MADISON, Wis. -- The crucial genetic mashup that spawned the yeast that brews the vast majority of beer occurred at least twice -- and both times without human help -- according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison study published Aug. 11 in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. Lager yeast, a hybrid that thrives in cold temperatures, is used in lager beer production, which accounts for about 94 percent of the world's beer. And while 15th century Bavarian monks invented lager beer, they probably did not deliberately cause the hybridizations detailed by a team ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., August 13, 2015--A team of researchers has discovered a Jupiter-like planet within a young system that could provide a new understanding of how planets formed around our sun. The new planet, called 51 Eridani b, is the first exoplanet discovered by the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), a new instrument operated by an international collaboration headed by Bruce Macintosh, a professor of physics in the Kavli Institute at Stanford University. It is a million times fainter than its star and shows the strongest methane signature ever detected on an alien planet, ...

WASHINGTON - Violent video game play is linked to increased aggression in players but insufficient evidence exists about whether the link extends to criminal violence or delinquency, according to a new American Psychological Association task force report. "The research demonstrates a consistent relation between violent video game use and increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive cognitions and aggressive affect, and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy and sensitivity to aggression," says the report of the APA Task Force on Violent Media. The task force's review ...

Recent Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigations into the neurobiology underlying the effects of general anesthesia have begun to reveal the ways different anesthetic agents alter specific aspects of the brain's electrical signals, reflected by EEG (electroencephalogram) signatures. While those studies have provided information that may lead to improved techniques for monitoring the consciousness of patients receiving general anesthesia, until now they have been conducted in relatively young adult patients. Now a series of papers from MGH researchers is detailing ...

You've heard that romance starts in the kitchen and not in the bedroom. Well, researchers at Drexel University finally have the science to support that saying - but not the way you might think. In a new study published online in the journal Appetite, researchers found that women's brains respond more to romantic cues on a full stomach than an empty one. The study explored brain circuitry in hungry versus satiated states among women who were past-dieters and those who had never dieted. The study's first author Alice Ely, PhD, completed the research while pursuing a ...

For the first time, Lawrence Livermore scientists as part of an international team, have discovered the most Jupiter-like planet ever seen in a young star system, lending clues to understanding how planets formed around our sun. Using a new advanced adaptive optics (AO) device on the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) on the Gemini South Telescope in Chile, the team took an image of the planet, which is about twice the size of Jupiter. Called 51 Eridani b, the planet is the first in a wave of discoveries by a new generation of planet-hunting instruments, and could help scientists ...

Scientists at The Field Museum have identified a new species of pre-mammal in what is now Zambia. Thanks to a unique groove on the animal's upper jaw, it was dubbed Ichibengops (Itchy-BEN-gops), which combines the local Bemba word for scar (ichibenga), and the common Greek suffix for face (ops). Put simply: Scarface. Believed to be roughly the size of a dachshund, Ichibengops lived around 255 million years ago, and was a member of Therocephalia, a group of ancient mammal relatives that survived the largest mass extinction in history (the Permian-Triassic extinction). ...

Scientists have been fascinated by a series of unusual exploding stars -- outcasts beyond the typical cozy confines of their galaxies. A new analysis of 13 supernovae -- including archived data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope -- is helping astronomers explain how some young stars exploded sooner than expected, hurling them to a lonely place far from their host galaxies. It's a complicated mystery of double-star systems, merging galaxies, and twin black holes that began in 2000 when the first such supernova was discovered, according to study leader Ryan Foley, University ...

New research from North Carolina State University and Reed College shows that when fruit flies are attacked by parasites or bacteria they respond by producing offspring with greater genetic variability. This extra genetic variability may give the offspring an increased chance of survival when faced with the same pathogens. These findings demonstrate that parents may purposefully alter the genotypes of their offspring. Fruit flies' reproductive cells are usually haploid, meaning that there is only one copy of each chromosome in the cell's nucleus instead of two. During ...

This news release is available in Japanese. As nonhuman primates mature, their vocalizations are thought to be minimally or not at all influenced by caregivers - but a new study reveals that infant marmosets use cues from adults as they develop vocalizations. In a surprise twist then, humans may not be the only primates whose vocal development benefits from early communication. To monitor and measure the vocal development in marmosets, Daniel Takahashi et al. recorded vocalizations between the first day of birth and two months of age, using four well-established ...

This news release is available in Japanese. Amid climate change debates revolving around limited increases in recent global mean surface temperature (GMST) rates, Kevin Trenberth argues that natural climate fluxes - larger than commonly appreciated - can overwhelm background warming, making plateaued rates, or hiatuses, deceiving in significance. After many years of monitoring, it's clear that the GMST can vary from year to year, even decade to decade; these differences, Trenberth argues, are largely a result of internal natural variability. For example, the Pacific ...

This news release is available in Japanese. The recently commissioned Gemini Planet Imager has made its first exoplanet discovery: what may be the lowest-mass exoplanet ever directly imaged with a space telescope instrument. Based on available data, the researchers project the planet weighs twice as much as Jupiter - far less than exoplanets directly imaged before, which weighed at least five times Jupiter's mass. The findings from the next-generation Gemini imaging tool pave the way toward a better understanding of how our solar system was formed. In ...

