News by Subject Biology

A new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study found that smoking in the three months prior to assisted reproductive technology (ART) treatment was associated with higher adjusted odds of cycle cancellation resulting in no embryo transfer and cancellations before fresh oocyte retrieval or frozen embryo transfer.

The study is the first to track the timing of 12 geographically distinct breeding populations of tree swallows across the continent. Researchers measured how long birds spent at breeding grounds to raise their young, when they began migration and stopped to refuel, and when they arrived at wintering grounds. Understanding when birds move between breeding and wintering sites, and how different populations move, can help identify the greatest threats to survival.

The complex sugars found in human breastmilk, long believed to be fixed in their composition, may change in women who are taking probiotics, according to new research from the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC).

Neonatal abstinence syndrome describes symptoms (including jitteriness, high-pitched crying, sweating and diarrhea) that primarily occur in newborns exposed to opioids during pregnancy. Finding an optimal drug therapy to treat newborns for neonatal abstinence syndrome may reduce the length of treatment and hospital stay.

Heart disease is the greatest killer in the world today. A new study in sheep, publishing Jan. 22 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, by a team from Cambridge University, finds that offspring whose mothers had a complicated pregnancy may be at greater risk of heart disease in later life, suggesting that our cards may be marked even before we are born.

What happens to sex pheromones as new species emerge? New research publishing Jan. 22 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology studies sex pheromones in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, revealing an 'asymmetric' pheromone recognition system in which one pheromone operates extremely stringently whereas the other pheromone is free to undergo a certain degree of diversification, perhaps leading to a first step towards speciation.

Mice growing up in a basic cage maintain lifelong visual cortex plasticity if their parents were raised in an environment that promoted social interaction and physical and mental stimulation, according to a multigenerational study published in eNeuro. The research suggests life experience may be transmitted from one generation to the next through a combination of changes in gene expression and parental caretaking behavior.