(Press-News.org) Scientists are looking for answers — including commercial bathroom disinfectants and over-the-counter fungicides used to fight athlete's foot — to help in the battle against a strange fungus that threatens bat populations in the United States. That's the topic of an article in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine.
C&EN Senior Correspondent Stephen K. Ritter notes that despite their poor public image, bats are beneficial. They pollinate plants, spread seeds, and eat vast numbers of insects that otherwise could destroy food crops and carry human diseases. Ritter describes a fast-spreading fungal disease called white-nose syndrome, named for its effects in discoloring the noses of infected bats. The fungus has killed more than 1 million hibernating bats in caves and abandoned mines in the U.S. during the past four years, the worst die-off of wildlife in North American history. The fungus damages the bats' wings and causes restless behavior during winter months, making survival unlikely.
The article describes how scientists are struggling to understand the disease while trying to prevent it from spreading and discusses how scientists are seeking possible chemical solutions to eradicate the fungus without damaging the environment or harming healthy bats.
INFORMATION:
ARTICLE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Battling Bat Fungus"
This story is available at
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/88/8846sci1.html
Battling a bat killer
2010-11-18
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Low-allergenic wines could stifle sniffles and sneezes in millions of wine drinkers
2010-11-18
Scientists have identified a mysterious culprit that threatens headaches, stuffy noses, skin rash and other allergy symptoms when more than 500 million people worldwide drink wine. The discovery could help winemakers in developing the first low allergenic vintages — reds and whites with less potential to trigger allergy symptoms, they say. The new study appears in ACS' monthly Journal of Proteome Research.
Giuseppe Palmisano and colleagues note growing concern about the potential of certain ingredients in red and white to cause allergy-like symptoms that range from stuffed ...
Differences in brain development between males and females may hold clues to mental health disorders
2010-11-18
Many mental health disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia, produce changes in social behavior or interactions. The frequency and/or severity of these disorders is substantially greater in boys than girls, but the biological basis for this difference between the two sexes is unknown.
Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have discovered differences in the development of the amygdala region of the brain – which is critical to the expression of emotional and social behaviors – in animal models that may help to explain why some mental health disorders ...
Advance toward controlling fungus that caused Irish potato famine
2010-11-18
Scientists are reporting a key advance toward development of a way to combat the terrible plant diseases that caused the Irish potato famine and still inflict billions of dollars of damage to crops each year around the world. Their study appears in ACS' bi-weekly journal Organic Letters.
Teck-Peng Loh and colleagues point out that the Phytophthora fungi cause extensive damage to food crops such as potatoes and soybeans as well as to ornamental plants like azaleas and rhododendrons. One species of the fungus caused the Irish potato famine in the mid 1840s. That disaster ...
Study: Employers, workers may benefit from employee reference pool
2010-11-18
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — With employers increasingly reluctant to supply references for former employees in order to avoid legal liability, the creation of a centralized reference pool for workers may make labor markets in the U.S. more efficient, a University of Illinois expert in labor and employment law says.
Law professor Matthew W. Finkin says that not only do employees face challenges when securing references from past employers, but employers also expose themselves to lawsuits when they provide a reference.
"Employees benefit from references, but there's nothing in ...
Multiple sclerosis drug serves as model for potential drugs to treat botulism poisoning
2010-11-18
Scientists are reporting that variants of a drug already approved for treating multiple sclerosis show promise as a long sought treatment for victims of bioterrorist attack with botulinum neurotoxin — which is 10,000 times deadlier than cyanide and the most poisonous substance known to man. The potential drugs also could be useful in treating other forms of botulism poisoning as well as Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, and myasthenia gravis, they say in an article in ACS Chemical Biology, a monthly journal.
Kim D. Janda and colleagues explain that the lack of ...
Being faced with gender stereotypes makes women less likely to take financial risks
2010-11-18
Last year Nicholas Kristof declared in his New York Times column what banks need to fix their problems: Not just a bailout, but also "women, women, and women." Women are generally thought to be less willing to take risks than men, so he speculated that the banks could balance out risky men by employing more women. Stereotypes like this about women actually influence how women make financial decisions, making them more wary of risk, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Anecdotally, many people ...
New technology gives on-site assessments in archaeology
2010-11-18
DURHAM, N.C. – The ability to tell the difference between crystals that formed naturally and those formed by human activity can be important to archaeologists in the field. This can be a crucial bit of information in determining the ancient activities that took place at a site, yet archaeologists often wait for months for the results of laboratory tests.
Now, however, an international team of physicists, archaeologists and materials scientists has developed a process that can tell in a matter of minutes the origin of samples thousands of years old. The new device is ...
Novel approach shows promise for cystic fibrosis, say UAB researchers
2010-11-18
Birmingham, Ala. – An investigational drug targeting a defective protein that causes cystic fibrosis has been shown to improve lung function in a small study of CF patients, according to findings published Nov. 18, 2010, in the New England Journal of Medicine. The investigational drug, VX-770, appeared to improve function of what is known as CFTR--the faulty protein responsible for CF. It is among the first compounds being developed for CF that specifically targets the root cause of cystic fibrosis.
Patients who took VX-770 for 28 days showed improvements in several key ...
IQ scores fail to predict academic performance in children with autism
2010-11-18
New data show that many children with autism spectrum disorders have greater academic abilities than previously thought. In a study by researchers at the University of Washington, 90 percent of high-functioning children with autism spectrum disorders showed a discrepancy between their IQ score and their performance on reading, spelling and math tests.
"Academic achievement is a potential source of self-worth and source of feeling of mastery that people may not have realized is available to children with autism," said Annette Estes, research assistant professor at the ...
As Arctic temperatures rise, tundra fires increase, researchers find
2010-11-18
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In September, 2007, the Anaktuvuk River Fire burned more than 1,000 square kilometers of tundra on Alaska's North Slope, doubling the area burned in that region since record keeping began in 1950. A new analysis of sediment cores from the burned area revealed that this was the most destructive tundra fire at that site for at least 5,000 years. Models built on 60 years of climate and fire data found that even moderate increases in warm-season temperatures in the region dramatically increase the likelihood of such fires.
The study was published this October ...