Thanks to a secret vaccine ingredient as well as a net of worldwide researchers and successful vaccination campaigns, smallpox was finally eradicated in 1977. A new study entitled 'Revisiting Jenner's mysteries, the role of the Beaugency lymph in the evolutionary path of ancient smallpox vaccines' and published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, provides an in-depth investigation of the mysteries associated with the development of smallpox vaccine and is a rich and interesting account of how the vaccine lymph was spread worldwide.

A collaborative research by Brazilian and Dutch scientists shows that many of the genes that are expressed by microglia are different between humans and mice, which are frequently used as animal models in research on Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders. The findings will be important for studies of the gene expression profile of normal microglia during human aging.

Smithsonian scientists use sonar to estimate Antillean Manatee populations in the murky waters of Panama's internationally protected San San Pond Sak wetlands.

A Brazilian company has developed a low-field nuclear magnetic resonance device that takes a few seconds to perform chemical and physical analyses of fruit, grains, olive oil, milk and meat, among other products.

Researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and colleagues compared fossil porcupine fish jaws and tooth plates collected on expeditions to Panama, Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil with those from museum specimens and modern porcupine fish, revealing three new species.

Article in Nature describing the analysis of 54 new whole genomes suggests that Zika virus arrived in Brazil in February 2014 and spread silently through the Americas for at least a year.