From slight sparrows to preening peacocks to soaring falcons, birds have long been known to possess distinct abilities in their sense of smell, but little has been known about the evolution of olfaction. Now, a large comparative genomic study of the olfactory genes tied to a bird's sense of smell has revealed important differences that correlate with their ecological niches and specific behaviors. Authors Agostinho Antunes et al., in a new study published in the advanced online edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution, analyzed olfactory receptor genes (OR gene ...

Physicists at the University of York have revealed a new understanding of nucleosynthesis in stars, providing insight into the role massive stars play in the evolution of the Milky Way and the origins of the Solar System. Radioactive aluminium (aluminium-26, or Al26) is an element that emits gamma radiation through its decay enabling astronomers to image its location in our galaxy. Studying how Al26 is created in massive stars, scientists have distinguished between previously conflicting assumptions about its rate of production by nuclear fusion. Funded by the Science ...

University of Adelaide research has shown for the first time that, despite not having a nervous system, plants use signals normally associated with animals when they encounter stress. Published today in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers at the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology reported how plants respond to their environment with a similar combination of chemical and electrical responses to animals, but through machinery that is specific to plants. "We've known for a long-time that the animal neurotransmitter ...

Bari, Italy, July 28, 2015 -- A new study by researchers at the University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy, Geriatric Unit & Laboratory of Gerontology and Geriatrics, IRCCS "Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza", San Giovanni Rotondo, Foggia, Italy, and Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS), Roma, Italy, estimates the association between change or constant habits in coffee consumption and the incidence of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), evaluating 1,445 individuals recruited from 5,632 subjects, aged 65-84 year old, from the Italian Longitudinal Study on Aging (ILSA), a population-based ...

Rewritable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray discs owe their existence to phase-change materials, those materials that change their internal order when heated and whose structures can be switched back and forth between their crystalline and amorphous phases. Phase-change materials have even more exciting applications on the horizon, but our limited ability to precisely control their phase changes is a hurdle to the development of new technology. One of the most popular and useful phase-change materials is GST, which consists of germanium, antimony, and tellurium. This material is ...

Hercules, CA -- July 28, 2015 -- Droplet Digital PCR (ddPCR™) has been shown to be a useful tool for the identification of microRNAs (miRNA) circulating in the blood that could serve as potential cancer biomarkers. A study in the journal Oncotarget further supports these findings and identifies a novel miRNA that shows great potential for breast cancer diagnosis. These findings confirm the potential clinical utility of ddPCR technology to precisely and reliably quantify cell-free miRNAs. The study also emphasizes that sample type as well as its preparation are critical ...

ANN ARBOR--Secondary students found healthier foods on more lunch menus in 2013 than in 2011, resulting in fewer nutrition disparities for small schools or those with racially diverse student bodies. The findings by University of Michigan researchers show significant improvements made in the National School Lunch Program at public middle and high schools in 2013 after many years of meal disparities based on school size or demographics. "While these improvements are encouraging, continued progress is needed," said Yvonne Terry-McElrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute ...

Wild chimpanzees in the forests of Uganda are increasingly eating clay to supplement the minerals in their diet, according to a long-term international study published in the early version of the journal PLOS ONE. The paper led by the University of Oxford describes how the researchers observed wild chimpanzees in the Budongo forest eating and drinking from clay pits and termite mounds. The paper concludes that this change in diet may be partly due to the widespread destruction of raffia palm trees that chimps relied on for their minerals in the past. However, the main reason ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) -- UC Davis health economists have for the first time projected the total costs of caring for all people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the U.S. for the current calendar year and in 10 years if effective interventions and preventive treatments for the condition are not identified and widely available. Their forecasts for ASD-related medical, nonmedical and productivity losses are $268 billion for 2015 and $461 billion for 2025. The researchers noted that these estimates are conservative and, if ASD prevalence continues to increase as it has ...

The continuous quality improvement (CQI) approach was introduced on a pilot basis to 30 sites across Uganda. This approach identified barriers in achieving national standards for voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC), identified possible solutions to overcome these barriers, and carried out improvement plans to test these changes while collecting performance data to objectively measure whether they had bridged gaps. Teams used a 53-indicator quality assessment tool adapted by the Ministry of Health and based on the WHO VMMC Quality Toolkit as a management tool to ...

Surgeons at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) joined with colleagues from Penn Medicine recently to complete the world's first bilateral hand transplant on a child. Earlier this month, the surgical team successfully transplanted donor hands and forearms onto eight-year-old Zion Harvey who, several years earlier, had undergone amputation of his hands and feet and a kidney transplant following a serious infection. Led by L. Scott Levin, M.D., FACS*, Chairman of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Penn Medicine, Director of the Hand Transplantation Program ...

Whether online auctions are selling rare Pokemon cards or fine art, the science behind inciting the highest bids gets a boost from a paper to be published in the September issue of the Journal of Retailing. Researchers from Germany and Australia teamed up to explore how bidders' emotions are affected by different types of auctions and how those emotions affect their bidding. In "Auction Fever! How Time Pressure and Social Competition Affect Bidders' Arousal and Bids in Retail Auctions," the three authors - Marc T.P. Adam of the University of Newcastle, Professor ...

PHILADELPHIA - Whether you're a human, a mouse, or even a fruitfly, losing sleep is a bad thing, leading to physiological effects and behavioral changes. One example that has been studied for many years is a link between sleep loss and aggression. But it can be difficult to distinguish sleep loss effects from stress responses, especially in rodent or human models. A team of researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania used fruitflies to probe deeper into the cellular and molecular mechanisms that govern aggression and sleep. They ...

