Eating chocolate could help to sharpen up the mind and give a short-term boost to cognitive skills, a University of Nottingham expert has found.

How does life survive in the black depths of the ocean? At the surface, sunlight allows green plants to "fix" carbon from the air to build their bodies. Around hydrothermal vents deep in the ocean live communities of giant clams with no gut and no functional digestive system, depending on symbiotic bacteria to use energy locked up in hydrogen sulfide to replace sunlight. Now, the genome of this symbiont has been completely sequenced and published in Science.

Each year 170,000 people around the world die of this type of meningitis, according to the World Health Organization, WHO. Bacterial meningitis, as the disease is called, can even spark epidemics: in Africa 250,000 people were affected in a matter of weeks in the late 1990s. Without treatment, mortality among those who contract the disease is 85-90 percent, with treatment some 10-15 percent. Patients also run a high risk of serious disability after recovery.

In the first genome-wide search for the genetic roots of the most common form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Johns Hopkins scientists have newly identified 34 unique variations in the human genetic code among 276 unrelated subjects with ALS.

The mystery of why multiple sclerosis (MS) tends to go into remission while women are pregnant may be the secret to overcoming the devastating neurodegenerative disease, according to University of Calgary researchers who have shown that a pregnancy-related hormone is responsible for rebuilding the protective coating around nerve cells.

New research pinpoints specific areas in sound processing centers in the brains of macaque monkeys that shows enhanced activity when the animals watch a video.

When amounts of a small protein called TCTP (translationally controlled tumor protein) are reduced in the cells of fruit flies, they are smaller than normal, indicating that the protein plays a major role in the growth and proliferation of cells, said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in a report in current issue of the journal Nature.

Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have developed an experimental vaccine that reduces stillbirths among rodents born to mothers infected with cytomegalovirus (CMV)—a common virus that can also cause mental retardation and hearing loss in newborn children who were infected in early fetal life.