East Peak fire burn scar, Colorado

FRESNO, Calif.—Rat poison used on illegal marijuana grows is killing fishers in the southern Sierra Nevada, according to a recent study conducted by a team of scientists from the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Research Station (PSW), University of California, Davis, University of California, Berkeley, and the Integral Ecology Research Center. A previous study published last summer by the research team documented that rodenticides were being found in the tissues of the cat-sized, weasel-like critters which live in rugged portions of the southern Sierra Nevada. ...

Although it may seem difficult for adults to understand what an infant is feeling, a new study from Brigham Young University finds that it's so easy a baby could do it. Psychology professor Ross Flom's study, published in the academic journal Infancy, shows that infants can recognize each other's emotions by five months of age. This study comes on the heels of other significant research by Flom on infants' ability to understand the moods of dogs, monkeys and classical music. "Newborns can't verbalize to their mom or dad that they are hungry or tired, so the first way ...

ORANGE, Calif. – Chapman University's Walter Piper, Ph.D., has published research this week in a leading science journal that shows animals choose habitat similar to where they were raised rather than that likely to maximize reproductive success. This finding runs counter to current tenets of habitat selection theory. The paper is published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B on June 26 and includes co-authors Michael Palmer, Nathan Banfield and Michael Meyer. Dr. Piper's research focuses on his long-term study of loons. "The basic finding is that young loons ...

VIDEO: Of course Twitter and Facebook are all the rage, but the power of social networks didn't start just in the digital age. A new study on squirrel monkeys reported in... Click here for more information. Of course Twitter and Facebook are all the rage, but the power of social networks didn't start just in the digital age. A new study on squirrel monkeys reported in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, on June 27 finds that monkeys with the strongest social networks ...

Research focused on the regulation of the adult stem cells that line the gastrointestinal tract of Drosophila suggests new models for the study of Barrett's esophagus. Barrett's esophagus, a risk factor for esophageal cancer, is a condition in which the cells of the lower esophagus transform into stomach-like cells. In most cases this transformation has been thought to occur directly from chronic acid indigestion when stomach contents flow back up into the esophagus. A new study, published June 27, 2013 online in Cell Reports, suggests a different cause, namely a change ...

STANFORD, Calif. — A chemical code scrawled on histones — the protein husks that coat DNA in every animal or plant cell — determines which genes in that cell are turned on and which are turned off. Now, Stanford University School of Medicine researchers have taken a new step in the deciphering of that histone code. In a study to be published June 27 in Cell Reports, a team led by Thomas Rando, MD, PhD, professor of neurology and neurological sciences and chief of the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System's neurology service, has identified characteristic differences ...

A study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows, that our imagination may affect how we experience the world more than we perhaps think. What we imagine hearing or seeing "in our head" can change our actual perception. The study, which is published in the scientific journal Current Biology, sheds new light on a classic question in psychology and neuroscience – about how our brains combine information from the different senses. "We often think about the things we imagine and the things we perceive as being clearly dissociable," says Christopher Berger, doctoral student ...

As the world becomes increasingly connected, the need to ensure the proper functioning of its many underlying networks -- such as the Internet, power grids, global air transportation and ecological networks -- also is increasing. But controlling networks is very difficult. Now a Northwestern University research team has developed the first broadly applicable computational approach identifying interventions that can both rescue complex networks from the brink of failure and reprogram them to a desired task. "A fundamental property of networks is that a perturbation to ...

HOUSTON -- (June 27, 2013) – A chromosomal deletion is associated with changes in the brain's white matter and delayed language acquisition in youngsters from Southeast Asia or with ancestral connections to the region, said an international consortium led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine. However, many such children who can be described as late-talkers may overcome early speech and language difficulties as they grow. The finding involved both cutting edge technology and two physicians with an eye for unusual clinical findings. Dr. Seema R. Lalani, a physician-scientist ...

PULLMAN, Wash.—Two university researchers say environmental restrictions have become unnecessarily restrictive and expensive—on Mars. Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, astrobiologists Alberto Fairén of Cornell University and Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University say the NASA Office of Planetary Protection's "detailed and expensive" efforts to keep Earth microorganisms off Mars are making missions to search for life on the red planet "unviable." The researchers claim "the protocols and policies of Planetary Protection are unnecessarily restricting ...