This news release is available in Japanese. Ecological communities around the world are richly varied, but a new study finds that many of these diverse communities follow an unexpected, yet consistent pattern: where prey are abundant, there are not proportionally more predators. Instead, as prey biomass increases, the ratio of predator-to-prey biomass decreases. This pattern was systematically identified across different areas, including grasslands, forests, lakes, and oceans, revealing an underlying structural organization of ecosystems. Pinpointing underlying ...

This news release is available in Japanese. Researchers have identified a mutation in plants that allows them to break down TNT, an explosive that has become highly prevalent in soil in the last century, particularly at manufacturing waste sites, mines, and military conflict zones. TNT, or 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene, is a toxic and persistent environmental pollutant that accumulates in the roots of plants, inhibiting growth and development. The identification of a plant mechanism that not only evades the negative impacts of TNT, but breaks down this harmful substance could ...

This news release is available in Japanese. A special news edition, Science in Iran, looks closely at the scientific challenges and triumphs of a country that has faced international isolation in recent years. Following an exclusive interview about the Iran nuclear deal with Ali Akbar Salehi, president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Science International News Editor Richard Stone delves further into the state of Iran's scientific endeavors. Decades of economic sanctions have deprived Iranian scientists of critical scientific resources and collaboration. ...

Biologists at the University of York have taken an important step in making it possible to clean millions of hectares of land contaminated by explosives. A team from the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products (CNAP) in the University's Department of Biology has unravelled the mechanism of TNT toxicity in plants raising the possibility of a new approach to explosives remediation technology. TNT has become an extensive global pollutant over the last 100 years and there are mounting concerns over its toxicity to biological systems. The study, which is published in Science, ...

Researchers at VIB (a leading life sciences institute in Flanders, Belgium) and Ghent University have successfully established a causal relationship between exposure to so-called farm dust and protection against asthma and allergies. This breakthrough discovery is a major step forward towards the development of an asthma vaccine. The results of the research were published in the leading journal Science. It is commonly known that drinking raw cow's milk can provide protection against allergies. A 14-member research team, led by professors Bart Lambrecht and Hamida Hammad ...

Evidence from a new study published in PLOS Computational Biology by researchers from Brown University and led by Assistant Professor Thomas Serre suggests that when we analyze scenery we simply make the easiest judgments first, rather than following a priority order of categories. There are many ways we understand scenery. Is it navigable or obstructed? Natural or man-made? A face or not a face? In previous experiments, researchers have found that some categorization tasks seem special, in that they occur earlier than others, leading to a hypothesis that the brain has ...

Rodents huddle together when it is cold, they separate when it is warm, and at moderate temperatures they cycle between the warm center and the cold edges of the group. In a new study published in PLOS Computational Biology, Jonathan Glancy, Roderich Gross, Jim Stone and Stuart Wilson from the University of Sheffield found they could simulate huddling by assuming simply that touching individuals in turn brings their temperatures closer to an ideal body temperature. According to the model, these selfish individual behaviours improved the ability of the whole group to regulate ...

Why aren't there more lions? That was what puzzled McGill PhD student Ian Hatton, when he started looking at the proportion of predators to prey across dozens of parks in East and Southern Africa. In this case, the answer had nothing to do with isolated human hunters. The parks were teeming with potentially tasty treats for the lions. So one might imagine that the population of lions in each park would increase to match the available prey. Instead, what Hatton and the McGill-led team discovered was that, in a very systematic way, in crowded settings, prey reproduced less ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (September 3, 2015) - A protein known to play a role in transporting the molecular contents of normal cells into and out of various intracellular compartments can also turn such cells cancerous by stimulating a key growth-control pathway. By conducting a large-scale search for regulators of the signaling pathway known as PI3K/AKT, which promotes cell survival, growth, and proliferation--and which is highly active in cancer cells--researchers at Whitehead Institute and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center have implicated the protein RAB35 in the oncogenic ...

For millions of years, the Pacific and North American plates have been sliding past -- and crashing into -- one another. This ongoing conflict creates uplift, the geological phenomenon that formed mountains along the west coast. A new analysis by UC Santa Barbara earth scientist Alex Simms demonstrates that the Pacific coastlines of North America are not uplifting as rapidly as previously thought. The results appear in the journal Geological Society of America Bulletin. "Current models overestimate uplift rates by an average of 40 percent," said Simms, an associate ...

Hurricane Jimena, a once powerful Category 4 storm with maximum sustained winds estimated at 140 mph by the National Hurricane Center, has continued to weaken well east of Hawaii. The Global Precipitation Measurement or GPM core satellite analyzed rainfall rates and saw the eyewall was eroding. The eyewall of a hurricane contains a storm's most damaging winds and intense rainfall. It consists of a vertical wall of powerful thunderstorms circling a hurricane's open eye. GPM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japanese space agency JAXA. GPM captured data on Jimena ...

The world is facing an extinction crisis as more and more forests are converted into farmland. But does it help when farms share the land with birds and other animals? The short answer is "no," according to new evidence based on the diversity of bird species reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on September 3. If the goal is to preserve more bird species, representing a greater span of evolutionary history, then it's better to farm more intensively in some areas while leaving more blocks of land entirely alone. In other words, land-sparing wins out over ...

High levels of saturated fat in the blood could make an individual more prone to inflammation and tissue damage, a new study suggests. Received wisdom on the health risks of eating saturated fat has been called into question recently. This new research supports the view that excessive consumption of saturated fat can be bad for us. Scientists from Imperial College London studied mice that have an unusually high level of saturated fat circulating in their blood. The research, published today (3 September 2015) in Cell Reports shows that the presence of saturated fats ...

