CORVALLIS, Ore. - A collection of fossilized owl pellets in Utah suggests that when the Earth went through a period of rapid warming about 13,000 years ago, the small mammal community was stable and resilient, even as individual species changed along with the habitat and landscape. By contrast, human-caused changes to the environment since the late 1800s have caused an enormous drop in biomass and "energy flow" in this same community, researchers reported today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The dramatic decline in this energy flow - a measurement ...

MADISON, Wis. -- A new study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has linked two seemingly unrelated cancer treatments that are both now being tested in clinical trials. One treatment is a vaccine that targets a structure on the outside of cancer cells, while the other is an altered enzyme that breaks apart RNA and causes the cell to commit suicide. The study was published July 13 in the new journal of the American Chemical Society: ACS Central Science. The new understanding could help both approaches, says UW-Madison professor of biochemistry Ronald Raines, who ...

MADISON, Wis. -- University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers have created a nanoscale device that can emit light as powerfully as an object 10,000 times its size. It's an advance that could have huge implications for everything from photography to solar power. In a paper published July 10 in the journal Physical Review Letters, Zongfu Yu, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and his collaborators describe a nanoscale device that drastically surpasses previous technology in its ability to scatter light. They showed how a single nanoresonator can ...

Scientists at the University of Arizona have discovered a mysterious molecule with a structure simple enough to make it into high school textbooks, yet so elusive that chemists have argued for more than a century over whether it even exists. And, like so many important discoveries in science, this one started out with a neglected flask sitting in a storage fridge, in this case in the lab of Andrei Sanov, a professor in the UA's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Sanov and two of his students report the first definitive observation and spectroscopic characterization ...

DOWNERS GROVE, Ill. - July 13, 2015 -Patients whose colorectal cancer (CRC) is detected during a screening colonoscopy are likely to survive longer than those who wait until they have symptoms before having the test, according to a study in the July issue of GIE: Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, the monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal of the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE). The study, "Survival in patients with colorectal cancer diagnosed by screening colonoscopy," looked at 312 patients in 10 gastroenterology practices in Germany, all aged 55 or ...

It is known that sleep facilitates the formation of long-term memory in humans. In a new study, researchers from Uppsala University, Sweden, now show that sleep does not only help form long-term memory but also ensures access to it during times of cognitive stress. It is well known that during sleep newly learned information is transferred from short-term to long-term memory stores in humans. In the study that is now being published in the scientific journal SLEEP, sleep researchers Jonathan Cedernaes and Christian Benedict, sought to investigate the role of nocturnal ...

URBANA, Ill. - Corn hybrids with improved tolerance to crowding stress, grown at higher plant populations than their predecessors, have been a driver of rising field corn yields in recent decades. Large differences in crowding stress tolerance (CST) recently reported among popular sweet corn processing hybrids has growers and processors wondering if newly emerging hybrids also offer improved CST. Martin Williams, a University of Illinois crop scientist and ecologist with the USDA-Agricultural Research Service, said this question is fundamentally important in improving ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Paramedics and emergency medical technicians (EMTs) are trained to save lives. But they sometimes enter situations where a dying patient's end-of-life wishes contradict their professional code. What do they do when faced with someone who is imminently dying and whose pre-hospital order is "do not resuscitate"? Until recently, the dynamics of that environment were a mystery. "One way to gain perspective on these crises was to interview the paramedics and EMTs involved in them," says Deborah Waldrop, a professor in the University at Buffalo School of Social ...

Two antioxidant supplements are effective in treating skin-picking disorder in mice, according to a study led by a Stanford University School of Medicine researcher. The finding suggests that people with the potentially serious disorder might benefit from this therapy. An estimated 4 percent of the population -- or about 1 in 25 -- suffer from skin-picking disorder, in which repeated, compulsive picking or scratching of the skin can lead to severe disfigurement and life-threatening infection. Skin picking is also common among laboratory mice, which may develop potentially ...

Boulder, Colorado, USA - In the July issue of GSA Today, Franz Neubauer of the University of Salzburg and Fariba Kargaranbafghi of the University of Yazd describe thinning of the lithosphere that they associate with the formation of a metamorphic core complex in the Central Iranian plateau. The core complex is located within a continental rift and was exhumed at a rate of approx. 0.75 to 1.3 km per million years during the main phase of oceanic subduction of the Arabian plate beneath the Central Iranian block between ca. 30 and 49 million years ago. The authors indicate ...

A newborn's first stool can signal the child may struggle with persistent cognitive problems, according to Case Western Reserve University Project Newborn researchers. In particular, high levels of fatty acid ethyl esters (FAEE) found in the meconium (a newborn's first stool) from a mother's alcohol use during pregnancy can alert doctors that a child is at risk for problems with intelligence and reasoning. Left untreated, such problems persist into the teen years, the research team from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences found. "We ...

Rice University engineers have demonstrated the first system that allows wireless data transmissions over UHF channels during active TV broadcasts. If the technology were incorporated into next-generation TVs or smart remotes, it could significantly expand the reach of so-called "super Wi-Fi" networks in urban areas. "Due to the popularity of cable, satellite and Internet TV, the UHF spectrum is one of the most underutilized portions of the wireless spectrum in the United States," said lead researcher Edward Knightly. "That's a bitter irony because the demand for mobile ...

