Learning from others and innovation have undoubtedly helped advance civilization. But these behaviours can carry costs as well as benefits. And a new study by an international team of evolutionary biologists sheds light on how one particular cost - increased exposure to parasites - may affect cultural evolution in non-human primates. The results, published Dec. 3, 2014, in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that species with members that learn from others suffer from a wider variety of socially transmitted parasites, while innovative, exploratory ...

This news release is available in German. (Jena/Germany) Jena scientists have been successful in producing highly specific nanoparticles. Depending on the bound dye the particles are guided to the liver or to the kidney and deliver their payload of active ingredients directly to the targeted tissue. Moreover, the dyes enable the tracking of the transport processes by intravital microscopy or, in a non-invasive way, by multi spectral optoacoustic tomography. The reduction of cholesterol production induced by siRNA served as the proof-of-principle for the developed ...

What do lasers, neural networks, and spreading epidemics have in common? They share a most basic feature whereby an initial pulse can propagate through a medium - be it physical, biological or socio-economic, respectively. The challenge is to gain a better understanding - and eventually control - of such systems, allowing them to be applied, for instance to real neural systems. This is the objective of a new theoretical study published in EPJ B by Clemens Bachmair and Eckehard Schöll from the Berlin University of Technology in Germany. Ultimately, with a better theoretical ...

New research from the University of Adelaide has helped to shed light on the complexities of child sleep, and could lead to improved diagnosis of children with sleep-related breathing problems. For his PhD in the University's School of Medical Sciences, Scott Coussens has been investigating how to accurately measure the level of sleep disturbance being experienced by children, to show whether or not they require treatment. "Quality sleep is extremely important for children, especially at critical times of development. It can impact on the health of the brain and plays ...

New Rochelle, NY, December 3, 2014--Are adolescents who view pornography or music videos more likely to engage in sexting, in which they share sexually explicit content via text, photo, or video using cell phones, email, or social networking sites? A study of the media consumption and sexting behavior of more than 300 teens is published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking website. In "The Associations ...

Plastic waste is one of today's major environmental concerns. Most types of plastic do not biodegrade but break up into ever smaller pieces while remaining a polymer. Also, most types are made from oil, a rapidly dwindling resource. But there are promising alternatives, and one of them is polylactic acid (PLA): it is biodegradable and made from renewable resources. Manufacturers use PLA for disposable cups, bags and other sorts of packaging. The demand for PLA is constantly rising and has been estimated to reach about one megaton per year by 2020. The research groups ...

Planets orbiting close to low-mass stars -- easily the most common stars in the universe -- are prime targets in the search for extraterrestrial life. But new research led by an astronomy graduate student at the University of Washington indicates some such planets may have long since lost their chance at hosting life because of intense heat during their formative years. Low-mass stars, also called M dwarfs, are smaller than the Sun, and also much less luminous, so their habitable zone tends to be fairly close in. The habitable zone is that swath of space that is just ...

People in the country's unhappiest communities spend about a quarter of the month so far down in the dumps that it can harm their productivity, according to economists. "This is a real concern not just in the United States, but across the world," said Stephan Goetz, professor of agricultural economics and regional economics, Penn State, and director of the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development. "Poor mental health can result in considerable economic costs, including losses of billions of dollars to lower productivity and this doesn't even include the staggering ...

PHILADELPHIA--Quitting smoking sets off a series of changes in the brain that Penn Medicine researchers say may better identify smokers who will start smoking again--a prediction that goes above and beyond today's clinical or behavioral tools for assessing relapse risk. Reporting in a new study published this week in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, James Loughead, PhD, associate professor of Psychiatry, and Caryn Lerman, PhD, a professor of Psychiatry and director of Penn's Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Nicotine Addiction, found that smokers who relapsed ...

Recent research from the Met Office and the University of East Anglia (UEA) suggests breaking the existing global and UK temperature records is much more likely due to human influence on the climate. Early Figures Suggest Global Record Possible The global mean temperature for January to October based on the HadCRUT4 dataset (compiled by the Met Office and UEA's Climatic Research Unit) is 0.57 °C (+/- 0.1) above the long-term (1961-1990) average. This is consistent with the statement from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) today. With two months of data still ...

Researchers at the Mechanobiology Institute at the National University of Singapore have comprehensively described the network of proteins involved in cell-cell adhesions, or the cadherin interactome. This work was published in Science Signaling (Guo et al. E-cadherin interactome complexity and robustness resolved by quantitative proteomics, Science Signaling, 02 Dec 2014, Vol 7, Issue 354). Unlocking the complexity of cell adhesion Many biological processes depend on the ability of cells to stick to one another. The formation of multicellular organisms and precise ...

Plastic is well-known for sticking around in the environment for years without breaking down, contributing significantly to litter and landfills. But scientists have now discovered that bacteria from the guts of a worm known to munch on food packaging can degrade polyethylene, the most common plastic. Reported in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology, the finding could lead to new ways to help get rid of the otherwise persistent waste, the scientists say. Jun Yang and colleagues point out that the global plastics industry churns out about 140 million tons ...

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the few cancers in which a continued increase in incidence has been observed over recent years. Globally, there are approximately 750,000 new cases of liver cancer reported each year. Importantly, population-based studies show that HCC ranks as the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Also, a large proportion of HCC patients display symptoms of intrahepatic metastases or postsurgical recurrence, with a five-year survival rate of around only 30-40%. Among the various pathogenic factors, HBV infection accounts ...

