Many mammals -- and some birds -- escape the winter by hibernating for three to nine months. This period of dormancy permits species which would otherwise perish from the cold and scarce food to survive to see another spring. The Middle East, with temperate winters, was until recently considered an unlikely host for hibernating mammals. New research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London by Tel Aviv University researchers is set to not only correct this fallacy but also change the very concept of hibernation. Prof. Noga Kronfeld-Schor, Chair of the Department ...

Natural forces have always caused the climate on Earth to fluctuate. Now researchers have found geological evidence that some of the same forces as today were at play 1.4 billion years ago. Fluctuating climate is a hallmark of Earth, and the present greenhouse effect is by far the only force affecting today's climate. On a larger scale the Earth's climate is also strongly affected by how the Earth orbits around the sun; this is called orbital forcing of climate change. These changes happen over thousands of years and they bring ice ages and warming periods. Now researchers ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - New clinical-trial findings provide further evidence that combining chemotherapy with radiation therapy is the best treatment for people with a low-grade form of brain cancer. The findings come from a phase II study co-led by a researcher at Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center - Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC - James) and researchers at the University of Maryland and at London Regional Cancer Program in Ontario, Canada. The study shows that patients with low-grade gliomas and at high risk ...

Established ways of measuring carbon emissions can sometimes give misleading feedback on how national policies affect global emissions. In some cases, countries are even rewarded for policies that increase global emissions, and punished for policies that contribute to reducing them. "We have developed a new method that provides policy makers with more useful information, in order to set national targets and evaluate their climate policies", says Astrid Kander, Professor in Economic History at Lund University, and lead author of the study, published in the latest issue ...

What inspires people to support conservation? As concerns grow about the sustainability of modern society, this question becomes more important. A new study by a team of researchers from Clemson University and Cornell University offers one simple answer: birdwatching and hunting. Their survey of conservation activity among rural landowners in Upstate New York considered a range of possible predictors, such as gender, age, education, political ideology and beliefs about the environment. All other factors being equal, birdwatchers are about five times as likely, and hunters ...

A study of a recently discovered fossil published by LMU zoologists reveals the specimen to be the oldest known crab larva: The fossil is 150 million years old, but looks astonishingly modern. To catch living crab larvae, all you have to do is trawl a plankton-net in the nearest bay or tidal pool. Finding fossilized crab larvae is rather more difficult - as witnessed by the fact that the specimen described in "Nature Communications" today by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich zoologists Joachim and Carolin Haug, and Joel Martin of the Natural History Museum ...

The increasing strength of winds over the Southern Ocean has extended its ability to absorb carbon dioxide, effectively delaying the impacts of global warming. New research published in the Journal of Physical Research found the intensifying wind over that ocean increased the speed and energy of eddies and jets, which are responsible in large part for the movement of nutrients, heat and salt across the ocean basin. The increased movement and overturning of these eddies and jets has accelerated the carbon cycle and driven more heat into the deep ocean. "Considering ...

ANDOVER, Mass. - March 9, 2015 - DeuteRx, LLC, is a research and development-focused biotechnology company dedicated to improving racemic small molecule marketed drugs and drug candidates intended for patients across multiple therapeutic indications. Today, DeuteRx announced the discovery of a method for the in vivo stabilization and differentiation of the individual enantiomers of selected thalidomide analogs. The method is described in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), entitled: "Differentiation of antiinflammatory and antitumorigenic properties ...

Capping and regulating CEO payments, including performance bonuses, could help make companies more profitable in the long term, new research has found. According to modeling by Dr Peter Cebon at the University of Melbourne in Australia and Dr Benjamin Hermalin from the University of California, Berkeley, reliance on performance bonuses - which are often $7-10 AUD million per year for top Australian CEOs - can lead executives to pursue poor strategies, including being too focused on short term gains. The model also showed that if bonuses are restricted, CEOs and boards ...

The paper summed the progress of the alternating EM field technique for earthquake monitoring and prediction after 1966 when Xingtai earthquake in Hebei province occurred, expounded the theoretical basement on electromagnetic field for this method, outlined new developed CSELF technique and the experimental examples and the study using satellite EM technologies, and introduced the new data processing and data mining techniques used for massive data (big data). The study, entitled "Advances in alternating electromagnetic field data processing for earthquake monitoring ...

