The process of cell division is central to life. The last stage, when two daughter cells split from each other, has fascinated scientists since the dawn of cell biology in the Victorian era. For just as long, it has been notoriously difficult to study this final step, when the dividing cell creates a furrow before cleaving in two. The name given to this process by those early biologists, cytokinesis, translates as "cell movement" and captures the sense of a highly active and organized series of events. Scientists have now learned much more about the proteins involved ...

Santa Barbara, Calif. — Concern about fisheries is widespread around the world. Over the past several decades, a robust discussion has taken place concerning how to manage fisheries better to benefit ecosystems and humans. Much of the discussion has focused on preserving biological diversity, a critical component of healthy ecosystems. One aspect that gets less attention is the role of fishing fleet diversity. Fishing fleets can be diverse in many ways, including the gear they use, the fishing grounds they visit and when, and the species they target. A new study ...

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 31, 2014 -- The soundtrack to a wild rhinoceros's life is wind passing through the savannah grass, birds chirping, and distant animals moving across the plains. But a rhinoceros in a zoo listens to children screaming, cars passing, and the persistent hum of urban life. A group of researchers from Texas believes that this discrepancy in soundscape may be contributing to rhinos' difficulties thriving and reproducing in captivity. During the 168th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), which will be held October 27-31, 2014, at the ...

DARIEN, IL – New research suggests that insomnia is a major contributor to deaths caused by motor vehicle crashes and other unintentional fatal injuries. The results underscore the importance of the "Sleep Well, Be Well" campaign of the National Healthy Sleep Awareness Project. Results show that the risk of unintentional fatal injury increased in a dose-dependent manner with the number of insomnia symptoms present. People with all three symptoms of insomnia were 2.8 times more likely to die from a fatal injury than those with no insomnia symptoms, even after adjusting ...

Nearly one out of four older Americans say that either they or a family member have experienced excessive or unwanted medical treatment, according to the latest issue of The Gerontological Society of America's Public Policy & Aging Report (PP&AR), which goes on to show that Americans strongly support holding doctors accountable when they fail to honor patients' end-of-life health care wishes. This PP&AR, titled "Advanced Illness Care: Issues and Options," features 12 articles that present new ways of understanding the complexity of securing appropriate advanced illness ...

A bright synchrotron source that emits over a wide part of the electromagnetic spectrum from the infrared to hard X-rays is currently being built in Lund, Sweden. The MAX IV facility presents a range of technical challenges for the team putting together its component parts in a storage - ring synchrotron system that will have a circumference of just a few hundred metres. Nevertheless, if these various challenges can be addressed then an entirely new class of experiments that require source brightness and transverse coherence will be possible. Pedro Tavares and colleagues ...

Johns Hopkins engineers have invented a lab device to give cancer researchers an unprecedented microscopic look at metastasis, the complex way that tumor cells spread through the body, causing more than 90 percent of cancer-related deaths. By shedding light on precisely how tumor cells travel, the device could uncover new ways to keep cancer in check. The inventors, from the university's Whiting School of Engineering and its Institute for NanoBioTechnology (INBT), published details and images from their new system recently in the journal Cancer Research. Their article ...

New Haven, Conn. – Geologists are letting the air out of a nagging mystery about the development of animal life on Earth. Scientists have long speculated as to why animal species didn't flourish sooner, once sufficient oxygen covered the Earth's surface. Animals began to prosper at the end of the Proterozoic period, about 800 million years ago — but what about the billion-year stretch before that, when most researchers think there also was plenty of oxygen? Well, it seems the air wasn't so great then, after all. In a study published Oct. 30 in Science, ...

Wind shear has caused the demise of former Tropical Cyclone Nilofar in the northern Arabian Sea. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Nilofar on Oct. 31 and captured an image that shows strong wind shear has pushed the bulk of clouds and showers away from Nilofar's center, basically sending the storm to its grave. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of the remnants of Tropical Cyclone Nilofar on Oct. 31 at 08:45 UTC (4:45 a.m. EDT). The image showed that the former tropical cyclone's clouds and showers were pushed ...

In terms of duration of treatment and cost, patients with early stage breast cancer may benefit from accelerated partial breast irradiation (APBI) with proton therapy versus whole breast irradiation (WBI), according to new research from The University of Texas MD Anderson Proton Therapy Center. In a cost analysis study based on typical patient characteristics, researchers used Medicare reimbursement codes to analyze allowable charges for eight different types of partial and whole breast irradiation therapies and treatment schedules available to early stage breast cancer ...

Planting trees and creating green space in cities is good for attracting species, but it may not be enough to ensure biodiversity in built environments, a University of Iowa study has found. The researchers surveyed two types of tree in an urban area in Iowa, and recorded the abundance of two insects that interact with them. They found that while there were plenty of the trees, black cherry and black walnut, they didn't find a corresponding abundance of the insects, in this case fruit flies that feed on the walnuts and black cherries and a type of wasp that feeds on the ...

In the war against Ebola one important hurdle has just been cleared – by a mouse. Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues have developed the first genetic strain of mice that can be infected with Ebola and display symptoms similar to those that humans experience. This work, published in the current issue of Science, will significantly improve basic research on Ebola treatments and vaccines, which are desperately needed to curb the worldwide public health and economic toll of the disease. "You can't look for a cure for Ebola ...