Current asthma treatments can alleviate wheezing, coughing and other symptoms felt by millions of Americans every year, but they don't get to the root cause of the condition. Now, for the first time, scientists are reporting a new approach to defeating asthma by targeting the trigger -- the allergen -- before it can spark an attack. They describe their new compound, which they tested on rats, in ACS' Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. Clive Robinson and colleagues explain that to prevent many health problems, the ideal approach to treatment or prevention involves getting ...

The interdisciplinary field of network science has attracted enormous attention in the past 10 years, although most results have been obtained by analyzing isolated networks. However many real-world networks interact with and depend on other networks. "The properties and dynamics of interdependent and interconnected networks have been studied extensively, and scientists are finding many interesting results and discovering many surprising phenomena," state scientists based in China, the US and Israel who co-authored a new study, "From a single network to a network of ...

Humans have been experimenting with and utilizing glassy materials for more than ten millennia, dating back to about 12000 B.C. Although glassy materials are the oldest known artificial materials, new discoveries and novel applications continue to appear. Yet understanding of glass is far from complete, and the nature of glass constitutes a longstanding puzzle in condensed mater physics. In a new overview titled "The β-Relaxation in Metallic Glasses" and published in the Beijing-based National Science Review, co-authors Hai Bin Yu and and Konrad Samwer, based at ...

In order to observe the impact of climate change on soil microorganisms under as natural conditions as possible, the scientists transferred intact young beech seedlings from a cool, wet, northwest-exposed site of a slope approximately corresponding to present climatic conditions to a warmer site exposed to the southwest. This transfer simulated temperature and precipitation profiles as can be expected from climate change. "We tried to keep initial soil type and nutrient content sin soil as comparable as possible to avoid additional factors influencing our data"," said Prof. ...

With good planning, it is possible to promote the reuse of construction and demolition waste and thereby both conserve the environment and save on material costs. In the future, it will be even more important to assess how buildings can reasonably be repaired or demolished into parts, together with how the remaining service life of the parts can be utilized in new applications. The best method is to implement demolition planning already as a component of construction design. Reuse of construction parts is always worthwhile from the perspective of the environment, and ...

For years, scientists have been pursuing "artificial leaf" technology, a green approach to making hydrogen fuel that copies plants' ability to convert sunlight into a form of energy they can use. Now, one team reports progress toward a stand-alone system that lends itself to large-scale, low-cost production. They describe their nanowire mesh design in the journal ACS Nano. Peidong Yang, Bin Liu and colleagues note that harnessing sunlight to split water and harvest hydrogen is one of the most intriguing ways to achieve clean energy. Automakers have started introducing ...

Their novel findings obtained by measuring "cortical thickness" for the first time in the eating disorder are now published in the renowned journal "Biological Psychiatry". The authors conclude, "The global thinning of cortical gray matter observed in acutely ill adolescent patients can be completely reversed following successful weight rehabilitation therapy". Previous studies of changes in brain structure associated with anorexia nervosa were limited in their ability to clarify important questions regarding the regional specificity and persistence of anomalies following ...

The Ebola epidemic in West Africa has pushed the decades-long search for a treatment to a frenetic pace. Somewhere in the virus' deceptively simple structure is a key to taming it. To find that key, scientists are undertaking multiple strategies, some of which are being fast-tracked for human testing, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society. Senior editors Lisa M. Jarvis and Bethany Halford of C&EN note that the Ebola virus is endowed with a mere seven genes that code for eight proteins. Although ...

New research shows that ocean heat uptake across three oceans is the likely cause of the 'warming hiatus' - the current decade-long slowdown in global surface warming. Using data from a range of state-of-the-art ocean and atmosphere models, the research shows that the increased oceanic heat drawdown in the equatorial Pacific, North Atlantic and Southern Ocean basins has played a significant role in the hiatus. The new analysis has been published in Geophysical Research Letters by Professor Sybren Drijfhout from the University of Southampton and collaborators from ...

This news release is available in German. The new study establishes that the best combination for incentives and punishment that promotes cooperation are in the form of "First carrot, then stick". The mathematical proof shows how the combined sequential use of reward ("carrot") and punishment ("stick") promotes cooperation in collaborative endeavors, such as protecting social commons and maintaining mutual aid. Rewards and punishments are the most tried and true approaches when trying to promote cooperation in collaborative endeavors. New research, in terms of ...

Analysis of data from the MATROSHKA experiment, the first comprehensive measurements of long-term exposure of astronauts to cosmic radiation, has now been completed. This experiment, carried out on board and outside of the International Space Station, showed that the cosmos may be less hostile to space travellers than expected. Among the many life-threatening hazards to the space traveller, cosmic radiation is a major one, considerably limiting the time astronauts may spend in space without incurring excessive risk to their health from too high a dose of this ionizing ...

An Australian National University (ANU) mathematician has developed a new way to uncover simple patterns that might underlie apparently complex systems, such as clouds, cracks in materials or the movement of the stockmarket. The method, named fractal Fourier analysis, is based on new branch of mathematics called fractal geometry. The method could help scientists better understand the complicated signals that the body gives out, such as nerve impulses or brain waves. "It opens up a whole new way of analysing signals," said Professor Michael Barnsley, who presented ...