Author: Beth Mole

Passing on the gym to snuggle on the couch and binge watch whole seasons of your favorite show this weekend may not bode well for your brain.

In a 25-year study that tracked more than 3,000 young adults into midlife, researchers found that those with the highest television watching and lowest physical activity scored worse on certain cognitive tests than their fit, less TV-addicted counterparts. In particular, couch potatoes had slightly lower brain processing speeds and worse executive function, but they scored just as well as other participants on verbal memory tests. The findings, reported in JAMA Psychiatry, may suggest that such bad TV and exercise habits early in life could set people up for faster cognitive decline in later life, the authors said.

However, the researchers can only speculate on cognitive decline for now, because they only tested cognitive skills at the end of the 25 years—not at the beginning. Therefore, it’s possible that participants with slightly lower cognitive function scores at the end of the study had those same low scores at the start and just enjoy spending lots of time lounging in front of glowing screens. Researchers can't tell from the data as is.

Following news that Coca-Cola’s chief scientist is stepping down, the controversial academic research group set up and funded by the beverage maker has now disbanded.

The group, the Global Energy Balance Network, announced on its website that it is shutting down its work, effective immediately, due to a lack of resources. The group, headed by James O. Hill of the University of Colorado, shifted focus away from the role of sweetened beverages and excess calories in poor health and obesity and instead promoted the benefits of exercise.

In August, The New York Times reported a financial link between the group and Coca-Cola, which provided $1.5 million in funding. $1 million of those funds went to the University of Colorado, which later returned the money after the financial tie was brought to light and drew criticism. Further investigations by the press found that the beverage company helped pick the group’s leaders, set up its website, and craft its mission statement.

Ditching annual flu shots for a single stick that can protect year after year may be even harder to do than scientists thought—thanks to our own bamboozled immune systems.

Influenza viruses are infamous masters of mutation, changing themselves ever so slightly to dodge detection by immune cells. That viral variation drives the need for us to roll up our sleeves each fall instead of relying on our immune system’s memory of last year’s flu—or so researchers thought. A new study finds that although our immune systems naturally have the potential to detect and fight all flavors of flu virus, they get tricked into fighting only strain-specific battles. The finding, published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine, suggests that making a universal vaccine may require wising up our immune cells as well as outsmarting the virus.

The study, from a group of researchers led by Patrick Wilson of the University of Chicago, examined the immune responses of 21 people after exposures to the 2009 H1N1 virus (swine flu). Researchers specifically looked at participants’ B cells, which make antibodies that help fend off the flu by seeking out the virus and marking it for an attack, as well as seeking out the antibodies themselves.

After more than a quarter of a century of rising diabetes rates, the number of new cases seems to be on a downward trend.

From 1980 to 2009, the annual number of new diabetes cases more than tripled in the US, going from 493,000 to 1.7 million diagnoses a year in people aged 18 to 79. But since 2009, case numbers appear to have slumped, though the decline had not registered as statistically significant. Now, using newly released data from 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that case numbers are definitely on their first sustained decline. In 2014, the number of diagnosed cases was down to 1.4 million.

“It seems pretty clear that incidence rates have now actually started to drop,” said Edward Gregg, one of the CDC’s top diabetes researchers told the New York Times. “Initially it was a little surprising because I had become so used to seeing increases everywhere we looked.”

Prescription drug manager Express Scripts Holding Co. plans to make it easier for patients to get a cheap alternative to Turing pharmaceuticals’ price-boosted drug, Daraprim.

Express Scripts, which manages prescription for tens of millions of Americans, will promote the use of the $1 per pill alternative to Turing’s $750 per pill drug, potentially sparing tens of thousands of dollars in treatment costs per patient. That cheap alternative is already being made and sold by Imprimis Pharmaceuticals in San Diego.

In a press release, Steve Miller, senior vice president and chief medical officer of Express Scripts, said that "leveraging our expertise to improve access and affordability to an important medication is the right thing to do..."

WASHINGTON DC—In the decades since learning how to splice DNA, scientists have anxiously debated the ethics and ramifications of editing the genetic blueprints of humans—from the moral quagmires of eugenics and made-to-order babies to more nuanced uses in basic research and disease treatments. Do scientists understand enough of human biology to safely become life’s editors? Should researchers be able to edit unviable human embryos for research? If altered genes are heritable, does that infringe on the rights of the next generation? If scientists have the genetic capabilities to cure a disease, do they have an obligation to do it?

There are a lot of questions and huge differences in opinion within the research community. Regulations also vary wildly across the globe, with some countries instituting bans on certain practices and others embracing engineering. But amid the long-smoldering debate, new technology that makes it extremely easy to edit human cells, including germ-line cells (eggs and sperm), has brought theoretical uses closer to reality, reigniting concerns.

On Tuesday, hundreds of researchers from across the globe gathered in Washington, DC for a three-day summit aimed at hashing out the issues of editing human genes. The summit, co-hosted by the US National Academy of Sciences, US National Academy of Medicine, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the UK's Royal Society, is the start of a larger effort by the US National Academies to come up with a consensus study on the use of editing technology. The Academies expect to release the report in 2016.