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Over a million people in the United States have some form of Inflammatory Bowel Disease or IBD. It can be caused by intestinal bacteria, environment or genetics. One thing is for sure, the lining of the intestines don't work correctly because the cells have been disturbed by one of these things. A common finding in Crohn's and IBD is that a molecule called TNF is elevated, and starts the inflammation process. Researchers still don't know what signals the TNF to go up, but maybe they can turn it off with another molecule.

Immune cells in mice with lupus symptoms have overactive metabolisms, so scientists inhibited two metabolic pathways and succeeded in reversing lupus symptoms in mice

Scientists have discovered a new hormone that fights the weight gain caused by a high-fat Western diet and normalizes the metabolism -- effects commonly associated with exercising. When tested in mice, the hormone blocked the negative health effects of eating a high-fat diet.

This web site provides tools and resources that support ambitious science instruction at the middle school and high school levels. Ambitious teaching deliberately aims to get students of all racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds to understand science ideas, participate in the discourses of the discipline, and solve authentic problems. We describe 4 core instructional strategies that support this kind of teaching. These "high-leverage" practices make up the Science Learning Framework (below), and have been selected based on extensive research of how young people learn science, on authentic forms of science activity, and how teachers learn to appropriate new practices.

CPALMS is an online toolbox of information, vetted resources, and interactive tools that helps educators effectively implement teaching standards. It is the State of Florida's official source for standards information and course descriptions.

Mouse study fingers potential cause of fertility problems, proposing obesity and egg quality link.

While humans and mice look and act very differently, 85 to 90 percent of our genes are the same or similar. So if scientists can understand the instructions in every mouse gene, people will get a good idea of the instructions in virtually every human gene as well.

FREE online interactive lessons based around unanswered questions in Earth and Space Science to help students craft cogent scientific arguments based on the evidence.

FREE online interactive lessons based around unanswered questions in Earth and Space Science to help students craft cogent scientific arguments based on the evidence.

In this activity, we will work with the two groups of genes that control the cell cycle, proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. We will also add a new group of genes that are in charge of the maintenance of our DNA, the DNA repair system.

Sonnenburg, his wife Erica, and the graduate student Samuel Smits confirmed this idea in a recent experiment. The researchers started with mice that had been raised in sterile bubbles and then loaded with identical collections of gut microbes. They then fed these mice a high-fiber diet, before randomly switching half of them to low-fiber chow for seven weeks. Predictably, the fall in fiber caused upheavals in the rodents' guts. In the low-fiber group, the numbers of 60 percent of the local microbe species fell dramatically, and some remained low even after the mice returned to high-fiber meals. Those seven low-fiber weeks left lingering scars on the animals' microbiomes.

Scientists have genetically engineered monkeys so that they exhibit behaviors similar to autism, with a goal of testing potential therapies on the animals in hopes that their resemblance to humans will yield more answers about the disorder. The scientists found that the monkeys showed "very similar behaviors related to human autism patients, including repetitive behaviors, increased anxiety and, most importantly, defects in social interactions," said Zilong Qiu, a leader of the research at the Institute of Neuroscience at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai. The team is now imaging the brains of the monkeys, he said, "trying to identify the deficiency in the brain circuits that is responsible for the autism-like behavior."

Pheidole dentata, a native of the southeastern U.S., isn't immortal. But scientists have found that it doesn't seem to show any signs of aging. Old worker ants can take care of infants, forage and attack prey just as well as the youngsters, and their brains appear just as sharp. "We really get a picture that these ants-throughout much of the lifespan that we measured, which is probably longer than the lifespan under natural conditions-really don't decline," says Ysabel Giraldo, who studied the ants for her doctoral thesis at Boston University.

A new study by Duke University researchers helps clarify the matter by showing how a sugar habit changes specific brain circuits, and how those changes produce cravings that reinforce the habit. The research team began by getting a group of healthy mice hooked on sugar. Similar to classic studies on drug addiction, the mice in this study were trained to press a tiny lever to receive doses of sweets. Once the mice were hooked, they continued pressing the lever even when the sweets were removed. So that was step one, establishing a behavioral pattern to get the goods.

The Animal Research Behind the Top 25 most Prescribed Drugs

Recently, in an article in the New Republic, 'The Animals That Can Save Your Life', journalist Emma Young introduces readers to the emerging science of training animals to detect things humans cannot.

Similar to humans who have obsessive compulsive disorder, dogs exhibit compulsive behaviors, in which they might repetitively spin around, chase their tail, bark, chew, or suck on a toy or a part of their body for an excessive amount of time. In the latest study from Tufts University, researchers identified genetic pathways that increase the severity of canine compulsive disorders in Doberman pinschers. This discovery may lead to the development of improved treatments and therapies for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) in people. 

The team, led by senior authors Qi Zhou and Xiao-Yang Zhao, both from the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, took embryonic stem cells from mice and treated them to a series of carefully worked out steps that included first exposing the stem cells to testicular cells in newly born male mice. The scientists then recreated the chemical environment that sperm cells need to grow, including early development factors and sex hormones including testosterone, follicle stimulating hormone and a growth factor from the pituitary gland.

Focusing on this species of fruit fly, he and the other researchers in the lab of molecular biologist Sean B. Carroll, had made a prolonged assault on one of the key questions in evolutionary biology: how nature endows creatures with their colorful patterns, from a leopard's dark spots to a butterfly's bold swirls. In different species the patterns serve to attract mates, provide camouflage or provide other advantages in the struggle to survive. But what causes the colors to fall so precisely into place?

Research has revealed striking differences in the trillions of bacteria - a.k.a., the microbiome - in the intestines of children with and without autism. But the gut bacteria in individuals with autism aren't just different. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have shown for the first time that they may actually contribute to the disorder. They reported in the journal Cell in December 2013 that an experimental probiotic therapy alleviated autism-like behaviors in mice and are already planning a clinical trial.

The conclusion is that the high-fat diet triggered chronic inflammation, which in turn triggered an autoimmune response in the mice's central nervous systems. Normally this response protects the brain from invaders like bacteria, but a high-saturated fat diet knocks the process off track, resulting in damage to synapses in the brain - specifically in the hippocampus. Since the hippocampus is a brain area central to memory and learning, the eventual outcome is impaired brain function. In short, the high-fat diet caused brain damage.