Pharmaceutical firms "underinvest" in long-term research to develop new cancer-fighting drugs due to the greater time and cost required to conduct such research, according to a newly published study co-authored by MIT economists. Specifically, drugs to treat late-stage cancers are less costly to develop than drugs for earlier-stage cancers, partly because the late-stage drugs extend people's lives for shorter durations of time. This means that the clinical trials for such drugs get wrapped up more quickly, too -- and provide drug manufacturers more time to control patented ...

Just as the brain forms memories of familiar faces, the immune system remembers pathogens it has encountered in the past. T cells with these memories circulate in the blood stream looking for sites of new infection. Recently, however, researchers have shown that memory T cells specific to viral infections can also set up residence in particular tissues. There, they stand guard, ready to respond quickly to the first sign of reinfection. Now, research led by a team from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine shows that these resident memory T cells ...

July 28, 2015 - Eyes with central vision loss adapt by developing a new fixation point in a different part of the retina, called the preferred retinal location (PRL). Now for the first time, a new method makes it possible to identify PRLs in both eyes simultaneously, reports a study in the August issue of Optometry and Vision Science, official journal of the American Academy of Optometry. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer. The new eye-tracker technique may help in developing visual rehabilitation approaches to improve binocular vision for the many older adults ...

BEER-SHEVA, Israel...July 28, 2015 - Researchers at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) Cyber Security Research Center have discovered that virtually any cellphone infected with a malicious code can use GSM phone frequencies to steal critical information from infected "air-gapped" computers. Air-gapped computers are isolated -- separated both logically and physically from public networks -- ostensibly so that they cannot be hacked over the Internet or within company networks. Led by BGU Ph.D. student Mordechai Guri, the research team discovered how to turn ...

Consumers have access to multiple Web sites to search for online health information and can be far more involved in managing their own medical issues than ever before. However, this wealth of resources can make finding accurate information difficult, especially because it is often spread across multiple sites. A new study published in the Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making aims to evaluate the types of search strategies that Internet users adopt when trying to solve a complicated health problem. Joseph Sharit, a professor in the Department of Industrial ...

Alexandria, VA - The United States' Icebreaker Fleet - operated by the U.S. Coast Guard - consists of just two ships that are used for everything from search and rescue to national security operations to scientific research. In our August cover story, EARTH Magazine examines the various roles icebreakers play, especially in Arctic research, and how insufficient funding is affecting the icebreakers' roles. Icebreakers are becoming more important every year, as more commerce is conducted in Arctic regions as seasonal ice cover decreases. Yet over recent fiscal cycles, Congress ...

West Orange, NJ. July 28, 2015 Recommendations for improving clinical cognitive testing were reported by the American Academy of Neurology's (AAN) Behavioral Neurology Section (BNS) Group, led by Kirk R. Daffner, MD, of Boston, Mass. The Group focused on the Neurobehavioral Status Exam (NBSE), conducting evidence-based reviews of testing used for five domains - attention, language, memory, spatial cognition, and executive function). "Improving clinical cognitive testing" (doi: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000001763) was published online ahead of print on July 10, 2015, in Neurology, ...

Are the same regions and even the same cells of the brain area called hippocampus involved in encoding and retrieving memories or are different areas of this structure engaged? This question has kept neuroscientists busy for a long time. Researchers at the Mercator Research Group "Structure of Memory" at RUB have now found out that the same brain cells exhibit activity in both processes. They have published their results in the journal "Hippocampus". Hippocampus: the key to memory In the course of their project, Dr Nozomu Nakamura and Prof Dr Magdalena Sauvage from ...

Like to go your own way? Most of us actually prefer to follow the pack, according to UBC research. That's one of the outcomes from a study published in Evolution and Human Behavior that examines how mathematical models predict human behaviour. The research tested theories about when people should rely on "social information" - information that we learn vicariously from others - and when we should choose to go it alone. "People are conformist - and that's a good thing for cultural evolution," said Michael Muthukrishna, a Vanier and Liu Scholar and recent PhD recipient ...

More and more Americans on-the-go are skipping the "most important meal of the day," not eating until lunch. This tendency to miss breakfast has already been linked to the growing epidemic of obesity and cardiovascular problems in the US -- and it may put the health of diabetics at risk as well. Very little was known regarding the effect of skipping breakfast on the health of diabetics -- until now. A new Tel Aviv University study reveals the substantial impact of skipping breakfast on type-2 diabetics. "Fasting" until noon triggers major blood sugar spikes (postprandial ...

Amsterdam, July 28, 2015 - Policy makers need to take factors like geography, available skills and knowledge and the networks of local companies into account to boost the impact of higher education on economic development, according to a new Atlas Award-winning paper published in the International Journal of Educational Development. The authors of the study, from the University of Nottingham, say it's not quite as simple as more students equals higher income: higher education is key to economic development, but the way the two relate is complex, they say. "Of course ...

People with a common form of hearing loss not helped by hearing aids achieved significant and sometimes profound improvements in their hearing and understanding of speech with hybrid cochlear implant devices, according to a new multicenter study led by specialists at NYU Langone Medical Center. In the study, described online ahead of print in the journal The Laryngoscope July 7, researchers at 10 medical centers and private clinics in the United States implanted hybrid cochlear implants into one ear of 50 men and women. All study volunteers had badly damaged high-frequency, ...