The Gemini Planet Imager has discovered and photographed its first planet, a methane-enshrouded gas giant much like Jupiter that may hold the key to understanding how large planets form in the swirling accretion disks around stars. The GPI instrument, which is mounted on the 8-meter Gemini South telescope in Chile, is the size of a small car and was designed, built and optimized for imaging and analyzing the atmospheres of faint Jupiter-like planets next to bright stars, thanks to a device that masks the star's glare. In December 2104, GPI began searching hundreds of ...

A Jupiter-like planet within a young system that could serve as a decoder ring for understanding how planets formed around our Sun has been discovered by a team of astronomers from the University of Montreal's Institute of Research on Exoplanets (iREx) in collaboration with an international team of astronomers led by professor Bruce MacInstosh from Stanford University. One of the best ways to learn how our solar system evolved is in fact to look to younger star systems in the early stages of development. The new planet, called 51 Eridani b, is the first exoplanet discovered ...

While it may not shock you to learn that children born with disorders of sex development (DSD) face challenges, Concordia University researchers have confirmed that these go far beyond the physical. In a paper published in the journal Hormone and Metabolic Research, psychology professor William M. Bukowski and his co-authors Elizabeth McCauley and Thomas Mazur examine the potential effects that these disorders can have on children's and adolescents' peer relationships. The term "disorders of sex development" covers a range of conditions, from physical malformations ...

Fifteen years ago, an odd mutant fruit fly caught the attention and curiosity of Dr. Ravi Allada, a circadian rhythms expert at Northwestern University, leading the neuroscientist to recently discover how an animal's biological clock wakes it up in the morning and puts it to sleep at night. The clock's mechanism, it turns out, is much like a light switch. In a study of brain circadian neurons that govern the daily sleep-wake cycle's timing, Allada and his research team found that high sodium channel activity in these neurons during the day turn the cells on and ultimately ...

For any complex society to function properly, individuals--be they people or social insects--must reliably recognize their friends and family with whom they live and work and readily distinguish those allies from strangers. Ants and other social insects manage this feat of recognition based on chemical pheromones, which are detected via sensors in their antennae. Now researchers reporting August 13 in Cell Reports have discovered that when it comes to assessing body odors, ants really don't miss a thing. "To our surprise, these very low volatility compounds are not only ...

A link between malaria and Burkitt's lymphoma was first described more than 50 years ago, but how a parasitic infection could turn immune cells cancerous has remained a mystery. Now, in the August 13 issue of Cell, researchers demonstrate in mice that B cell DNA becomes vulnerable to cancer-causing mutations during prolonged combat against the malaria-causing Plasmodium falciparum. Individuals who are chronically infected with certain pathogens are at increased risk of developing lymphomas, cancers of the antibody-producing B lymphocytes. For example, Burkitt's lymphoma, ...

A study from the US National Institutes of Health presents some of the most precise human data yet on whether cutting carbs or fat has the most benefits for losing body fat. In a paper published August 13 in Cell Metabolism, the researchers show how, contrary to popular claims, restricting dietary fat can lead to greater body fat loss than carb restriction, even though a low-carb diet reduces insulin and increases fat burning. Since 2003, Kevin Hall, PhD--a physicist turned metabolism researcher at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases--has ...

Irisin, a hormone linked to the positive benefits of exercise, was recently questioned to exist in humans. Two recent studies pointed to possible flaws in the methods used to identify irisin, with commercially available antibodies. In Cell Metabolism on August 13, the Harvard scientists who discovered irisin address this contentious issue by showing that human irisin circulates in the blood at nanogram levels and increases during exercise. Senior study author Bruce Spiegelman of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School says that the confusion over irisin ...

The mechanisms that allow the liver to repair and regenerate itself have long been a matter of debate. Now researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered a population of liver cells that are better at regenerating liver tissue than ordinary liver cells, or hepatocytes. The study, published August 13 in Cell, is the first to identify these so-called "hybrid hepatocytes," and show that they are able to regenerate liver tissue without giving rise to cancer. While most of the work described in the study was done in mouse models, the researchers ...

In what appears to be an unexpected challenge to a long-accepted fact of biology, Johns Hopkins researchers say they have found that ribosomes -- the molecular machines in all cells that build proteins -- can sometimes do so even within the so-called untranslated regions of the ribbons of genetic material known as messenger RNA (mRNA). "This is an exciting find that generates a whole new set of questions for researchers," says Rachel Green, Ph.D., a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and professor of molecular biology and genetics at the Johns Hopkins University ...

Researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and their collaborators have developed an experimental, nanoparticle-based vaccine against Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) that can induce potent neutralizing antibodies in vaccinated mice and nonhuman primates. Microscopic particles, known as nanoparticles, are being investigated as potential delivery vehicles for vaccines. The scientists' findings suggest that using a structure-based vaccine design and self-assembling nanoparticles to deliver a viral ...

In a recent study, restricting dietary fat led to body fat loss at a rate 68 percent higher than cutting the same number of carbohydrate calories when adults with obesity ate strictly controlled diets. Carb restriction lowered production of the fat-regulating hormone insulin and increased fat burning as expected, whereas fat restriction had no observed changes in insulin production or fat burning. The research was conducted at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), part of the National Institutes of Health. Results were published ...

Engineers from the University of Sheffield have developed a novel technique to predict when bearings inside wind turbines will fail which could make wind energy cheaper. The method, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A and developed by Mechanical Engineering research student Wenqu Chen, uses ultrasonic waves to measure the load transmitted through a ball bearing in a wind turbine. The stress on wind turbine is recorded and then engineers can forecast its remaining service life. When a bearing is subject to a load, its thickness is reduced by ...