PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Stopping flies before they mature

2012-11-26
(Press-News.org) An insect growth regulator is one of the latest technologies U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists are adding to their arsenal to help fight house flies that spread bacteria to food.

Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists at the agency's Center for Medical, Agricultural, and Veterinary Entomology in Gainesville, Fla., are using an insect growth regulator called pyriproxyfen to kill house flies that spread bacteria that can cause diarrhea and other illnesses. When pyriproxyfen is applied to larval breeding sites such as manure, it mimics a hormone in the larvae, preventing the larvae from maturing.

According to ARS entomologist Chris Geden at the Gainesville center, the greatest potential use for pyriproxyfen may be via autodissemination, a process in which adult flies treated with the growth regulator carry it to egg-laying sites. In his experiments, flies were treated with a dust containing pyriproxyfen and then allowed to lay their eggs on a larval medium. All immature flies died in the pupal stage.

Geden also studied the dosages required, the potency needed, different formulations, and the amount a fly can transport to the larval habitat. Small dosages of pyriproxyfen were extremely effective against house flies, which were able to carry enough back to their breeding sites to prevent immature flies from becoming adults. New, more potent formulations are being tested to improve the delivery system.

Baits and traps are other methods being used to help control house flies. Working with University of Florida scientists, ARS entomologist Jerry Hogsette at Gainesville has found that multiple traps may be needed at capture sites to effectively decrease fly populations. One reason is that house flies can use almost any moist surface as an egg-laying site. Flies also grow quickly, and can develop from an egg to an adult in less than seven days.

INFORMATION:

ARS is USDA's principal intramural scientific research agency.

Read more about this research in the November/December 2012 issue of Agricultural Research magazine. http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/nov12/insects1112.htm

USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer. To file a complaint of discrimination, write: USDA, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, Office of Adjudication, 1400 Independence Ave., SW, Washington, DC 20250-9410 or call (866) 632-9992 (Toll-free Customer Service), (800) 877-8339 (Local or Federal relay), (866) 377-8642 (Relay voice users).

END



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Scanning innovation can improve personalized medicine

Scanning innovation can improve personalized medicine
2012-11-26
New combinations of medical imaging technologies hold promise for improved early disease screening, cancer staging, therapeutic assessment, and other aspects of personalized medicine, according to Ge Wang, director of Virginia Tech's Center for Biomedical Imaging, in a recent paper that appeared in the refereed journal PLOS ONE. The integration of multiple major tomographic scanners into a single framework "is a new way of thinking in the biomedical imaging world" and is evolving into a "grand fusion" of many imaging modalities known as "omni-tomography," explained Wang, ...

Model sheds light on the chemistry that sparked the origin of life

2012-11-26
Durham, NC – The question of how life began on a molecular level has been a longstanding problem in science. However, recent mathematical research sheds light on a possible mechanism by which life may have gotten a foothold in the chemical soup that existed on the early Earth. Researchers have proposed several competing theories for how life on Earth could have gotten its start, even before the first genes or living cells came to be. Despite differences between various proposed scenarios, one theme they all have in common is a network of molecules that have the ability ...

Deciphering bacterial doomsday decisions

2012-11-26
Like a homeowner prepping for a hurricane, the bacterium Bacillus subtilis uses a long checklist to prepare for survival in hard times. In a new study, scientists at Rice University and the University of Houston uncovered an elaborate mechanism that allows B. subtilis to begin preparing for survival, even as it delays the ultimate decision of whether to "hunker down" and withdraw into a hardened spore. The new study by computational biologists at Rice and experimental biologists at the University of Houston is available online in the Proceedings of the National Academy ...

Continuing Thanksgiving eruptions on the sun

Continuing Thanksgiving eruptions on the sun
2012-11-26
On Nov. 23, 2012, at 8:54 a.m. EST, the sun erupted with an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection or CME. Experimental NASA research models, based on observations from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and the ESA/NASA mission the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, show that the Nov. 23 CME left the sun at speeds of 375 miles per second, which is a slow to average speed for CMEs. This is the third Earth-directed CME since Nov. 20. Not to be confused with a solar flare, a CME is a solar phenomenon that can send solar particles into space and can reach ...

Personalities influence workforce planning

2012-11-26
Montreal, November 26, 2012 – What if factory foremen treated their workers less like the machines they operate, and more like people, with personality strengths and differences? Surely the workers would benefit, but might the employers also see positive results in the workplace, as well as being able to cut costs? That's what Concordia researcher Mohammed Othman set out to prove in his paper "Integrating workers' differences into workforce planning," recently published in the journal Computers & Industrial Engineering. Currently, explained Othman, two types of researchers ...