Giving cancer patients aspirin at the same time as immunotherapy could dramatically boost the effectiveness of the treatment, according to new research published in the journal Cell today (Thursday). Francis Crick Institute researchers, funded by Cancer Research UK, have shown that skin, breast and bowel cancer cells often produce large amounts of prostaglandin E2 (PGE2). This molecule dampens down the immune system's normal response to attack faulty cells, which helps cancer to hide. It is a trick that allows the tumour to thrive and may explain why some immunotherapy ...

LAWRENCE - Men might want to ditch the pickup lines and polish their punchlines in their quest to attract women, new research at the University of Kansas suggests. Jeffrey Hall, associate professor of communication studies, found that when two strangers meet, the more times a man tries to be funny and the more a woman laughs at those attempts, the more likely it is for the woman to be interested in dating. However, an even better indicator of romantic connection is if the two are spotted laughing together. Those findings were among the discoveries Hall made in his search ...

Coral Gables, Fla. (September 1, 2015) - Cognitive flexibility is the ability to shift our thoughts and adapt our behavior to the changing environment. In other words, it's one's ability to disengage from a previous task and respond effectively to a new one. It's a faculty that most of us take for granted, yet an essential skill to navigate life. In a new paper published in the journal Trends in Neurosciences, University of Miami (UM) College of Arts & Sciences researchers clarify many of the concepts surrounding cognitive flexibility and propose a model of its underlying ...

Researchers involved in an international collaboration across six institutions, including the University of Copenhagen and the National Aquarium of Denmark (Den Blå Planet), have successfully identified the exact composition of sea snake venom, which makes the future development of synthetic antivenoms more realistic. Currently, sea snake anitvenom costs nearly USD 2000, yet these new findings could result in a future production of synthetic antivenoms for as little as USD 10-100. Venomous snakebites represent a major health concern in many tropical and subtropical ...

Sea level rise poses one of the biggest threats to human systems in a globally warming world, potentially causing trillions of dollars' worth of damages to flooded cities around the world. As surface temperatures rise, ice sheets are melting at record rates and sea levels are rising. But there may be some good news amid the worry. Sea levels may not rise as high as assumed. To predict sea level changes, scientists look to Earth's distant past, when climate conditions were similar to today, and investigate how the planet's ice sheets responded then to warmer temperatures ...

High blood sugar is a defining characteristic of Type 2 diabetes and the cause of many of the condition's complications, including kidney failure, heart disease, and blindness. Most diabetes medications aim to maintain normal blood sugar (glucose) levels and prevent high blood sugar by controlling insulin. A new University of Iowa study shows that another biological checkpoint, known as the Mitochondrial Pyruvate Carrier (MPC), is critical for controlling glucose production in the liver and could potentially be a new target for drugs to treat diabetes. The study, led ...

LAWRENCE -- Researchers at the University of Kansas working with an international team at the Large Hadron Collider have produced quark-gluon plasma -- a state of matter thought to have existed right at the birth of the universe -- with fewer particles than previously thought possible. The material was discovered by colliding protons with lead nuclei at high energy inside the supercollider's Compact Muon Solenoid detector. Physicists have dubbed the resulting plasma the "littlest liquid." "Before the CMS experimental results, it had been thought the medium created in ...

DARIEN, IL - A new study shows that high school students lose sleep on school nights following the change to daylight saving time that occurs in March. The loss of sleep during the school week was associated with a decline in vigilance and cognitive function, which raises safety concerns for teen drivers. Results show that the average objectively measured sleep duration on the weeknights after the spring time change declined to 7 hours, 19 minutes, which reflects a mean loss of 32 minutes per night compared with the school week prior to the implementation of daylight ...

MADISON, Wis. - Orchids, a fantastically complicated and diverse group of flowering plants, have long blended the exotic with the beautiful. Most species live on trees, often in remote, tropical mountains. Their flowers can be strange -- one even flowers underground, and many species deceive their pollinators into thinking they are good to eat. Some are florist's staples, like phalaenopsis, the hot-pink and white flower that is easy to grow and easier to sell. Beyond the "job" of looking beautiful, only the vanilla orchids have any commercial role. The estimated ...

Repeated exposure to anesthesia early in life causes alterations in emotional behavior that may persist long-term, according to a study from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in collaboration with the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, and published in the Online First edition of Anesthesiology, the official medical journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists®. Each year, approximately one million children under the age of four undergo surgery with general anesthesia, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Retrospective ...

A study that used stored blood samples from U.S. Air Force personnel who conducted aerial herbicide spray missions of Agent Orange during the Vietnam war found a more than 2-fold increased risk of the precursor to multiple myeloma known as monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS), according to an article published online by JAMA Oncology. While the cause of MGUS and multiple myeloma (plasma cell cancer) remains largely unclear, studies have reported an elevated risk of multiple myeloma among farmers and other agricultural workers and pesticides have ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The technology behind 3-D printing is growing more and more common, but the ability to create designs for it is not. Any but the simplest designs require expertise with computer-aided design (CAD) applications, and even for the experts, the design process is immensely time consuming. Researchers at MIT and the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel aim to change that, with a new system that automatically turns CAD files into visual models that users can modify in real time, simply by moving virtual sliders on a Web page. Once the design meets ...