Freelance writer Julianna Photopoulos and mobile app reporter Xiaoxue Chen are among the five recipients of the 2018 EurekAlert! Fellowships for International Science Reporters awards, marking two firsts for the fellowship program – the inaugural recipient from the Balkan region and the first representing a daily mobile-app publication.

Researchers have identified a region on a chromosome in Plasmodium falciparum—a major malaria parasite—that helps to explain how the parasite developed resistance to the best known anti-malarial treatments in Southeast Asia.

Researchers have uncovered a new way that some bacteria survive when under siege by antibiotics.

This survival mechanism is fundamentally different from other known bacterial strategies. Understanding it may be useful for designing drugs that target hard-to-treat bacterial strains such as drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB), an increasingly urgent public health problem. The study is based on Mycobacterium smegmatis—a cousin of the microbe that causes TB—and its response to the TB drug isoniazid.