Researchers who paired Siamese fighting fish in mock fights found that winning fish could supply more energy to their muscles during fights than losing fish. The findings link the invisible processes going on inside cells to tangible consequences in the visible world, and they show how a behavior such as aggression can be affected by underlying biochemical processes that help sustain an animal's life. "Conspicuous adaptations like antlers are usually what come to mind when thinking about traits that maximize success in aggressive interactions, but as these interactions ...

Rich, creamy, nutritious and now cancer fighting. New research reveals that molecules derived from avocados could be effective in treating a form of cancer. Professor Paul Spagnuolo from the University of Waterloo has discovered a lipid in avocados that combats acute myeloid leukemia (AML) by targeting the root of the disease - leukemia stem cells. Worldwide, there are few drug treatments available to patients that target leukemia stem cells. AML is a devastating disease and proves fatal within five years for 90 per cent of seniors over age 65. Spagnuolo's new avocado-derived ...

The world's first study into the brain anatomy of a marine reptile that lived at the same time as the dinosaurs sheds light on how the reptilian brain adapted to life in the oceans. The fossils of ichthyosaurs, which lived 150 to 200 million years ago, are often very well preserved, but they are commonly flattened. Now investigators have used computed tomography to create a 3-D scan of the animal's skull, revealing internal details of the palate and braincase that usually cannot be seen. A reconstruction of the brain shows the importance of vision for the predator, which ...

In a new study, older women who lived in places with higher air pollution had significantly reduced white matter in the brain. For the study, a research team took brain MRIs of 1403 women who were 71 to 89 years old and used residential histories and air monitoring data to estimate their exposure to air pollution in the previous 6 to 7 years. The findings suggest that ambient particulate air pollutants may have a deleterious effect on brain aging. "Investigating the impact of air pollution on the human brain is a new area of environmental neurosciences. Our study provides ...

The prevalence of smoking among undergraduate nursing and physiotherapy students in Spain decreased from 29.3% in 2003 to 18.2% in 2013. Many of the students remained unaware of the link between smoking and diseases such as bladder cancer or the negative health effects of second-hand smoke, which points to a significant deficiency in undergraduate training. The majority of nursing and physiotherapy students recognized that healthcare professionals were role models in society, noted Dr. Beatriz Ordás, lead author of the Journal of Advanced Nursing study. INFORMATION: ...

Following a decade of steady growth, use of bisphosphonates--medications that are effective for treating osteoporosis--declined in the United States by more than 50% from 2008 to 2012. The sudden drop seemed to occur after media reports highlighted safety concerns, such as the development of certain fractures that occurred rarely in long-term users, despite the fact that the US Food and Drug Administration and the American Society of Bone and Mineral Research did not recommend any specific safety restrictions on bisphosphonates. The findings are published in the Journal ...

A new study shows that shorter telomeres--which are the protective caps at the end of a cell's chromosomes--are linked with worse survival in a progressive respiratory disease called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). In patients with IPF, excessive scar tissue forms in the lungs. The average telomere length of IPF patients was significantly shorter than that of healthy individuals. Also, the telomere length of patients with IPF who died from their disease during the study was shorter than that of patients who survived. The Respirology results support the theory that ...

A new global review reveals that elder abuse--which includes psychological, physical, and sexual abuse; neglect; and financial exploitation--is common among community-dwelling older adults and is especially prevalent among minority older adults. Older adults with cognitive and physical impairments or psychosocial distress are also at increased risk of elder abuse. In North and South American epidemiological studies, the prevalence of elder abuse ranged from about 10% among cognitively intact older adults to 47% in older adults with dementia. In Europe, the prevalence ...

One of the body's own tools for preventing wound infections may actually interfere with wound healing, according to new research from Boston Children's Hospital. In a study published online in Nature Medicine, scientists from the hospital's Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine (PCMM) found they could speed up wound healing in diabetic mice by keeping immune cells called neutrophils from producing bacteria-trapping neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs). The study, led by PCMM senior investigator Denisa Wagner, Ph.D., and postdoctoral fellow Siu Ling Wong, Ph.D., ...

University of California, Berkeley, scientists have identified more than 35 new groups of bacteria, clarifying a mysterious branch of the tree of life that has been hazy because these microbes can't be reared and studied in the lab. The new groups make up more than 15 percent of all known groups or phyla of bacteria, the scientists say, and include the smallest life forms on Earth, microbes a mere 400 nanometers across. The number of new bacterial phyla is equal to all the known animal phyla on Earth. The scientists, who recently also identified nine new groups of microbes ...

Researchers estimate that 48.5 percent of the nearly 346,000 deaths from 12 cancers among adults 35 and older in 2011 were attributable to cigarette smoking, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine. Researcher Rebecca L. Siegel, M.P.H., of the American Cancer Society, Atlanta, and coauthors provide an updated estimate because they note smoking patterns and the magnitude of the association between smoking and cancer death have changed in the past decade. While smoking prevalence decreased from 23.2 percent in 2000 to 18.1 percent in 2012, some ...

New York, June 15 -- Led by Young Duck Kim, a postdoctoral research scientist in James Hone's group at Columbia Engineering, a team of scientists from Columbia, Seoul National University (SNU), and Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) reported today that they have demonstrated -- for the first time -- an on-chip visible light source using graphene, an atomically thin and perfectly crystalline form of carbon, as a filament. They attached small strips of graphene to metal electrodes, suspended the strips above the substrate, and passed a current through ...