CANCER RESEARCH UK scientists have found a drug combination that can trigger the self-destruct process in lung cancer cells - paving the way for new treatments, according to research that will be presented at the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Cancer Conference in Liverpool next week*. When healthy cells are no longer useful they initiate a chain of events culminating in self destruction. But cancer cells swerve away from this suicide path and become immortal. This means that cells grow out of control – causing tumours to form. The Cancer Research UK ...

Tropical Depression Nuri formed on Halloween morning, October 31, and is haunting the waters of the western North Pacific Ocean. NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured a ghostly-white image of the storm. When Suomi NPP flew over Tropical Depression Nuri on Oct. 31 at 3:36 UTC, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite or VIIRS instrument aboard captured an infrared image of the storm. The infrared data shows temperature, an indicated that there were very high thunderstorms with very cold cloud top temperatures surrounding the center of the low level circulation ...

WCS study confirms that endangered musk deer still live in Nuristan Province – some 60 years after last sighting Species targeted by poachers: Musk deer scent glands are more valuable than gold Study appears in the October issue of the journal Oryx NEW YORK (October 31, 2014) – More than 60 years after its last confirmed sighting, a strange deer with vampire-like fangs still persists in the rugged forested slopes of northeast Afghanistan according to a research team led by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which confirmed the species presence during ...

Melbourne researchers have uncovered key steps involved in programmed cell death, offering new targets for the treatment of diseases including lupus, cancers and neurodegenerative diseases. The research teams from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute worked together to discover the three-dimensional structure of a key cell death protein called Bak and reveal the first steps in how it causes cell death. Their studies were published in Molecular Cell and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Programmed cell death, known as apoptosis, occurs naturally when ...

A University of Adelaide-led project has developed a new test that can distinguish between birds that have been vaccinated against the H5N1 strain of avian influenza virus or "bird flu" with those that have been naturally infected. This is a significant step in the fight against this often fatal strain of avian influenza which is widespread in the poultry populations of South East Asia, particularly Indonesia and Vietnam. It causes global concern because of its possible transmission to humans and the threat of a pandemic if it mutates to a form that can be easily passed ...

Thomas Bugnyar and his team have been studying the behavior of approximately 300 wild ravens in the Northern Austrian Alps for years. They observed that ravens slowly build alliances through affiliative interactions such as grooming and playing. However, they also observed that these affiliative interactions were regularly interrupted by a third individual. Although in about 50 % of the cases these interventions were successful and broke up the two affiliating ravens, intervening can be potentially risky when the two affiliating ravens team up and chase away the intervening ...

As potential next-generation therapeutics and research tools, few life sciences technologies hold more promise than genome-editing proteins – molecules that can be programmed to alter specific genes in order to treat or even cure genetic diseases. There's at least one catch though – getting genome-editing proteins into cells, where they need to be to access the genome, is a major challenge, especially in live animals or human patients. Conventionally, researchers have delivered the DNA encoding these genome-editing proteins into cells and then relied on ...

In March 2013, Cyprus agreed to a €17 billion (£13.42 billion) international bailout by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission (EC). The magnitude of the bailout was 100 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and also involved a bank bail in. This is when the borrower's creditors are forced to bear some of the burden by having a portion of their debt written off in order for the bank to have sustainable level of debt. The package of measures was aimed at preventing the country from facing the ...

The imbalanced structure of Twitter, where some users have many followers and the large majority barely has several dozen followers, means that messages from the more influential have much more impact. Less popular users can compensate for this by increasing their activity and their tweets, but the outcome is costly and inefficient. This was confirmed by an analysis of the social network performed by researchers from the Technical University of Madrid. What can Twitter users do to increase their influence? To answer this question, a team of researchers at the Technical ...

Tropical Depression 21E strengthened overnight on Oct. 30 and by Halloween morning, Tropical Storm Vance was haunting the waters of the Eastern Pacific Ocean. In a false-colored infrared image from NASA's Terra satellite on Oct. 31, the strong thunderstorms around the center resemble a pumpkin. Tropical Depression 21E formed on Oct. 30 after struggling for days as a low pressure area. Just a day later it strengthened into a tropical storm and was renamed Vance. NASA's Terra satellite passed over Vance on October 31 at 4:55 UTC (12:55 a.m. EDT) – the witching hour ...

Most modern cryptographic schemes rely on computational complexity for their security. In principle, they can be cracked, but that would take a prohibitively long time, even with enormous computational resources. There is, however, another notion of security — information-theoretic security — which means that even an adversary with unbounded computational power could extract no useful information from an encrypted message. Cryptographic schemes that promise information-theoretical security have been devised, but they're far too complicated to be practical. In ...

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 31, 2014 -- Imagine this scenario: You've been feeling persistently blue lately, so you pull out your phone. Instead of asking Siri to tell you a joke, though, you open an app that records you simply talking about your day. A few hours later, your therapist sends you a message asking if you'd like to meet. A program like this one that analyzes your speech and uses it to gain information about your mental health could soon be feasible, thanks in part to research from the University of Maryland showing that certain vocal features change as patients' ...

WASHINGTON, DC (October 31, 2014) — A new report by Milken Institute School of Public Health (Milken Institute SPH) at the George Washington University examines the challenge of maintaining enriched health care for pregnant women who are enrolled in Covered California and who are also eligible for Medi-Cal, which includes the Comprehensive Perinatal Services Program (CPSP). The CPSP, whose roots are in one of the nation's most successful programs ever developed for low-income pregnant women, makes enriched maternity care available to pregnant women facing elevated ...