Ants do drugs
2015-08-24
(Press-News.org) We humans have been using self-medication to cure the illnesses since the dawn of our species. There is some evidence that also other animals can exhibit this type of behavior, but the evidence has been hard to come by.
Scientists from the University of Helsinki, Finland, have now shown that black ant Formica fusca can change their taste for food once exposed to the fungal pathogens. In the compound of interest was hydrogen peroxide, which can be found in the damaged plants, other insects and cadavers.
"When ants are feeding on the diet containing extra free radicals they are able to survive infections significantly better. Moreover, the ants also choose the diet including extra free radicals after they are exposed to fungus, but not if they are not" says University researcher Dalial Freitak from the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences.
"It is an amazing discovery that ants have an idea of their health status and seem to adjust the dosage of medicine to that," continues a fellow researcher Nick Bos.
For healthy individuals under no infection conditions, feeding on the free radical diet has the same detrimental side-effects as with any drug. But once infected, free-radical-feeding ants have about 20% higher chances to survive the otherwise lethal fungal disease.
INFORMATION:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2015-08-24
People are motivated to participate in the sharing economy because of its ecological sustainability, the enjoyment derived from the activity, the sense of community, and saving money and time. Ecological sustainability is one of the basic principles of the sharing economy - not to purchase everything individually but rather consumer collaboratively by sharing goods and services. Another canonical principle of the sharing economy is 'paying it forward'. However, collaborative consumption may involve the same hurdles as any other type of green consumption, researcher from ...
2015-08-24
The report, published on F1000Research and titled Neuropathic pain in a patient with congenital insensitivity to pain has just passed peer review. It concerns a unique case of a woman with Channelopathy-associated Insensitivity to Pain (CIP) Syndrome, who developed features of neuropathic pain after sustaining pelvic fractures and an epidural hematoma that impinged on the right fifth lumbar (L5) nerve root. These injuries were sustained during a painless labour, which culminated in a Caesarean section.
The patient had been diagnosed with CIP as child. This was later ...
2015-08-24
CINCINNATI - A study published online Aug. 24 by the journal Pediatrics finds a significant decrease in the use of computed tomography (CT) scans at children's hospitals for 10 common childhood diagnoses including seizure, concussion, appendectomy and upper respiratory tract infection.
Alternate types of imaging such as ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are being used more frequently for eight of the 10 diagnoses. Study authors hypothesize the decline in CT usage may be attributable to a growing body of evidence linking ionizing radiation from CT scans to ...
2015-08-24
Yes, a good cry indeed might go a long way to make you feel better, says Asmir Gračanin of the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands, lead author of a study in Springer's journal Motivation and Emotion. These findings were established after a research team videotaped a group of participants while watching the emotionally charged films La vita è bella and Hachi: A Dog's Tale. Afterwards, the participants were asked a few times to reflect on how they felt.
Although humans are the only species able to shed emotional tears, little is known about the function ...
2015-08-24
21.08.2015: In mountainous regions earthquakes often cause strong landslides, which can be exacerbated by heavy rain. However, after an initial increase, the frequency of these mass wasting events, often enormous and dangerous, declines, in fact independently of meteorological events and aftershocks. These new findings are presented by a German-Franco-Japanese team of geoscientists in the current issue of the journal Geology, under the lead of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences. Even after strong earthquake the activity of landslides returns back over the course ...
2015-08-24
By minimizing the acceleration of industrial robots, energy consumption can be reduced by up to 40 percent - while retaining the given production time. This is the result of a new optimization algorithm that was developed by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology.
Optimization of the robot's movements reduces acceleration and deceleration, as well as the time the robot is at a standstill since being at a standstill also consumes energy.
"We simply let the robot move slower instead of waiting for other robots and machines to catch up before carrying out the ...
2015-08-24
The public sector has long served as an equalizer in American society, a place where minority workers could find stable employment that offered advancement and a reliable path to a middle-class life.
But the Great Recession wiped out many of those jobs, as tax revenues declined and anti-government sentiment added to a contraction that continued long after the Great Recession ended in 2008. Those job cuts disproportionately hurt African-American workers and increased racial disparity in the public sector, a new study by University of Washington sociologist Jennifer Laird ...
2015-08-24
CHICAGO -- As the World War I military draft brought to the forefront the high rate of venereal disease among the civilian population, states began to enact measures to quarantine people and begin forms of treatment to try to control syphilis, gonorrhea and other potential outbreaks.
However, a University of Kansas (KU) researcher has documented examples of how this process continued well into peacetime and how these laws were generally enforced along lines of gender and class, especially punishing poor women.
Nicole Perry, a University of Kansas graduate student in ...
2015-08-24
CHICAGO -- Early adolescent girls lose friends for having sex and gain friends for "making out," while their male peers lose friends for "making out" and gain friends for having sex, finds a new study that will be presented at the 110th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA).
"In our sample of early adolescents, girls' friendship networks shrink significantly after they have sex, whereas boys' friendship networks expand significantly," said Derek A. Kreager, the lead author of the study and an associate professor of sociology and criminology at ...
2015-08-24
CHICAGO -- Skin color is a significant factor in the probability of employment for male immigrants to the United States, according to a new study by two University of Kansas (KU) researchers.
The researchers, Andrea Gomez Cervantes, a doctoral candidate in sociology, and ChangHwan Kim, an associate professor of sociology, found that among men, darker skin color negatively influenced their likelihood of employment, even after accounting for the effects of race and other demographic and education related variables. The negative effect of darker skin color was particularly ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Ants do drugs
