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A new strain of MRSA has been identified in cows' milk and in people, but don't stop drinking milk - the bug is killed off in pasteurisation. However, the strain evades detection by standard tests used by some hospitals to screen for MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), potentially putting people at risk. Laura Garcia Alvarez, then at the University of Cambridge, and colleagues were studying infections in British cows when they discovered antibiotic-resistant bacteria that they thought were MRSA. However, tests failed to identify the samples as any known strains of the superbug. Sequencing the mystery bacteria's genomes revealed a previously unknown strain of MRSA with a different version of a gene called MecA. The new strain was also identified in samples of human MRSA, and is now known to account for about 1 per cent of human MRSA cases.

ScienceDaily (June 27, 2011) - While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration notes "some concern" with the controversial chemical BPA, and many other countries, such as Japan and Canada, have considered BPA product bans, disagreement exists amongst scientists in this field on the effects of BPA in animals and humans. The latest research from the University of Missouri shows that BPA causes male deer mice to become demasculinized and behave more like females in their spatial navigational abilities, leading scientists to conclude that exposure to BPA during human development could be damaging to behavioral and cognitive traits that are unique to each sex and important in reproduction.

An immune-suppressing drug called rapamycin could possibly treat Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome (HGPS), a rare genetic disease that causes premature aging, and advance biological understanding of the normal aging process, according to researchers from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health, the University of Maryland and Massachusetts General Hospital. Progeria is a genetic disorder characterized by dramatic premature aging. "Progerin that causes progeria also accumulates, although in very small amounts, in normal aging," said Dimitri Krainc, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. "However, if rapamycin proves to have beneficial effects in lifespan in humans it is safe to assume that it will not be just because it may clear progerin from cells, but also because it clears other toxic products that accumulate during aging." Ref.: Francis S. Collins, et al., Rapamycin Reverses Cellular Phenotypes and Enhances Mutant Protein Clearance in Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome Cells, Science, 2011; [DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3002346]

Brain tumor and brain cancer are synonymous terms. Due to the formation of abnormal cells in the human brain this disease occurs. Human beings below the age of 40 years, especially the kids are the most affected ones by this particular sort of cancer.

"The Natural Language Processing Group at Stanford University is a team of faculty, research scientists, postdocs, programmers and students who work together on algorithms that allow computers to process and understand human languages. Our work ranges from basic research in computational linguistics to key applications in human language technology, and covers areas such as sentence understanding, machine translation, probabilistic parsing and tagging, biomedical information extraction, grammar induction, word sense disambiguation, automatic question answering, and text to 3D scene generation."

Stem cells are generally present in the body of humans and several animals. They divide themselves into some other cells as well with time, which are important for the survival of humans.

"Bioprinting human body parts. Jemma Redmond , Ouro_botics, we are already touching the future"

"SocioPatterns is an interdisciplinary research collaboration formed in 2008 that adopts a data-driven methodology to study social dynamics and human activity. Since 2008, we have collected longitudinal data on the physical proximity and face-to-face contacts of individuals in numerous real-world environments, covering widely varying contexts across several countries: schools, museums, hospitals, etc. We use the data to study human behaviour and to develop agent-based models for the transmission of infectious diseases."

"The Human Brain Project aims to put in place a cutting-edge research infrastructure that will allow scientific and industrial researchers to advance our knowledge in the fields of neuroscience, computing, and brain-related medicine"

'A key enabler to advance brain science EBRAINS is a new digital research infrastructure, created by the EU-funded Human Brain Project, that gathers an extensive range of data and tools for brain-related research. EBRAINS will capitalize on the work performed by the Human Brain Project teams in digital neuroscience, brain medicine, and brain-inspired technology and will take it to the next level.'

"Advance scientific research. Promote technology. For the good of all humanity. Open Academic Search (OAS) is a working group aiming to advance scientific research and discovery, promote technology that assists the scientific and academic communities, and make research available worldwide for the good of all humanity."

The Personal Genome API. Build an app on the human genome

A Deep Catalog of Human Genetic Variation

"Our knowledge of species and functional composition of the human gut microbiome is rapidly increasing, but it is still based on very few cohorts and little is known about variation across the world. By combining 22 newly sequenced faecal metagenomes of individuals from four countries with previously published data sets, here we identify three robust clusters (referred to as enterotypes hereafter) that are not nation or continent specific. We also confirmed the enterotypes in two published, larger cohorts, indicating that intestinal microbiota variation is generally stratified, not continuous. This indicates further the existence of a limited number of well-balanced host-microbial symbiotic states that might respond differently to diet and drug intake."

"This research provides an understanding of the neural basis for social behavior from the perspective of how we evaluate social experiences and how our social interactions and decisions are motivated. We review research addressing the common neural systems underlying evaluation of social and nonsocial rewards. The human striatum, known to play a key role in reward processing, displays signals related to a broad spectrum of social functioning, including evaluating social rewards, making decisions influenced by social factors, learning about social others, cooperating, competing, and following social norms. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:61-73. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1266"

A new interactive database, including a timeline showing how human fetuses develop, displays scientific data about controversial chemicals in a graphic way

We belong to a remarkably quirky species. Despite our best efforts, some of our strangest foibles still defy explanation. But as science probes deeper into these eccentricities, it is becoming clear that behaviours and attributes that seem frivolous at first glance often go to the heart of what it means to be human.

"ScienceDaily (Aug. 25, 2010) - A new study from researchers in Canada and Sweden has shown that biosynthetic corneas can help regenerate and repair damaged eye tissue and improve vision in humans. The results, from an early phase clinical trial with 10 patients, are published in the August 25th, 2010 issue of Science Translational Medicine"