A new study suggests that increases in atmospheric CO2 could intensify extreme droughts in tropical and subtropical regions -- such as Australia, the southwest and central United States, and southern Amazonia -- at much a faster rate than previously anticipated, explains University of Texas at Austin professor Rong Fu in a commentary in the March 9 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Fu, a professor at the university's Jackson School of Geosciences, writes about a new study by William K.M. Lau of the University of Maryland and Kyu-Myong Kim of the ...

Once green, the Sahara expanded 5,500 years ago, leading ancient herders to follow the rain and grasslands south to eastern Africa. But about 2,000 years ago, their southward migration stalled out, stopped in its tracks, archaeologists presumed, by tsetse-infested bush and disease. As the theory goes, the tiny tsetse fly altered the course of history, stopping the spread of domesticated animal herding with a bite that carries sleeping sickness and nagana, diseases often fatal for the herder and the herded. Now, isotopic research on animal remains from a nearly 2,000-year-old ...

Despite extensive historical knowledge about the African slave trade - including trends in the volume and demographics of the roughly 12 million people shipped from West and West Central Africa to the New World between 1500 and 1850 - fundamental details about their ethnic and geographical origins remain elusive. Dr. Hannes Schroeder from the Centre for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum, University of Copenhagen, who led the study, explains: - There are historical records - merchant ledgers, shipping records and the like - but they tend to refer to coastal shipping ...

In the ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa, whose death toll is approaching 10,000, little information has been available about how the human immune response unfolds after infection. Researchers from Emory and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have now obtained a first look at the immune responses in four Ebola virus disease survivors who received care at Emory University Hospital in 2014, by closely examining their T cells and B cells during the acute phase of the disease. The findings reveal surprisingly high levels of immune activation, and have implications ...

March 9, 2015 PITTSBURGH--To fully understand how nanomaterials behave, one must also understand the atomic-scale deformation mechanisms that determine their structure and, therefore, their strength and function. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, Drexel University, and Georgia Tech have engineered a new way to observe and study these mechanisms and, in doing so, have revealed an interesting phenomenon in a well-known material, tungsten. The group is the first to observe atomic-level deformation twinning in body-centered cubic (BCC) tungsten nanocrystals. ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Children whose parents think they're God's gift to the world do tend to outshine their peers - in narcissism. In a study that aimed to find the origins of narcissism, researchers surveyed parents and their children four times over one-and-a-half years to see if they could identify which factors led children to have inflated views of themselves. Results showed that parents who "overvalued" their children when the study began ended up with children who scored higher on tests of narcissism later on. Overvalued children were described by their parents ...

A new study of Tourette syndrome (TS) led by researchers from UC San Francisco and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has found that nearly 86 percent of patients who seek treatment for TS will be diagnosed with a second psychiatric disorder during their lifetimes, and that nearly 58 percent will receive two or more such diagnoses. It has long been known that TS, which emerges in childhood and is characterized by troublesome motor and vocal tics, is often accompanied by other disorders, especially attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and obsessive-compulsive ...

If advanced biofuels are to replace gasoline, diesel and jet fuel on a gallon-for-gallon basis at competitive pricing, we're going to need a new generation of fuel crops - plants designed specifically to serve as feedstocks for fuels. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have demonstrated the power of a new ally in this effort - proteomics! In a study led by Benjamin Schwessinger, a grass geneticist with JBEI's Feedstocks Division, researchers used advanced proteomic techniques to identify 1,750 unique proteins in shoots ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- The discovery of the "exercise hormone" irisin three years ago and more than 170 related papers about it since have been called into question by recent research showing they were based on flawed testing kits. Previous studies suggested that the hormone irisin -- named for the Greek messenger goddess Iris -- travels from muscle to fat tissue after exercise to tell fat cells to start burning energy instead of storing it. The finding ignited hope and press coverage that irisin could hold the key to fighting diabetes and obesity, perhaps one day taking the ...

In a study that helps to deconstruct how olfaction is encoded in the brain, neuroscientists at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified a type of neuron that appears to help tune, amplify and dampen neuronal responses to chemosensory inputs from the nasal cavity. The study, published March 9 in Nature Neuroscience, has applications to understanding the root cause of epileptic seizures, which are frequently centered in the olfactory cortex, the part of the brain that processes the sense of smell. "Our sense of smell is complex and involves ...

A new class of drugs identified and validated by Mayo Clinic researchers along with collaborators at Scripps Research Institute and others, clearly reduces health problems in mice by limiting the effect of senescent cells -- cells that contribute to frailty and diseases associated with age. The researchers say this is a first step toward developing similar treatments for aging patients. Their findings appear today in the journal Aging Cell. "If translatable to humans -- which makes sense as we were using human cells in many of the tests - this type of therapy could keep ...

Irvine, Calif., March 9, 2015 -- Long the stuff of science fiction, the disembodied "brain in a jar" is providing science fact for UC Irvine researchers, who by studying the whole brains of fruit flies are discovering the inner mechanisms of jet lag. To do this, Todd C. Holmes, professor of physiology & biophysics in the UCI School of Medicine, and colleagues used imaging technology to make movies of fruit fly brains kept alive for six days in a petri dish. The scientists captured the activity of individual circadian clocks at single-cell resolution with an extremely ...

