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A man from Arkansas was brought to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences as he experienced nausea, weakness, fatigue and body aches. The findings were presented in New England Journal of Medicine.

After going through a series of tests researchers discovered that the 56-year-old man’s urine has high levels of calcium oxalate crystals which turned into kidney stones.

The man said that he has never experienced anything like this before and his family also had no history of getting diagnosed with kidney stones.

After a series of question and answer with experts the man finally admitted that he has a bizarre daily intake of 16 250ml glasses (approximately 8 ounces) of iced tea which is equals to over four liters or one gallon.

Researchers have claimed that a blood test that detects markers in DNA can accurately detect Down’s syndrome in fetuses. According to researchers, the new technique’s effectiveness to detect the disorder is much better than the conventional ones. The blood test needs to be used between 10 and 14 weeks of pregnancy.

The same test is also capable of detecting two other chromosomal abnormalities that are rarer than Down’s syndrome. The new technique has been developed by University of California San Francisco researchers.

Researchers in the US have developed personalized cancer vaccines. Highlighting feature of these vaccines is that they target unique genetic errors in a patient’s tumor.

The research published in the journal Science has unveiled that safety tests were carried out on three people. From them, it has been found that the immune system could be trained to flight skin cancer.

The researchers are quite happy with the initial results and said that it marks as a significant step towards tailor-made cancer vaccines. The charity Cancer Research UK has also praised the test results.

On Thursday, the heads of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System signed a landmark collaborative agreement on ‘bench to bedside’ cancer care. According to executives of both institutions, the collaboration is a ‘strategic affiliation’, which will help approximately 16,000 cancer patients, treated each year by North Shore doctors.

The agreement between both the institutions could help benefit more patients in the New York City metropolitan area. The agreement is a new research and treatment affiliation.

According to health officals, a drug-resistant strain of a nasty stomach infection that caused over 200 illnesses since last May is spreading in the United States.

The experts said various cases were traced to people who had lately traveled to the Dominican Republic, India or other countries. Outbreaks of the shigella bacteria are not strange and this strain is resistant to the antibiotic most normally prescribed for adults.

“This is the first time we've documented this large an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant (shigella) linked to international travel”, said Dr. Anna Bowen of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Aerospace company Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. built Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission Core Satellite's Microwave Imager (GMI) under a deal for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). According to reports, the mission has performed well in its first year on orbit.

Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) is an international satellite mission by United States space agency that collects data from 12 weather satellites orbiting earth. The mission combines data into one global picture of rain and snow. It is the first time when scientists have ever had map of where and when rain will fall. The mission makes map every half an hour with a resolution of about 10km by 10km.