SONG: “Starts Beating” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on “Scientists build a biological pacemaker by injecting a modified virus into the heart”, io9.com, 17 December 2012, as used in the post “Virus rebuilds unhealthy hearts.”

ABSTRACT: I like thinking about the metaphor of hearts being broken, because what everyone thinks of [...]

Sci-News reveals one more weapon in the war on carnivores – tick bites that

Nature echoes the call for the National Institutes of Health to create a humane retirement plan for their primate research assistants:

Last December, a report from the US Institute of Medicine concluded that most chimpanzee research was scientifically unnecessary and recommended that the NIH sharply curtail its support. The agency has since set up a working group to review [...]

Scientific American’s “Science Sushi” blog rolls up some recent research connecting cat-parasite Toxoplasma gondii with human suicides:

in Denmark, serum antibody levels for Toxoplasma gondii were taken from the children of over 45,000 women as a part of a neonatal screening study to better understand how the parasite is transmitted from mother to child. Since children do not [...]

New Scientist makes one more argument for breast-feeding, with research that shows breast milk seems to wipe out the virus that causes AIDS:

Previous research had hinted at breast milk’s antiviral properties, but it was unclear if they would prevent transmission of HIV. “We have shown that milk has an intrinsic innate ability to kill HIV,” says J. Victor [...]

Discover launches a thousand new phobia cases with their expose (and I cannot do better than their headline here) Hidden Epidemic: Tapeworms in the Brain:

A blob in the brain is not the image most people have when someone mentions tapeworms. These parasitic worms are best known in their adult stage, when they live in people’s intestines and their [...]

BBC says the disease, once thought practically eradicated, is now moving out into China from Pakistan:

Polio has been found in China for the first time since 1999 after spreading from Pakistan, the World Health Organization (WHO) has confirmed.

It said a strain of polio (WPV1) found in China was genetically linked with the type now circulating in Pakistan.

At least [...]

The aptly named PLoS blog “The Panic Virus” brings together a few disturbing strands of information about the anti-vaccination movement and the growing threat of measles:

* There have been 118 reported measles cases in the first nineteen weeks of the year — which is the highest number of infections for that period since 1996. That’s particularly noteworthy because, [...]

National Geographic has some creepy new insights into one of nature’s creepiest reproductive strategies. The zombie ants – insects whose brains have been hijacked by the Ophiocordyceps fungus – are much more strategic in their shambling movements than one might imagine:

It takes about three to nine days from initial infection for the ants to become completely zombified, the [...]