Bacteria

Skechers has agreed to pay $40 million to consumers who purchased its  rocker-bottom shoes under the mistaken belief that the shoes would help give them Kim Kardashian's booty or Joe Montana's stamina. So how do you get your piece of the payout if you purchased the shoes months, if not years ago, and don't have a receipt? No problem. This refund relies largely on the honor system. Anyone who purchased the company's line of Shape-Up shoes -- or its Resistance Runners, Tone-ups or Toners -- is entitled to a partial refund whether they have proof of purchase or not, officials said Thursday.

Despite surging cases of infections unresponsive to existing antibiotic drugs, the number of medications under development or receiving approval from the Food and Drug Administration is dwindling and remains "alarmingly low," a new report warns. Most concerning, according to the Infectious Disease Society of America , is the "near absence" of antibiotic candidate drugs capable of combating new strains of bacteria that are uniquely dangerous: These "gram-negative" bacteria are not only resistant to most available antibiotic drugs themselves, they can pass genetic materials on to other bacteria that make them impervious to existing medications as well.

Whether perusing the beauty and personal care products at Target or Whole Foods or shopping online at Sephora, consumers are increasingly encountering the phrase "paraben-free. " What exactly does paraben-free mean, and why might it matter? We take a closer look — including sussing out pretty makeup products that are paraben-free. What are parabens? Parabens are the most widely used preservatives in cosmetics and personal care products such as soap, moisturizers, shaving cream and underarm deodorant, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

Circumcision is known to reduce a man's risk of HIV infection by at least half, but scientists don't know why. A new study offers support for the theory that removing the foreskin deprives troublesome bacteria of a place to live, leaving the immune system in much better shape to keep the human immunodeficiency virus at bay. Anyone who has ever lifted a rock and watched as the earth beneath it was quickly vacated by legions of bugs and tiny worms...

A newly identified, antibiotic-resistant strain of a common bacterium is contributing to an increase in relatively hard-to-treat bladder infections in women in at least three U.S. cities, according to a study published Thursday. Genetic analysis and other laboratory tests pinpointed the strain of Escherichia coli bacteria as the culprit in a substantial percentage of drug-resistant urinary tract infections among female university students in Berkeley, Minneapolis and Ann Arbor, Mich.

A 35-year-old Santa Barbara triathlete stricken with a rare and virulent streptococcus infection--which has become notorious as the "flesh-eating" bacteria--was better Thursday afternoon, but remained in critical condition at the Sherman Oaks Hospital burn center.

Circumcision is known to reduce a man's risk of HIV infection by at least half, but scientists don't know why. A new study offers support for the theory that removing the foreskin deprives troublesome bacteria of a place to live, leaving the immune system in much better shape to keep the human immunodeficiency virus at bay. Anyone who has ever lifted a rock and watched as the earth beneath it was quickly vacated by legions of bugs and tiny worms...

The hike is long and dusty, across two miles of shrub-strewn desert, south of Apple Valley. But Lisa Fernandez, a Web designer and hot springs enthusiast, has often made the trek from the trail head to the pools of steaming water. She believes the payoff is worth it: a day of soaking in undeveloped, natural hot springs in the shade of pine and willow trees at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains.

Emmi-dent. It's the toothbrush you're not supposed to brush your teeth with. But that's not to say you shouldn't use it regularly. Like any other toothbrush, Emmi-dent has a head full of bristles. But they're for transmitting ultrasonic impulses from a microchip inside the brush head. When these impulses interact with Emmi-dent's own toothpaste, they cause millions of infinitesimal "nano-bubbles" to form and then collapse. To the bacteria in your mouth, this mass bubble implosion is cataclysmic.

At least some cases of Parkinson's disease, a devastating neurological illness that affects as many as 500,000 Americans, may be caused by infection by a common soil fungus, researchers from UC Davis will report today.

Western land managers may have a new weapon in their frustrating - and so far losing - battle against invasive cheatgrass. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says early field tests of naturally occurring soil bacteria known as ACK55 show promise in controlling alien cheatgrass, a native of Eurasia that was accidentally introduced by settlers in the 1800s. Cheatgrass has taken over millions of acres of federal land in Nevada and other Great Basin states, promoting huge, fast-moving wildfires that destroy sagebrush habitat and with it, food and shelter for pronghorn antelope, sage grouse and mule deer.

