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The identification of a new class of photoreceptors in the retina of fruit flies sheds light on the regulation of the pigments of the eye that confer color vision, researchers at New York University's Center for Developmental Genetics report in a new study. The findings, they write, may also have implications for the regulating of olfactory receptors, which are responsible for the detection of smells, because both types of receptors belong to the same protein family.

A commonly used chemotherapy drug causes healthy brain cells to die off long after treatment has ended and may be one of the underlying biological causes of the cognitive side effects -- or "chemo brain" -- that many cancer patients experience.

Concern about the potential health effects of bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical widely used in consumer plastic products, is growing, following the recent release of a draft report from the US National Toxicology Program. That report says there's "some concern" about the potential negative health effects of BPA on infants and children and calls for more research to determine just what the risks of BPA exposure might be.

New research suggests that not everyone who is bitten by a malaria-infected mosquito develops life threatening health problems. Malaria causes an estimated 500 million clinical cases worldwide with symptoms ranging from headache, high fevers and nausea to more than 1 million deaths annually.

Cancer treatment with chemotherapeutic agents is often associated with delayed adverse neurological consequences -- an occurrence often referred to as "chemobrain" -- that may compromise the quality of life of a proportion of cancer survivors. Now, new research demonstrates that treatment with a single chemotherapeutic agent, 5-fluorouracil, by itself is sufficient to cause a syndrome of delayed degeneration in the central nervous system.

New drug research suggests that teens may get addicted and relapse more easily than adults because developing brains are more powerfully motivated by drug-related cues. This conclusion has been reached by researchers who found that adolescent rats given cocaine -- a powerfully addicting stimulant -- were more likely than adults to prefer the place where they got it.

Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disorder of the brain affecting movement, speech, mood, behavior, thinking and sensation for which there is no known cause or cure. Two new studies shed new light on very early development of the disease.

A new fundamental mechanism of how tumour cells communicate has just been discovered. These findings could change our view on how cancerous tissues work and lead to major clinical innovations.

Fertility experts have long been interested in understanding why so few human eggs harvested during in vitro fertilization result in pregnancies. Researchers found that eggs that matured in culture, as opposed to eggs that were already mature at the time of harvesting, tended to lack gene activity normally involved in the development of the cytoplasm of the egg, or the area outside the nucleus. Furthermore, they compiled a list of mRNA-mediated gene expression changes that take place as the eggs matured.

Most of us have missed a dose of antibiotic or forgotten to take a daily vitamin. But when the stakes are higher -- as they are for people with HIV/AIDS -- a skipped pill could mean the difference between health and hazard for the entire population. Now, scientists have developed a breath monitoring device that may help prevent the emergence of drug-resistant strains of HIV by monitoring medication adherence in high-risk individuals.