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 ...

DENVER, June 15 -- A new study from the University of Colorado Denver finds that scientists agree that children of same-sex parents experience 'no difference' on a range of social and behavioral outcomes compared to children of heterosexual or single parents. The study was led by Jimi Adams, an associate professor in the Department of Health and Behavioral Studies at CU Denver College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and published this month in Social Science Research. The research comes at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court is determining whether the Constitution requires ...

Bethesda, MD (June 15, 2015) -- Modifying the small white blood cells that protect against disease might help treat immune disorders, according to a study1 published in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the basic science journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. Specifically, researchers found that modulation of B lymphocyte function may be a means of regulating T lymphocyte function to treat immune-mediated disorders, including inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). Researchers uncovered the following pathway: gut bacteria stimulate intestinal ...

This news release is available in German. An innovative mechanism that the innate immune system uses to control viral infections has been uncovered by researchers at the University Medical Centers in Mainz and Freiburg. Central to this is the discovery that two different but related elements of the immune system can act together in concert to fight, for example, rotavirus infections. Infection with rotavirus is the most common cause of diarrhea in children around the world. The results of the research have recently been published in the eminent scientific journal Nature ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- Aging can cause many changes to the body, including obesity and a loss of lean mass. Now, a group of University of Florida Health researchers has discovered that an existing drug reduces body fat and appetite in older rats, which has intriguing implications for aging humans. Rapamycin, a pharmaceutical used to coat coronary stents and prevent transplant rejection, reduces obesity and preserves lean body mass when given intermittently to older rats. The two rapamycin-related studies were published recently in the Journal of Gerontology as a joint effort ...

A simple way to turn carbon nanotubes into valuable graphene nanoribbons may be to grind them, according to research led by Rice University. The trick, said Rice materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan, is to mix two types of chemically modified nanotubes. When they come into contact during grinding, they react and unzip, a process that until now has depended largely on reactions in harsh chemical solutions. The research by Ajayan and his international collaborators appears in Nature Communications. To be clear, Ajayan said, the new process is still a chemical reaction ...

The city where an individual lives can influence the risk of dying by suicide, according to a new study from sociologists at Rice University and the University of Colorado at Boulder. "Suicide in the City: Do Characteristics of Place Really Influence Risk?" appears in the latest edition of Social Science Quarterly. The study found that adults living in cities with more socio-economic disadvantages and fewer families living together have higher odds of suicidal death than adults living in less-disadvantaged cities and cities with more families living together. The findings ...

PHILADELPHIA (June 15, 2015) - Army ants, the nomadic swarming predators underfoot in the jungle, can take down a colony of prey animals without breaking a sweat. But certain army ant species can't take the heat. According to a new study from Drexel University, underground species of army ants are much less tolerant of high temperatures than their aboveground relatives--and that difference in thermal tolerance could mean that many climate change models lack a key element of how animal physiology could affect responses to changing environments. At face value, this is ...

Scientists at the University of Southampton have found a way to pry into the private lives of fish - by looking in their ears. By studying ear stones in fish, which act as tiny data recorders, scientists can now reveal migration patterns and even provide insights into their sex life. Managing fish stocks in a sustainable way is a major challenge facing scientists, conservationists, policy makers and fishermen. To get the best results, accurate information about the movements of fish in the wild is needed but gathering this information is extremely difficult. Tiny ...

Daejeon, Republic of Korea, Jun 15, 2015 -- Phase change random access memory (PRAM) is one of the strongest candidates for next-generation nonvolatile memory for flexible and wearable electronics. In order to be used as a core memory for flexible devices, the most important issue is reducing high operating current. The effective solution is to decrease cell size in sub-micron region as in commercialized conventional PRAM. However, the scaling to nano-dimension on flexible substrates is extremely difficult due to soft nature and photolithographic limits on plastics, thus ...