(PHILADELPHIA) - Cancer is a disease of cell growth, but most tumors only become lethal once they metastasize or spread from their first location to sites throughout the body. For the first time, researchers at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia report a single molecule that appears to be the central regulator driving metastasis in prostate cancer. The study, published online July 13th in Cancer Cell, offers a target for the development of a drug that could prevent metastasis in prostate cancer, and possibly other cancers as well. "Finding a way to halt or prevent ...

Foraging and eating wild mushrooms can result in liver failure and even death because mistaking toxic mushrooms for edible varieties is common, illustrates a case published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) "Distinguishing safe from harmful mushrooms is a challenge even for mycologists," writes Dr. Adina Weinerman, Division of General Internal Medicine, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Toronto, Ontario, with coauthors. The case focuses on a previously healthy 52-year-old immigrant woman of Asian descent who had foraged for wild mushrooms in a local park ...

Combining chemotherapy with new drugs that target a protein that helps cancer cells to withstand chemotherapy could drastically improve treatment, according to research published in Cancer Cell. Researchers at the University of Manchester carefully studied a network of proteins that kick into action when cancer cells in the lab are treated with a class of chemotherapy drugs called taxanes*. These drugs are commonly used to treat several cancers - including breast, ovarian and prostate cancers. But not all cancers respond to them, and it's difficult to predict which patients ...

Baltimore, Md., July 13, 2015 - A new study by researchers at University of Maryland School of Medicine has identified promising compounds that could successfully treat depression in less than 24 hours while minimizing side effects. Although they have not yet been tested in people, the compounds could offer significant advantages over current antidepressant medications. The research, led by Scott Thompson, PhD, Professor and Chair of the Department of Physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM), was published this month in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. "Our ...

Using molds to shape things is as old as humanity. In the Bronze Age, the copper-tin alloy was melted and cast into weapons in ceramic molds. Today, injection and extrusion molding shape hot liquids into everything from car parts to toys. For this to work, the mold needs to be stable while the hot liquid material hardens into shape. In a breakthrough for nanoscience, Cornell polymer engineers have made such a mold for nanostructures that can shape liquid silicon out of an organic polymer material. This paves the way for perfect, 3-D, single crystal nanostructures. The ...

From the smell of flowers to the taste of wine, our perception is strongly influenced by prior knowledge and expectations, a cognitive process known as top-down control. In a University of California, San Diego School of Medicine study published July 13 in the online journal Nature Neuroscience, a research team led by Takaki Komiyama, PhD, assistant professor of neurosciences and neurobiology, reports that in mouse models, the brain significantly changed its visual cortex operation modes by implementing top-down processes during learning. "We found that when the mouse ...

LOS ANGELES (July 13, 2015) - Research for Her™, Cedars-Sinai's groundbreaking online registry that matches women with research studies and clinical trials, enrolled study participants more quickly when compared with traditional paper-based registries, according to new research published in the journal Gynecologic Oncology. Historically, fewer women have participated in clinical research and only 3 to 5 percent of patients nationally enroll in trials. "Research for Her is committed to changing these statistics and improving patient lives," said B.J. Rimel, ...

Spending more leisure time sitting was associated with a higher risk of total cancer risk in women, and specifically with multiple myeloma, breast, and ovarian cancers, according a new study. The higher risk was present even after taking into account BMI, physical activity, and other factors. The study, appearing in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers, and Prevention, found no association between sitting time and cancer risk in men. While extensive research links physical activity to cancer prevention, few studies have examined the link between sitting time and the risk of ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University and Brown University have found that nanoscale wires (nanowires) made of common semiconductor materials have a pronounced anelasticity - meaning that the wires, when bent, return slowly to their original shape rather than snapping back quickly. "All materials have some degree of anelasticity, but it is usually negligible at the macroscopic scale," says Yong Zhu, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State and corresponding author of a paper describing the work. "Because nanowires are so small, ...

New research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests that the protein keratin 17 - the presence of which is used in the lab to detect and stage various types of cancers - is not just a biomarker for the disease, but may play a critical role in tumor growth. This new understanding of how keratin 17 works, the researchers say, could lead to the development of better ways to detect and prevent cancer, and identify new targets for therapeutic treatment. A report on the findings is published July 13 in Nature Genetics. "Keratin 17 is a sensitive ...

North Carolina State University researchers have developed an effective and environmentally benign method to combat bacteria by engineering nanoscale particles that add the antimicrobial potency of silver to a core of lignin, a ubiquitous substance found in all plant cells. The findings introduce ideas for better, greener and safer nanotechnology and could lead to enhanced efficiency of antimicrobial products used in agriculture and personal care. In a study being published in Nature Nanotechnology July 13, NC State engineer Orlin Velev and colleagues show that silver-ion ...

A follow-up to a 2005 study of industry relationships among members of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) at academic health centers finds both improvements in the management of such relationships, with increased levels of disclosure and fewer problematic relationships, and the persistence of problems such as IRB members' voting on protocols with which they may have conflicts of interest, a violation of federal regulations. The new study from the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital appears in the July 13 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. ...

Contact with another player was the most common way boys and girls sustained concussions in a study of U.S. high school soccer players, while heading the ball was the most common soccer-specific activity during which about one-third of boys and one-quarter of girls sustained concussions, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics. Soccer has increased in popularity in the United States over the past three decades. In 1969-1970, there were 2,217 schools that fielded 49,593 boys' soccer players and no girls' soccer players compared to 2013-2014 when 11,718 ...