For many people, the New Year is a time to adopt new habits as a renewed commitment to personal health. Newly enthusiastic fitness buffs pack into gyms and grocery stores are filled with shoppers eager to try out new diets. But, does scientific evidence support the claims made for these diets?

Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have identified a tenacious subset of immune macrophages that thwart treatment of glioblastoma with anti-PD-1 checkpoint blockade, elevating a new potential target for treating the almost uniformly lethal brain tumor.

A drug that once helped obese adults lose weight, but was withdrawn from the market due to heart risks, may be safe and effective for children with a life-threatening seizure disorder called Dravet syndrome, say researchers from UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals and other major treatment centers.

Coffee can help reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes - but only filtered coffee, rather than boiled coffee. New research from Chalmers University of Technology and Umeå University, both in Sweden, show that the choice of preparation method influences the health effects of coffee.

Every cell contains a vast number of proteins, each of which has a specific function, for example as a receptor for another molecule or an enzyme that catalyses chemical reactions. Disorders of such mechanisms can seriously affect a cell and cause diseases such as cancer, in which the sick cell functions in a fundamentally different way to a healthy cell.

Neuroscientists at Lund University in Sweden have developed a new technology that engineers the shell of a virus to deliver gene therapy to the exact cell type in the body that needs to be treated. The researchers believe that the new technology can be likened to dramatically accelerating evolution from millions of years to weeks.

Researchers from Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT's research enterprise in Singapore, and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have designed an antimicrobial polymer that can kill bacteria resistant to commonly used antibiotics, including the superbug Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).