Burning all of the world's available fossil-fuel resources would result in the complete melting of the Antarctic ice sheet, a new study to be published in Science Advances shows. The Antarctic ice masses store water equivalent to more than 50 meters of sea-level rise. The new calculations show that Antarctica's long-term contribution to sea-level rise could likely be restricted to a few meters that could still be manageable, if global warming did not exceed 2 degrees. Crossing this threshold, however, would in the long run destabilize both West and East Antarctica - causing ...

A study conducted by biologists at UC San Diego has found that the Africanized honey bee--an aggressive hybrid of the European honey bee--is continuing to expand its range northward since its introduction into Southern California in 1994. The study, published in this week's edition of the journal PLOS ONE, found that more than 60 percent of the foraging honey bees in San Diego County are Africanized and that Africanized bees can now be found as far north as California's delta region. "Our study shows that the large majority of bees one encounters in San Diego County are ...

Scientists have identified an ingeniously elegant brain circuit consisting of just five nerve cells that allows female crickets to automatically identify the chirps of males from the same species through the rhythmic pulses hidden within the mating call. The circuit uses a time delay mechanism to match the gaps between pulses in a species-specific chirp - gaps of just few milliseconds. The circuit delays a pulse by the exact between-pulse gap, so that, if it coincides with the next pulse coming in, the same species signal is confirmed. It's one of the first times ...

Researchers from Lund University in Sweden have shown that well-developed eyes come at a surprising cost to other organ systems. The study involving Mexican cavefish shows that the visual system can require between 5% and 15% of an animal's total energy budget. Researchers have long associated the presence of a well-developed brain with major energy consumption. This means that animals that develop advanced nervous systems require environments where this is possible. There has to be good access to nutrients, and every investment in an organ comes at a cost to some other ...

WASHINGTON (Sept. 11, 2015) - A statement from American College of Cardiology President Kim Allan Williams Sr., M.D., FACC, regarding the National Institutes of Health stopping the SPRINT trial early after demonstrating the positive benefits of lower blood pressure control targets: "About 70 million American adults have high blood pressure and only half of them have their condition under control. The preliminary data demonstrates why the cardiovascular community must continue to aggressively fight a condition that leads to stroke, kidney disease and heart problems for ...

Washington, DC - September 11, 2015 - Periodontitis is a risk factor for heart disease. Now a team of researchers has shown that a periodontal pathogen causes changes in gene expression that boost inflammation and atherosclerosis in aortic smooth muscle cells. The research is published ahead of print in Infection and Immunity, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. The circumstantial evidence that led to this study was ample. The periodontal pathogen, Porphyromonas gingivalis, has also been found in coronary artery plaques of heart attack patients. And in ...

This election year has produced 17 Republican presidential candidates, which on its surface may appear to give the party a competitive advantage. Evolution, however, disagrees. A new study by Michigan State University researcher Arend Hintze and appearing in the current issue of Scientific Reports, says the delicate balance of some, but not too much, competition optimally drives the evolution of decision-making strategies. "Competition has a unique relationship with our decision-making strategies as humans," said Hintze, an assistant professor at MSU. "Modest competition ...

An overview of regulatory solutions worldwide on the use of nanotechnology in food and feed production shows a differing approach: only the EU and Switzerland have nano-specific provisions incorporated in existing legislation, whereas other countries count on non-legally binding guidance and standards for industry. Collaboration among countries across the globe is required to share information and ensure protection for people and the environment, according to a JRC co-authored paper. The paper Regulatory aspects of nanotechnology in the agri/feed/food sector in EU and ...

The list of potential mechanisms that underlie an unusual metal-insulator transition has been narrowed by a team of scientists using a combination of X-ray techniques. This transition has ramifications for material design for electronics and sensors. The transition between being electrically conductive (metallic) at high temperatures and electrically insulating at lower temperatures is known as a metal-insulator transition (MIT). Pinpointing the activation mechanism that allows crystals used in devices such as transistors in electronics and temperature-based sensor control ...

The light that typically floods homes, offices and public buildings could provide something more than illumination. Scientists at Disney Research and ETH Zurich have demonstrated that light could be a medium for light bulbs to communicate - with each other, with objects and with the Internet. Transmitting signals via light is nothing new; Alexander Graham Bell showed that speech could be conveyed with light in the 1880s, years before speech was first transmitted via radio. The Disney researchers, however, have created networking technology that makes it possible for LED ...

KANSAS CITY, MO -- Cellular mitosis depends in part on small organelles that extend spindles to pull apart chromosome pairs. Before they can perform this and other essential tasks, these tiny cylindrical structures -- known as centrioles in animals and spindle pole bodies (SPBs) in yeast -- must themselves duplicate. However, much about this nanoscale process has remained veiled by the limits of current microscopy. Optical approaches cannot resolve objects below certain wavelength limits, while non-optical approaches like electron microscopy (EM) can only study nonliving ...

What if tornado activity could be forecasted months, even seasons in advance? Thanks to a new model developed at the University of Toronto Scarborough, that ability could soon become a reality. "The aim is to predict ahead to the following year or subsequent years about whether we'll get above or below average tornado activity in a given area," says Vincent Cheng, a postdoctoral fellow in UTSC's Ecological Modelling Lab. The model, developed by Cheng, Professor George Arhonditsis and Professor Bill Gough in UTSC's Climate Lab along with colleagues at Environment Canada, ...

