Despite the clear need, progress toward a vaccine for congenital cytomegalovirus (CMV) has been slow. However, recent events have provided new interest, and several vaccine candidates are either in clinical trials or the trials are close to starting. In this issue of Clinical and Vaccine Immunology, Schleiss and colleagues show that a nonreplicating lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (rLCMV)-ve...

Recent studies of water in and around proteins have made us acutely aware of the critical role that water plays in protein structure and function. They have also highlighted how little we know about the detailed behavior of water molecules. Four general questions can be asked about water molecules interacting with proteins. Where are they? How long do they stay there? How strongly do they inter...

Cue phrases are words and phrases such as now and by the way which may be used to convey explicit information about the structure of a discourse. However, while cue phrases may convey discourse structure, each may also be used to different effect. The question of how speakers and hearers distinguish between such uses of cue phrases has not been addressed in discourse studies to date. Based on a...

The environmental health literature is rife with controversial papers that evoke criticism, support, and, most importantly, a desire to better understand the findings put forth by the authors. A research article by Séralini and colleagues (Séralini et al. 2012), published in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT), is one such article resulting in considerable discourse (Arjó et al. and ...

Those who yearn for a world in which policies are based on a systematic and dispassionate assessment of the evidence can find little encouragement in the ongoing debate about the safety of hospitals at weekends. Almost nothing is clear in this tangled tale. It began when the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, claimed on the BBC Today programme that there were 6000 avoidable deaths each year and a l...