In the latest of a slew of studies examining the role of the so-called microbiome -- the mix of microscopic critters that colonize our bodies and our environment -- in human health, Harvard researchers said Wednesday that part of the reason that Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery works so well in helping people lose weight is because it causes changes in the mix of bacteria in our bellies. The discovery suggests that doctors might someday be able to mimic the microbial effects of weight-loss surgery without putting patients under the knife, said Dr. Lee Kaplan, director of the Obesity, Metabolism and Nutrition Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-senior author of a report detailing the research in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The vastly deep ocean trenches at the edge of continents have been something like the Mars of oceanography - off limits until recently. Now they are providing information nearly as freaky as that provided by the Mars Rover. There is abundant life at 36,000 feet below the ocean surface, living under the kind of pressure (more than 1,000 times atmospheric pressure at sea level) that would crush human bones down to liquid, according to the first data from a 2010 robotic exploration of the sediments in the Mariana Trench, in the western Pacific Ocean.

What happens in a day at the roller derby?  For one thing, scientists have discovered and reported Tuesday in the journal PeerJ , a lot of bacteria get swapped around. Researchers at the University of Oregon's Biology and Built Environment Center , a collaboration of architects and biologists who study how design affects the kinds of microbes that live among us, and how it influences our health, recently examined the microbiomes -- the ecosystems of thousands of microorganisms -- on the skin of three roller derby teams before and after a competition.

There's a $200-million hotel on the drawing board for downtown Los Angeles, so tourists from around the globe can kick up their heels at LA Live. And a few miles away on downtown's skid row, there's a TB outbreak brewing in a stew of Third World-style squalor and disorder. It's the yin and yang of our city's clumsily evolving downtown scene: We haven't managed to seal the deal for a professional football team, but we have been able to produce and sustain our own unique tuberculosis strain.

A deadly bacteria that's practically impervious to antibiotics is on the rise and has appeared in medical facilities in 42 U.S. states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. The rate of infection from carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE, might seem low -- 4% -- but it has risen fourfold in just the last decade. CRE is resistant even to last-resort drugs such as carbapenem and can potentially be very deadly. Up to half of patients who develop a bloodstream infection from CRE die, according to the CDC report.

After five years of toil, a consortium of several hundred U.S. researchers has released a detailed census of the myriad bacteria, yeasts, viruses and amoebas that live, eat, excrete, reproduce and die in or on us. Described in two papers in Nature and a raft of reports in other journals, the data released Wednesday describe microbes of the skin, saliva, nostrils, guts and other areas of 242 adults in tiptop health. The $170-million, federally funded Human Microbiome Project also cataloged the genes contained within this zoo of life.

The musical instruments kids play in school bands and orchestras are traveling denizens of bacteria and fungi, say the authors of a new study. Music education is great for kids, they note, but please, please wash the instruments! Researchers at Oklahoma State University bravely examined 13 instruments that belonged to a high school band. Six of the instruments had been played the previous week and seven hadn't been played in a month. Swabs were taken of 117 different sites on the instruments, including the mouthpieces, internal chambers and even the carrying cases.

Ancient Egyptians were vexed by it, using sulfur to dry it out. Shakespeare wrote of its "bubukles, and whelks, and knobs, and flames o' fire. " Today, acne plagues us still. Doctors can cure some cancers and transplant vital organs like hearts, but they still have trouble getting rid of the pimples and splotches that plague 85% of us at some time in our lives - usually, when we're teenagers and particularly sensitive about the way we look. But new research hints that there's hope for zapping zits in the future, thanks to advances in genetic research.

A team of storm-chasing scientists sampling rarefied air has found a world of bacteria and fungi floating about 30,000 feet above Earth. The findings, detailed Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that microbes have the potential to affect the weather. Scientists have long studied airborne bacteria, but they typically do so from the ground, often trekking to mountain peaks to examine microbes in fresh snow. Beyond that, they don't know much about the number and diversity of floating microbes, said study coauthor Athanasios Nenes, an atmospheric scientist at Georgia Tech.