Puberty often begins early for children who are obese. While there is nothing new about this fact, a scientific explanation has been elusive. Now, a team of scientists at the University of Copenhagen offers what may be a partial explanation.

Ruminants like cows have developed an unusual way of digesting their food: they ingest plants, give them a rough chewing and then swallow the half-chewed mash before regurgitating it repeatedly and continuing to chew. This has clear advantages, as a research team including the University of Göttingen has shown: the regurgitated mushy food contains much less hard grit, sand and dust than the food that they first ingested. This protects the teeth from being ground down during the chewing process. This may explain why the crowns of the teeth of ruminants are less pronounced than those of other herbivores. The findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).

Human hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common type of primary liver cancer in adults, has a high rate of mortality. Most patients diagnosed with the advanced form of HCC have a relatively low long-term survival rate. Proteins called “integrins” play a major role in all stages of hepatocarcinogenesis, including initiation, progression, and metastasis. Therefore, integrins serve as attractive drug targets with tremendous chemotherapeutic potential. A recent review jointly published by researchers from the United States and China describes how integrins could be targeted in the fight against HCC.

Increasing temperature or nutrients in an ecosystem can destabilize food webs, but when temperature and nutrients increase together it can be difficult to predict the combined effects. This study examined a laboratory microbial food web consisting of bacterial prey and protist predators. It found that temperature and nutrients can alter the dynamics of microbial communities by changing how species’ abundances and average body sizes relate to each other.

Stars emit light that travels through empty space without significant attenuation. The visual signal is essentially lossless until detected. After many years and billions of kilometers, starlight-photons may eventually encounter the earth’s atmosphere and be decoded as a speck in the night sky by some lucky person’s retina and brain.