Bothered by negative, unwanted thoughts? Just throw them away

2012-11-26
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- If you want to get rid of unwanted, negative thoughts, try just ripping them up and tossing them in the trash. In a new study, researchers found that when people wrote down their thoughts on a piece of paper and then threw the paper away, they mentally discarded the thoughts as well. On the other hand, people were more likely to use their thoughts when making judgments if they first wrote them down on a piece of paper and tucked the paper in a pocket to protect it. "However you tag your thoughts -- as trash or as worthy of protection -- seems to ...

Scientists analyze millions of news articles

2012-11-26
A study led by academics at the University of Bristol's Intelligent Systems Laboratory and the School of Journalism at Cardiff University have used Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to analyse 2.5 million articles from 498 different English-language online news outlets over ten months. The researchers found that: • As expected, readability measures show that online tabloid newspapers are more readable than broadsheets and use more sentimental language. Among 15 US and UK newspapers, the Sun is the easiest to read, comparable to the BBC's children's news programme, ...

Scientists from Bangalore and Mainz develop new methods for cooling of ions

2012-11-26
Among the most important techniques developed in atomic physics over the past few years are methods that enable the storage and cooling of atoms and ions at temperatures just above absolute zero. Scientists from Bangalore and Mainz have now demonstrated in an experiment that captured ions can also be cooled through contact with cold atoms and may thus be stored in so-called ion traps in a stable condition for longer periods of time. This finding runs counter to predictions that ions would actually be heated through collisions with atoms. The results obtained by the joint ...

Geometries presented by Chinese scholars for all possible space-time kinematics and their relations

Geometries presented by Chinese scholars for all possible space-time kinematics and their relations
2012-11-26
The possible kinematics and their corresponding geometries were once regarded as an already-solved problem. The de Sitter relativity research group formed by researchers from Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University, and Beijing Normal University, restudied the problem and showed that additional, previously unknown realizations exist of possible kinematical algebras, each of which has so(3) isotropy and a ten-generators symmetry group. They presented these geometries corresponding to all these realizations and provided a classification in an article, entitled "Geometries ...

Interannual variability in soil respiration from terrestrial ecosystems in China

2012-11-26
Soil respiration is a critical hydrological process that plays an important role in the terrestrial carbon cycle. Associate Professor CHEN ShuTao and his colleagues from the School of Environmental Science and Engineering at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology set out to estimate annual soil respiration from terrestrial ecosystems in China. They have tabulated published estimates of annual soil respiration and developed an empirically based, semi-mechanistic model that includes climate and soil properties. They found that the highest and lowest annual ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Education system needs overhaul to support school anxiety, psychologists say

Play “humanizes” pediatric care and should be key feature of a child-friendly NHS – report

Stricter oversight needed as financial misconduct drives risk-taking in banking

Cardiac arrest during long-distance running races

Preventable cardiac deaths during marathons are down, Emory study finds

New study finds peripheral artery disease often underdiagnosed and undertreated; opportunity to improve treatments, lower death rates

Use of antidepressant medication linked to substantial increase in risk of sudden cardiac death 

Atrial fibrillation diagnosed in midlife is linked to a 21% increased risk of dementia at any age and a 36% higher risk of early-onset dementia 

Mode of death in patients with heart failure with mildly reduced or preserved ejection fraction

Intravenous ferric carboxymaltose in heart failure with iron deficiency

Artificial intelligence in the prevention of sudden death

Oral semaglutide vastly reduces heart attacks, strokes in people with type 2 diabetes

Prothrombin complex concentrate vs frozen plasma for coagulopathic bleeding in cardiac surgery

Who needs a statin? New study compares prescribing recommendations based on traditional risk factors vs. coronary artery calcium scoring

Finerenone and atrial fibrillation in heart failure

Low coronary artery calcium score is associated with an excellent prognosis regardless of a person’s age, new study finds

Groundbreaking consensus statement on conduction system pacing released: a major milestone in the evolution of pacing therapy

Nuclear monitoring system suggests landslide cut off internet in west Africa

PNNL scientist elected AAAS fellow

American College of Cardiology recognizes five JACC Rocket Fuel Consultants

American College of Cardiology, Association of Black Cardiologists recognize three Merck Research Fellowship awardees

JACC to recognize 2025 Simon Dack Award recipients, Elite Reviewers

American College of Cardiology honors two recipients with the William A. Zoghbi Global Research Initiative Award

JACC recognizes five recipients of the William W. Parmley Young Author Achievement Award

Mass General Brigham researchers identify mutations that can lead to resistance to some chemotherapies

JACC journals honor 10 young researchers

Jefferson Lab Director Kimberly Sawyer named to CoVaBIZ Magazine’s 150 Most Influential People List

The world according to mosquitoes: USU ecologists lead AI-based effort to identify disease vectors

Drexel researchers develop new DNA test for personalized treatment of bacterial vaginosis

Keith T. Flaherty, MD, FAACR, elected as American Association for Cancer Research President-Elect for 2025-2026

[Press-News.org] Stopping flies before they mature