Growth hormone mapped — Discovery of the complete chemical structure of the human growth hormone has been reported…. The discovery marks a major advance toward understanding how the powerful growth-promoting substance works and increases the chances for its eventual synthesis in the laboratory…. Some 5,000 fresh human pituitary glands were required to achieve the results.
— Science News, May 21, 1966

Update
In 1979, researchers produced a synthetic human growth hormone in the lab, using bacteria equipped with human hormone genes. Six years later, the synthetic growth hormone was approved for medical use; distribution of growth hormone collected from human pituitary glands had been halted after infected product was linked to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal brain-wasting disorder. Today, doctors use synthetic growth hormone to treat growth hormone deficiency, which can stunt growth in children. Because synthetic growth hormone can build muscle and trim body fat, it is prohibited as a doping agent by many sports organizations.

Nearly 300 pregnant women in the United States show laboratory evidence of Zika virus infection.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is monitoring 279 pregnant women, including 122 in U.S. territories, the government agency reported at a news conference May 20.

Those numbers are way up compared with previous counts: Last week, the CDC tallied 47 cases in the states and 65 in the territories. The increase reflects a change in reporting, rather than a spike in new cases, said CDC epidemiologist Margaret Honein, who heads the agency’s birth defects branch.

Before today, the CDC report included only pregnant women who had both positive lab test results and either symptoms or pregnancy complications linked to Zika. The new tally includes women without symptoms of infection.

“We’ve learned a lot in the past four months,” Honein said. Scientists have reported that asymptomatic mothers have given birth to Zika-infected babies with microcephaly or other birth defects, she said.

So far, less than a dozen of the 279 U.S. pregnancies have had adverse outcomes, but the agency wouldn’t specify what those outcomes were, or how many women have given birth, miscarried or terminated their pregnancies.

In the United States, Honein said, microcephaly typically affects six per 10,000 infants.

Scientists have found one of the youngest exoplanets ever, huddling close to a star that is just 2 million years old. Located 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus, the star is so young that it still has its baby fat — it is surrounded by the disk of gas and dust from which it formed.

The planet, CI Tau b, is hefty for an infant — tipping the scales at 11 times the mass of Jupiter, say astronomer Christopher Johns-Krull of Rice University in Houston and colleagues in a paper posted May 25 on arXiv.org. It’s surprising, the researchers say, that such a large planet could have formed in just 2 million years — peanuts on cosmic timescales.
Such baby-faced exoplanets have been spotted before (SN: 12/26/15, p. 14), but they’ve lingered farther from their stars. This fledgling planet shows that such behemoths can form quickly and snuggle close to their stars. Scientists still don’t know whether star-hugging planets form far away and migrate inwards, or whether they are birthed close to their stars. The new planet could shed light on that process.

The scientists used a variety of optical and infrared telescopes to reveal periodic variations in the frequency of the star’s light, caused by the planet’s gravitational pull. CI Tau b tugs its star back and forth as it swings around in a tight orbit that it completes every nine days, the researchers determined. Hints of the planet showed up in both optical and infrared light, ruling out spurious signals caused by sunspots or other variability within the young and active star.

Editor’s note: Science News astronomy writer Christopher Crockett is a coauthor on the paper, which incorporates work he did as an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., prior to joining Science News.