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At the turn of the last century, German physician Heinrich Koch identified four critical criteria for determining whether or not a particular microbe causes a disease. The ideas behind them were crucial for advancing medicine and formalizing the germ theory of disease. Over the last century, these postulates have been updated as medicine has advanced.

In what may end up being the most recent of these updates, biologists Allyson Byrd and Julia Segre propose some adjustments to these classic medical postulates intended to bring them in line with analytic techniques based on DNA sequencing and the most current understanding of bacterial communities. Just as the previous updates to Koch’s postulates did, these proposed amendments incorporate cutting-edge scientific knowledge and add nuance to our understanding of the causes of disease.

Koch’s original postulates are that, if a microorganism causes a disease, then:

Nintendo has altered a controversial scene for the western version of Fire Emblem: Fates, a 3DS RPG originally released in Japan last year. The scene features a gay character who has her drink spiked by a male protagonist.

In the Japanese version, players are able to bond two characters together in battle, which can result in marriage. A gay female character, Soleil, is shown to have difficulty talking to other women, so a male protagonist secretly spikes her drink with a "magic powder" to make women appear to as men, and men appear at women.

Once the magic wears off, Soleil is then attracted to the male protagonist, and ends up proposing, saying that she fell in love with the female version of him, but now loves him as a male.

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Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla and creator of the JavaScript programming language, has unveiled his latest project: Brave, a Web browser that blocks ads by default... and then replaces those blocked ads with its own ads. Brave Software, the company behind the eponymous browser, will take a 15 percent cut of the ad revenue generated in this way.

Brave is an open-source Web browser. There's a Brave GitHub repository for Mac/Windows/Linux, iOS, and Android. It looks like the iOS version, ironically enough, is based on Firefox for iOS, and the PC version is based on Chromium (an open-source project that somewhat parallels the development of Chrome). At first glance, it looks like the Android version of Brave is based on Bubble.

If you want to try out Brave, you have to download and build the browser from a GitHub repo. You can sign up to be a beta tester, which presumably grants you some pre-built binaries, but there's currently a waiting list.

Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles Apple's iPhones, has made a ¥600 billion bid (about £3.6 billion) to purchase troubled Japanese electronics maker Sharp, according to reports from Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. While the acquisition hasn't yet been approved, a decision to accept or reject the bid is expected before the end of January.

The ¥600 billion bid is the latest in a string of attempts to take over the embattled Japanese company, which received a ¥225 billion (£1.4 billion) bailout from banks last year following what it described as "very severe conditions." In 2012, Foxconn made an offer of $806 million (£569 million) for a 10 percent stake in Sharp, which quickly fell apart. This was followed by Foxconn founder Terry Gou purchasing a minority stake in a Sharp subsidiary for $617 million (£436 million). The company was also in talks to acquire Sharp's LCD business unit in September of last year.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Foxconn may receive pushback from the Japanese government, which doesn't want to cede control of Sharp to a foreign company. The Innovation Network Corp. of Japan, a government-backed investment fund, is said to be making its own bid of ¥300 billion (£1.8 billion). While the INCJ bid would keep Sharp under Japanese control, Foxconn's higher bid and willingness to take on the company's debt could see officials side in its favour.

(credit: Michael Coghlan)

Moving on up to that deluxe apartment in the sky might actually increase your chances of moving on down—way down.

Living on or above the third floor of a high-rise significantly lowered the chances of people surviving cardiac arrest that struck at home, researchers report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The finding, gleaned from 7,842 cases of cardiac arrest in and around Toronto, suggests that the precious extra moments it takes paramedics and other first responders to get up to patients and get them to the hospital could make the difference between patients living and dying.

“With continuing construction of high-rise buildings, it is important to understand the potential effect of vertical height on patient outcomes after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest,” wrote the authors, led by Ian Drennan, a paramedic and researcher at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto.

(credit: Marc)

Ditching the notorious complex of proteins known as gluten is a popular diet plan nowadays. Besides people with celiac disease, a severe autoimmune disorder triggered by the proteins, athletes have been particularly smitten with the gluten-free fad. But, according to a recent study, the diet is unlikely to give them the results they expect.

Completely cutting out gluten didn't improve cyclists' workout performance, digestive health, or overall fitness in a short-term, double-blind study, researchers reported in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. “We did not find a beneficial or negative effect of a gluten-free diet,” lead author Dana Lis of the University of Tasmania told The New York Times.

She and her colleagues got the idea to test the effects in athletes after previous studies had reported that gluten-free diets had taken off in the sports world. Many athletes reported thinking that skipping gluten, which is found in wheat and other grains, could improve their digestive health—a common problem for athletes.