Genetic mutations called "escape variants" in the deadly Ebola virus appear to block the ability of antibody-based treatments to ward off infection, according to a team of U.S. Army scientists and collaborators. Their findings, published online this week in the journal Cell Reports, have implications for the continued development of therapeutics to treat Ebola virus disease, which has claimed the lives of over 11,000 people in West Africa since last year. Ebola virus overruns the immune system, thus overwhelming the host's ability to fight off the infection. One strategy ...

PhD candidate Matt Shultz has discovered the first massive binary star, epsilon Lupi, in which both stars have magnetic fields. A binary star is a star system consisting of two or more stars, orbiting around their common centre of mass. For the past few years, the BinaMIcS (Binarity and Magnetic Interactions in various classes of Stars) collaboration, formed to study the magnetic properties of close binaries, has been trying to find such an object. They have now discovered one using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. "The origin of magnetism amongst massive stars is ...

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Sept. 8, 2015) -- A new University of Kentucky study in the journal mBio shows that tissue cysts of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, long thought to be dormant, are quite active. Led by Anthony Sinai, professor at the UK College of Medicine, the study has significant implications on the understanding of chronic toxoplasmosis in the brain, a condition suggested to contribute to a range of neurological diseases including schizophrenia in humans, and the modulation of behavior in rodents. Toxoplasmosis can be acquired from the droppings of infected cats ...

Using metallic osmium (Os) in experimentation, an international group of researchers have demonstrated that ultra-high pressures cause core electrons to interplay, which results in experimentally observed anomalies in the compression behavior of the material. Os is one of Earth's most exceptional elemental materials, possessing the highest known density at ambient pressure, one of the highest cohesive energies and melting temperatures, and an incompressibility that is almost comparable to that of diamond. Researchers believe that the ability to affect core electrons ...

Open source lab equipment is the focus of a new study, published in Science and Public Policy. Joshua Pearce, an associate professor of materials science and engineering as well as electrical and computer engineering at Michigan Tech, led the research. Pearce proposes that instead of spending millions of dollars every year replacing quickly obsolescent equipment, that money could be redirected to developing open source tools that are "upgradeable and transformable--they will be continuously updated" using digital manufacturing techniques such as 3-D printing. The benefits ...

The politics of climate change are often depicted as a simple battle, between environmentalists and particular industries, over government policy. That's not wrong, but it's only a rough sketch of the matter. Now a paper co-authored by MIT economist Christopher Knittel fills in some important details of the picture, revealing an essential mechanism that underlies the politics of the climate battle. Specifically, as Knittel and his colleagues demonstrate, at least one climate policy enacted by Congress -- on transportation fuels -- contains a crucial asymmetry: It imposes ...

The aging process is associated with declines in brain function, including memory and how fast our brain processes information, yet previous research has found that higher levels of cardiorespiratory fitness in older adults leads to better executive function in the brain, which helps with reasoning and problem solving. Higher cardiorespiratory fitness levels have also been found to increase brain volume in key brain regions. A new study from a team at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois reveals the connection between ...

UPTON, NY--In the Daya Bay region of China, about 55 kilometers northeast of Hong Kong, a research project is underway to study ghostlike, elusive particles called neutrinos. Today, the international Daya Bay Collaboration announces new findings on the measurements of neutrinos, paving the way forward for further neutrino research, and confirming that the Daya Bay neutrino experiment continues to be one to watch. The latest findings involve measurements that track the way neutrinos change types or flavors as they move, a characteristic called neutrino oscillation. By ...

VIB and UGent scientists have developed a new method which allows them to predict the final size of a plant while it is still a seedling. Thanks to this method, which is based on the knowledge that a set of genes is associated with the final size of a leaf, scientists will be able to significantly accelerate plant breeding programs. The VIB/UGent scientists were able to identify this set of genes through advanced and highly detailed analyses. Expression analysis of specific genes will help breeders select the most useful crossing products at a very early stage. Smart ...

Tyrosine kinase 2 (Tyk2) is an enzyme involved in intracellular signalling and has an important role in activating the immune system. But enzymatically active Tyk2 can also promote excessive immune reactions and growth of certain cancer types. Since several years, scientists are developing substances to specifically inhibit the kinase activity of Tyk2 for the treatment of inflammatory diseases and for potential use in cancer therapy. However, complications may occur: Tyk2 crucially contributes to the maturation and activation of natural killer (NK) cells. NK cells form ...

After being diagnosed with a chest wall sarcoma, a 54-year-old Spanish man's surgical team made the decision to remove his sternum and a portion of his rib cage and replace it with an implant. The implant was designed and manufactured by medical device company, Anatomics, who utilised the CSIRO's 3D printing facility, Lab 22 in Melbourne, Australia. The surgical team, Dr José Aranda, Dr Marcelo Jimene and Dr Gonzalo Varela from Salamanca University Hospital, knew the surgery would be difficult due to the complicated geometries involved in the chest cavity. The ...

An approach to converting the data from MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machines, mammograms and other medical equipment gives doctors a much clearer picture of your insides and a chance to detect disease and other problems earlier, according to research published in the International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology. The technique known as the wavelet transform was first reported in 1910, but it was during the early 1990s that its applications in medicine and biomedical research first emerged and it is now reaching maturity as a technique to supplement ...

Arterial wall stiffness and reduced arterial dilation are the first signs of cardiovascular diseases that can be measured. The Physical Activity and Nutrition in Children Study (PANIC) carried out in the Institute of Biomedicine at the University of Eastern Finland shows that low levels of physical activity, weaker physical fitness and higher body fat content are linked to arterial stiffness already in 6-8 year-old children. The study sample included 160 children, and the findings were published in Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports. Physically active ...