Europe,
The main task now is to identify resistant strains of ash a challenge that European scientists are already trying to tackle
"If a small number of trees have survived the very intense epidemic in Demark, then there is hope for us here,
Part of the reason it has taken so long to tackle the disease  was confusion in Europe over
says Joan Webber, a pathologist at Forest Research in Surrey, UK. Was it a new species of fungus,
a species endemic to Europe that they thought had developed into a new, more virulent strain.
But in 2011 a group of mycologists determined that the disease was caused by a different species altogether,
and meanwhile the pathogen moved west across Europe. The latest research indicates that H. pseudoalbidus is native to Japan,
says Stephen Woodward, a plant pathologist at the University of Aberdeen, UK, who was part of the group that advised the UK government on the action plan.
the trees had little ability to cope with the pathogen, and Woodward says that there is little that can be done now."
the worldwide spread of plant pathogens shows little sign of abating in a globalized economy."
Food and Rural affairs. We need to treat plant diseases as seriously as we do said animal diseases, Paterson this morning."
"We need a radical rethink in how we deal with plant diseases, and the word is radical
"The question of the underlying health of the forest is much deeper than the instantaneous response.
MÃ lanie Salque, a chemist at the University of Bristol, UK, used gas chromatography and carbon-isotope ratios to analyse molecules preserved in the pores of the ancient clay
a chemist at Bristol and a co-author of the paper. The finding, he adds, is not only an indication that humans had by that time learned to use sophisticated technology,
A three-month investigation, led by the Chinese Center for disease control and Prevention (CDC), culminated in the decision on 6 december to sack two members of the CDC s own staff Yin Shi an,
where the study took place as well as Wang Yin, head of science and technology at the Zhejiang Academy of Medical sciences.
and was part-funded by the US National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney diseases,
According to a paper published online by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition on 1 august, each group of two dozen or so children aged six to eight ate meals containing Golden Rice, spinach or à Â-carotene capsules for lunch every week day during the three-week trial1.
and have demanded a guarantee that the rice will not affect their children s health.""If it s safe, why did need they to deceive us into this?
has rejected the findings of a controversial paper published in September (see go. nature. com/3slkys) claiming that rats fed genetically modified maize (corn) showed adverse health effects,
including higher incidence of tumours and earlier mortality than controls. The review s conclusion that the study was designed"inadequately,
Mental-health guide The upcoming revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental disorders (DSM-5) has passed the final hurdle before it heads to the presses.
On 1 Â December the American Psychiatric Association s board of trustees approved the revised text, which includes controversial changes to the definitions of autism
and major depression (see Nature 482,14-15; 2012). ) The manual is slated to be published by May 2013.
Mess in Texas The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) announced the freezing of an US$11-million commercialization grant to Peloton Therapeutics in Dallas on 29 november,
after an audit revealed that the 2010 award was made without commercial or scientific review (see go. nature. com/ctjei4).
The finding comes on the heels of months of controversy about an $18-million unreviewed CPRIT grant to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston (see Nature 486,169-171;
) Two strikes rule The US National institutes of health has said that it will continue an unpopular policy that prevents grant applicants from resubmitting rejected proposals more than once.
Utah, and a coalition of medical associations and physicians that has challenged the validity of the company s patents on the BRCA1
and BRCA2 gene variants linked to inherited breast and ovarian cancer. See go. nature. com/jbqdxl for more.
HSCICMMR vaccination The immunization of children in England against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) by 24 Â months of age has reached now more than 90,
Vaccinations dipped to as low as 79%after authors led by Andrew Wakefield published a now-retracted paper in The Lancet suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
about safety data from clinical trials of a drug for Alzheimer s disease before the results were made public.
Policy Curesglobal funding for work on neglected diseases totalled US$3. 32 billion in 2011, essentially stable in real terms compared with 2010, according to the G-FINDER investment survey by Policy Cures,
a health-policy analysis firm based in London and Sydney, Australia. Over the past three years, public and philanthropic funding has declined as some government aid budgets have been cut,
whereas industry funding has grown (mostly owing to investments in trials for dengue vaccines). 7 december Climate negotiators end a fortnight of debate at the United nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Doha. go. nature. com/wnhovv12 December British scientists start 100
 hours of drilling to reach Antarctica s subglacial Lake  Ellsworth, buried under more than 3  kilometres of ice (see Nature 491,506-507;
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