Diatoms in the world's oceans exhale more oxygen than all the world's rainforests. These tiny drifting algae generate about 20 percent of the oxygen produced on Earth each year and invisibly recycle gases enveloping our planet. How diatoms will respond to the rising carbon dioxide levels is still unknown. A new study by the University of Washington and Seattle's Institute for Systems Biology, published June 15 in Nature Climate Change, finds the genetic ways that a common species of diatom adjusts to sudden and long-term increases in carbon dioxide. 'There are certain ...

Does participation in the annual lung cancer screening currently recommended for people with high-risk smoking histories encourage those who are still smoking to quit? A new study from a Massachusetts General Hospital research team (MGH) finds that the answer may depend on the level of support given by patients' primary care providers. In the report receiving online publication in JAMA Internal Medicine, the team finds that, while providers' asking such patients about smoking did not increase their likelihood of quitting, providing more direct assistance - such as talking ...

LOS ANGELES -- New research by an international team including Keck Medicine of USC scientists is bringing the origins of ovarian cancer into sharper focus. The study, published online June 15 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Genetics, highlights the discovery of three genetic variants associated with mucinous ovarian carcinomas (MOCs), offering the first evidence of genetic susceptibility in this type of ovarian cancer. The research also suggests a link between common pathways of development between MOCs and colorectal cancer and for the first time identifies a gene ...

TORONTO, June 15 -- Researchers in Canada and the U.K. have for the first time sequenced and assembled de novo the full genome of a living organism, the bacteria Escherichia Coli, using Oxford Nanopore's MinIONTM device, a genome sequencer that can fit in the palm of your hand. The findings, which were published today in the journal Nature Methods, provide proof of concept for the technology and the methods lay the groundwork for using it to sequence genomes in increasingly more complex organisms, eventually including humans, said Dr. Jared Simpson, principal investigator ...

A new study, published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, has found that while students' unions often try to oppose the rise of consumerism at their universities, they are rarely successful. The team of researchers at the University of Surrey arranged various focus groups at 10 higher education institutions, with both students' union leaders and university managers. They found that the nature of relationships between unions and their university often makes it difficult for students' unions to reject consumerism - either because they have little independence ...

Over the past nine years, Scot H. Simpson, professor in the faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Alberta, has been studying the role of pharmacists on primary care teams and their impact on the health of patients with Type 2 diabetes. His most recent study, Pharmacists on primary care teams: Effect on antihypertensive medication management in patients with Type 2 diabetes, published in the May/June issue of the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, found that having pharmacists on primary care teams had a significant impact ...

If you leave your job, chances are your pattern of cellphone use will also change. Without a commute or workspace, it stands to reason, most people will make a higher portion of their calls from home -- and they might make fewer calls, too. Now a study co-authored by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers shows that mobile phone data can provide rapid insight into employment levels, precisely because people's communications patterns change when they are not working. Indeed, using a plant closing in Europe as the basis for their study, the researchers found ...

From heat waves to damaged crops to asthma in children, climate change is a major public health concern, argues a Michigan State University researcher in a new study. Climate change is about more than melting ice caps and images of the Earth on fire, said Sean Valles, assistant professor in Lyman Briggs College and the Department of Philosophy, who believes bioethicists could help reframe current climate change discourse. "When we talk about climate change, we can't just be talking about money and jobs and polar bears," he said. "Why do we focus on polar bears? Why ...

The National Hurricane Center is keeping a close eye on a developing tropical low pressure area in the south-central Gulf of Mexico. NOAA's GOES-East satellite provided imagery of the system, and an animation was created at NASA showing the development over two days. The system has a high chance for development into a tropical depression. NOAA's GOES-East satellite sits in a fixed location providing continuous coverage of weather systems in the eastern U.S. and Atlantic Ocean basin. An animation of visible and infrared imagery of the low was created by NASA/NOAA's GOES ...

An international research team has found a way of protecting sensitive catalysts from oxygen-caused damage. In the future, this could facilitate the creation of hydrogen fuel cells with molecular catalysts or with biomolecules such as the hydrogenase enzyme. To date, this could only be accomplished using the rare and expensive precious metal platinum. Together with their French colleagues, researchers from Bochum and Mülheim describe the way in which a hydrogel can serve as a "protective shield" for biomolecules by two articles written in the journals Angewandte Chemie ...

The stress and worry of giving birth prematurely does not adversely affect a mother's parenting behaviour, according to researchers at the University of Warwick. Preterm children often require special care in the neonatal period including incubator care or assistance with breathing. Previous research has suggested that this stress, separation and an increased tendency for depression may impair a mother's parenting behaviour and adversely affect preterm childrens' long term development. However, a new paper from the University of Warwick shows that mothers of preterm ...

WASHINGTON, June 15, 2015 -- It's been around for decades and it's probably in your diet soda - for a little while longer anyway. PepsiCo announced recently it was removing the artificial sweetener aspartame from its Diet Pepsi products in the U.S. starting in August. The company cited consumer concerns about the chemical's safety. So this week, Reactions answers the question, "Is aspartame safe?" Check it out here: https://youtu.be/92r1oOul0kM. INFORMATION:Subscribe to the series at http://bit.ly/ACSReactions, and follow us on Twitter @ACSreactions to be the first to ...

HOUSTON -- (June 15, 2015) -- A team of biologists from Rice University, the University of Notre Dame and three other schools has discovered that an agricultural pest that began plaguing U.S. apple growers in the 1850s likely did so after undergoing extensive and genome-wide changes in a single generation. This new result, which appears online this week in Ecology Letters, came from applying the latest tools of genome sequencing and analysis to preserved evidence from experiments carried out at Notre Dame in the 1990s. The research focuses on the fruit fly Rhagoletis ...