More than two years after Washington legalized marijuana, parents and teens may be hazy on the specifics of the law, if the findings of a new study are any indication. University of Washington research, published recently in Substance Use & Misuse, found that only 57 percent of Washington parents surveyed knew the legal age for recreational marijuana use and just 63 percent knew that homegrown marijuana is illegal under the law. And while 71 percent of 10th-graders correctly identified the legal age, fewer than half (49 percent) knew how much marijuana can legally ...

MISSOULA - Researchers at the University of Montana, Princeton University, Stanford University and Rutgers University, among others, are collecting new measurements of tropical forests to gain a better understanding of how they respond to seasonal climate variations. The new information helps predict how the global tropics may react to future climate change. These findings are detailed in a paper titled "Photosynthetic seasonality of global tropical forests constrained by hydroclimate," which was published in Nature Geoscience this month. "A better understanding ...

The relationship between human disease and environmental management has been the subject of extensive research, especially given the recent outbreaks of Ebola, SARS and other zoonotic infectious diseases that transmit from animals to humans. The fieldwork of UC Santa Barbara community ecologist Hillary Young is a good example of researchers' continuing effort to understand exactly how environmental management affects disease emergence. In East Africa, Young examines the direct impacts of human disturbance on landscape and wildlife, as well as a variety of factors affecting ...

Tropical Cyclone Haliba formed east of the island nation of Madagascar in the Southern Indian Ocean and is now affecting the La Reunion and Mauritius islands. NASA's Terra satellite passed over Haliba on March 9 and captured an image of the storm that showed the eastern quadrant was affecting the two smaller islands. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Cyclone Haliba on March 9 at 06:35 UTC (2:35 a.m. EDT). The image showed both La Reunion and Mauritius islands were covered ...

Although many people value receiving information about incidental findings identified from genomic sequencing, not everyone wants to know about genetic conditions regardless of potential health implications, found a study of Canadian preferences in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). An incidental finding refers to discovery of a genetic condition that may cause a disease, but the finding is unrelated to why genomic testing was initially ordered by the physician. For example, a test to determine if there is a genetic cause of a patient's colon cancer may find ...

In a screen of more than 100,000 potential drugs, only one, harmine, drove human insulin-producing beta cells to multiply, according to a study led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, funded by JDRF and the National Institutes of Health, and published online today in Nature Medicine. Diabetes results from too few insulin-producing "beta cells" in the pancreas secreting too little insulin, the hormone required to keep blood sugar levels in the normal range. The disease affects 380 million people worldwide, and leads to major medical complications: ...

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- An analysis of changes to the climate that occur over several decades suggests that these changes are happening faster than historical levels and are starting to speed up. The Earth is now entering a period of changing climate that will likely be faster than what's occurred naturally over the last thousand years, according to a new paper in Nature Climate Change, committing people to live through and adapt to a warming world. In this study, interdisciplinary scientist Steve Smith and colleagues at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National ...

Activity in a brain area known as the dorsal posterior insula is directly related to the intensity of pain, a brain imaging study of 17 people has found. Researchers at the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain used a new brain imaging technique to look at people experiencing pain over many hours. Activity in only one brain area, the dorsal posterior insula, reflected the participants' ratings of how much the pain hurt. These results, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, could help detect pain in people with limited communication ...

Scientists have discovered another 15 genetic 'hot-spots' that can increase a woman's risk of developing breast cancer, according to research published today (Monday) in Nature Genetics. In a study funded by Cancer Research UK*, scientists compared tiny variations in the genetic make-up of more than 120,000 women of European ancestry, with and without breast cancer, and identified 15 new variations - called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) - that are linked to a higher risk of the disease. This new discovery means that a total of more than 90 SNPs associated with ...

Kansas City, MO. -- All the cells in an organism carry the same instruction manual, the DNA, but different cells read and express different portions of it in order fulfill specific functions in the body. For example, nerve cells express genes that help them send messages to other nerve cells, whereas immune cells express genes that help them make antibodies. In large part, this highly regulated process of gene expression is what makes us fully functioning, complex beings, rather than a blob of like-minded cells. Despite its importance, researchers still do not completely ...

PHILADELPHIA--Treating metastatic melanoma with a triple threat--including radiation therapy and two immunotherapies that target the CTLA4 and PD-1 pathways--could elicit an optimal response in more patients, one that will boost the immune system's attack on the disease, suggests a new study from a multidisciplinary team of researchers from Penn's Abramson Cancer Center published today in Nature. The study, led by senior authors Andy J. Minn, MD, PhD, assistant professor of Radiation Oncology, Robert Vonderheide, MD, DPhil, the Hanna Wise Professor in Cancer Research, ...

A collaborative effort between investigators at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University School of Medicine and Georgia Institute of Technology has led to the development of a non-invasive method to image simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) replication in real-time, in vivo. This approach, which is reported today in Nature Methods' Advance Online Publication, is based on immune positron-emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) and allows for the capture of viral dynamics of SIV, the animal model of human HIV infection. This novel approach ...

A new study of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), a blood cancer that primarily affects young children, has revealed that the disease has two distinct subtypes, and provides preliminary evidence that about 13 percent of ALL cases may be successfully treated with targeted drugs that have proved highly effective in the treatment of lymphomas in adults. Usually emerging in children between 2 and 5 years of age, ALL occurs when the proliferation of white blood cells known as lymphocytes spirals out of control. The current standard of care for ALL employs high doses of chemotherapy ...