The Antarctic ice sheet is a giant water reservoir. The ice cap on the southern continent is on average 2,100 meters thick and contains about 70 percent of the world's fresh water. If this ice mass were to melt completely, it could raise the global sea level by 60 meters. Therefore scientists carefully observe changes in the Antarctic. In the renowned international journal Science, researchers from Germany, the UK, the US and Japan are now publishing data according to which water temperatures, in particular on the shallow shelf seas of West Antarctica, are rising. "There ...

In a new study, published in Science, researchers at Uppsala University demonstrate an association between smoking and loss of the Y chromosome in blood cells. The researchers have previously shown that loss of the Y chromosome is linked to cancer. Since only men have the Y chromosome, these results might explain why smoking is a greater risk factor for cancer among men and, in the broader perspective, also why men in general have a shorter life expectancy. Smoking is a risk factor for various diseases, not only lung cancer. Epidemiological data show that male smokers ...

Cholera is caused when the bacterium Vibrio cholerae infects the small intestine, resulting in severe diarrhea and vomiting, which can result in dehydration and death. The main treatment involves oral rehydration therapy, where the patient drinks water mixed with salts and glucose. But although proven to be enormously effective, there are concerns that the glucose content might actually worsen the disease. EPFL scientists have now shown that this is indeed the case, as glucose increases the toxicity of the cholera bacterium, whereas replacing glucose with starch can reduce ...

A public summer jobs program for high school students from disadvantaged neighborhoods in Chicago reduced violent crime arrests by 43 percent over a 16-month period, according to a new study from the University of Chicago Crime Lab and the University of Pennsylvania. The randomized controlled trial is published in the journal Science. This research comes as youth employment in the summer months, when teenagers are most likely to work, is near a 60-year low. The challenges facing minority and low-income youth are particularly stark; the 2010 employment rate for low-income ...

Magnetite (or Fe3O4) is an elaborate kind of rust - a regular lattice of oxygen and iron atoms. But this material plays an increasingly important role as a catalyst, in electronic devices and in medical applications. Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology have now shown that the atomic structure of the magnetite surface, which everybody had assumed to be well-established, has in fact been wrong all along. The properties of magnetite are governed by missing iron atoms in the sub-surface layer. "It turns out that the surface of Fe3O4 is not Fe3O4 at all, but ...

Highly expressed in the testis, a gene named Ranbp9 has been found to play a critical role in male fertility by controlling the correct expression of thousands of genes required for successful sperm production. A group of researchers led by Professor Wei Yan, at the University of Nevada School of Medicine has discovered that a loss of function of Ranbp9 leads to severely reduced male fertility due to disruptions in sperm development. A paper reporting this finding was published in PLOS Genetics on December 4, 2014. Male infertility affects 1 out of 20 men of reproductive ...

A genetic variant which causes smokers to smoke more heavily has been shown to be associated with increased body mass index (BMI) - but only in those who have never smoked, according to new research led by the University of Bristol, UK and published today in PLOS Genetics. It is likely that this finding has not come to light before because it has been masked by the effect of smoking, which acts to reduce BMI. Professor Marcus Munafo from Bristol's School of Experimental Psychology and colleagues studied a variant in the CHRNA5-A3-B4 gene cluster which is known to increase ...

Researchers from the Medical Research Council Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit (MRC LEU), University of Southampton have shed new light on how grip strength changes across the lifespan. Previous work has shown that people with weaker grip strength in midlife and early old age are more likely to develop problems, such as loss of independence and to have shorter life expectancy. However, there is little information on what might be considered a normal grip strength at different ages. This latest research, which combined information from 12 British studies and is published in ...

An international team, including scientists from DESY, has caught a light sensitive biomolecule at work with an X-ray laser. The study proves that X-ray lasers can capture the fast dynamics of biomolecules in ultra slow-motion, as the scientists led by Prof. Marius Schmidt from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee write in the journal Science. "Our study paves the way for movies from the nano world with atomic spatial resolution and ultrafast temporal resolution", says Schmidt. The researchers used the photoactive yellow protein (PYP) as a model system. PYP is a receptor ...

The temperature of the seawater around Antarctica is rising according to new research from the University of East Anglia. New research published today in the journal Science shows how shallow shelf seas of West Antarctica have warmed over the last 50 years. The international research team say that this has accelerated the melting and sliding of glaciers in the area, and that there is no indication that this trend will reverse. It also reveals that other Antarctic areas, which have not yet started to melt, could experience melting for the first time with consequences ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Scientists may have solved a long-standing enigma known as the African Humid Period - an intense increase in cumulative rainfall in parts of Africa that began after a long dry spell following the end of the last ice age and lasting nearly 10,000 years. In a new study published this week in Science, an international research team linked the increase in rainfall in two regions of Africa thousands of years ago to an increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. The ...

A long-held assumption about the Earth is discussed in today's edition of Science, as Don L. Anderson, an emeritus professor with the Seismological Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology, and Scott King, a professor of geophysics in the College of Science at Virginia Tech, look at how a layer beneath the Earth's crust may be responsible for volcanic eruptions. The discovery challenges conventional thought that volcanoes are caused when plates that make up the planet's crust shift and release heat. Instead of coming from deep within the interior of the ...

VIDEO: Vanderbilt biologist Kenneth Catania describes his discovery that the electroshock system used by the electric eel to detect and immobilize prey is uncannily similar to the Taser. Click here for more information. The electric eel - the scaleless Amazonian fish that can deliver an electrical jolt strong enough to knock down a full-grown horse - possesses an electroshock system uncannily similar to a Taser. That is the conclusion of a nine-month study of the way in which ...

The "survival of the fittest" principle applies to cells in a tissue - rapidly growing and dividing cells are the fit ones. A relatively less fit cell, even if healthy and viable, will be eliminated by its more fit neighbors. Importantly, this selection mechanism is only activated when cells with varying levels of fitness are present in the same tissue. If a tissue only consists of less fit cells, then no so-called cell competition occurs. Molecular biologists from the University of Zurich and Columbia University are the first researchers to demonstrate in a study published ...

Since 2010, detections of Asian Carp environmental DNA or "eDNA" have warned scientists, policymakers, and the public that these high-flying invaders are knocking on the Great Lakes' door. Scientists capture tiny DNA-containing bits from water and use genetic analysis to determine if any Asian Carp DNA is present. New research published by Notre Dame scientists shows that the tools currently used for Asian Carp eDNA monitoring often fail to detect the fish. By comparison, the new eDNA methods described in this study capture and detect Asian Carp eDNA more effectively. The ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Among the billions and billions of stars in the sky, where should astronomers look for infant Earths where life might develop? New research from Cornell University's Institute for Pale Blue Dots shows where - and when - infant Earths are most likely to be found. The paper by research associate Ramses M. Ramirez and director Lisa Kaltenegger, "The Habitable Zones of Pre-Main-Sequence Stars" will be published in the Jan. 1, 2015, issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. Images and study: https://cornell.box.com/infantearths "The search for new, habitable ...

For nearly 40 years, one of the cornerstones of the study of adaptation has been the examination of "whole-organism performance capacities"--essentially, measures of the dynamic things animals do: how fast they can run; how hard they can bite; how far, fast, and high they can jump; and so on. Together, these functional attributes determine the performance of a species' ecology: the types of food one can eat; the ability to capture or locate prey; the ability to avoid predation; the ability of males to intimidate or, in some cases, prevent rival males from invading a territory; ...

Insects can transmit viral diseases to humans. Therefore, understanding how insects cope with viral infection, and what immune mechanisms are triggered, can be important to stop diseases transmission. In a study published in this week's issue of the scientific journal PLOS Pathogens*, researchers from the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia (IGC; Portugal) now show that the entry route of the virus changes how the insect host responds to it. Using the fruit flies as a model of study, they discovered an immune mechanism that is specifically effective when flies are infected ...

BOULDER - New research demonstrates for the first time that an increase in greenhouse gas concentrations thousands of years ago was a key factor in causing substantially more rainfall in two major regions of Africa. The finding provides new evidence that the current increase in greenhouse gases will have an important impact on Africa's future climate. The study, led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), is being published this week in Science. "The future impact of greenhouse gases on rainfall in Africa is a critical socioeconomic issue," said NCAR ...

WASHINGTON - Children in emergency departments can safely be treated for pain from limb injuries using intranasal ketamine, a drug more typically used for sedation, according to the results of the first randomized, controlled trial comparing intranasal analgesics in children in the emergency department. The study was published online last month in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("The PICHFORK (Pain in Children Fentanyl OR Ketamine) Trial: A Randomized Controlled Trial Comparing Intranasal Ketamine and Fentanyl for the Relief of Moderate to Severe Pain in Children with Limb ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Micheal L. Dent, a University at Buffalo psychologist, listens to what is inaudible to others. And what she's hearing might one day help us better understand human hearing loss. Dent studies ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) in mice. These sounds are above the human ear's upper limit, but they can be recorded and played back using specialized equipment that has allowed Dent to capture an impressive repertoire that when graphically represented shows a variety of sweeps, arcs, dips and curves. The tempo and intensity of these vocalizations change, as does ...

TORONTO, Dec. 4, 2014 - Results from an ongoing survey conducted by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) show that 2.2 per cent of adults --or over 230,000 people in Ontario, Canada -- seriously contemplated suicide in the last year. The 2013 edition of the CAMH Monitor, released today, included questions about suicidal ideation for the first time in the survey's history. "Suicide is a major public health issue, and these data confirm that large numbers of Ontario adults report having suicidal thoughts," said Dr. Hayley Hamilton, CAMH scientist and co-principal ...

AMHERST, Mass. - A new study led by biologist R. Thomas Zoeller of the University of Massachusetts Amherst provides "the strongest evidence to date" that endocrine disrupting chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) found in flame retardant cloth, paint, adhesives and electrical transformers, can interfere with thyroid hormone action in pregnant women and may travel across the placenta to affect the fetus. Results appeared in an early online edition and in the December print edition of the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. ...

BELLINGHAM, Washington, USA -- Those formerly silent walls can "talk" now: Researchers have demonstrated a simple optical technique by which audio information can be extracted from high-speed video recordings. The method uses an image-matching process based on vibration from sound waves, and is reported in an article appearing in the November issue of the journal Optical Engineering, published by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. "One of the intriguing aspects of the paper is the ability to recover spoken words from a video of objects in the room," ...

In what is believed to be the first interview-style qualitative study of its kind among health care providers in the trenches, a team led by a Johns Hopkins geriatrician has further documented barriers to better care of older adults as they are transferred from hospital to rehabilitation center to home, and too often back again. Using comments and concerns drawn from in-depth interviews of 18 physicians and two home health care agency administrators -- all experienced in trying to coordinate care of older adults -- the researchers created a framework for evaluating what ...