The level of vitamin D in our blood should neither be too high nor to low. Scientists from the University of Copenhagen are the first in the world to show that there is a connection between high levels of vitamin D and cardiovascular deaths. In terms of public health, a lack of vitamin D has long been a focal point. Several studies have shown that too low levels can prove detrimental to our health. However, new research from the University of Copenhagen reveals, for the first time, that also too high levels of vitamin D in our blood is connected to an increased risk of ...

This news release is available in German. It has not yet been possible to measure the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. They are so weak that they get lost in the noise of the measurements. But thanks to the latest simulations of the merging of binary neutron star systems, the structure of the sought-after signals is now known. As a team of German and Japanese theoretical astrophysicists reports in the Editor's choice of the current edition of the scientific journal "Physical Review D", gravitational waves have a characteristic ...

Researchers at the University of Birmingham believe that a new method of genetically engineering immune cells could lead to improved treatment of Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) patients. The research, published in Cancer Immunology Research, explains how the team were able to create immune cells (T-cells) that use the presence of the Epstein-Barr virus to combat NPC. NPC develops in the upper part of the throat known as the nasopharynx, which connects the back of your nose to the back of your mouth. This particular cancer is unusually common throughout Southeast ...

A new approach to care for patients with advanced HIV in Tanzania and Zambia, combining community support and screening for a type of meningitis, has reduced deaths by 28%. The research, published in The Lancet, suggests that a simple low-cost intervention could be an effective approach to reducing HIV-related deaths in Africa. Researchers from the National Institute of Medical Research Tanzania, the University Teaching Hospital in Zambia, St Georges University of London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine conducted a randomised trial of 1,999 HIV ...

One of the biggest unknowns in understanding the effects of climate change today is the melting rate of glacial ice in Antarctica. Scientists agree rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures could destabilize these ice sheets, but there is uncertainty about how fast they will lose ice. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is of particular concern to scientists because it contains enough ice to raise global sea level by up to 16 feet, and its physical configuration makes it susceptible to melting by warm ocean water. Recent studies have suggested that the collapse of certain parts ...

A team of scientists led by astronomers at the University of Bonn discovered an unusual phenomenon in the centre of the Milky Way: They detected about 20 rotating dust and gas discs in each cluster hosting exceptionally large and hot stars. The existence of these discs in the presence of the destructive UV radiation field of their massive neighbours came as a surprise. The science team is pondering how these rotating discs are able to withstand evaporation under these extreme conditions. The results are published in the most recent edition of the journal „Astronomy ...

A new study from the University of Warwick is calling for more UK compulsory regulation of devices used in hip replacements to reduce the need for further traumatic and expensive surgery. In a paper published today in the British Medical Journal, a team from Warwick Medical School looked at ten year revision rates for five of the most commonly used hip replacement devices. This means the number of devices that had to be replaced within 10 years of the original surgery. The team found the revision rates for these devices were less than 5% but warned many other devices ...

Genes linked with a greater risk of developing autism may also be associated with higher intelligence, a study suggests. Researchers have found new evidence linking genetic factors associated with autism to better cognitive ability in people who do not have the condition. The relationship between autism and intelligence is not clear, researchers say. Although up to 70 per cent of individuals with autism have an intellectual disability, some people with the disorder have relatively well-preserved, or even higher than average, non-verbal intelligence, the team says. ...

It's called the gambler's fallacy: After a long streak of losses, you feel you are going to win. But in reality, your odds of winning are no different than they were before. For years, the gambler's fallacy has been thought to be a prime example of human irrationality, but a new study published by researchers from the Texas A&M Health Science Center suggests that our brains naturally soak up the strange statistics of random sequences, causing us to commit the gambler's fallacy. The study, which appears in the March 9 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy ...

It's not much harder or more expensive to send a tweet or a Facebook post to hundreds or even thousands of people than to just a handful. So you'd think that the ease of communicating with lots of people via social networks would result in more and more people sharing their thoughts, political views, and cat videos. But that's not the case, says Associate Professor Zsolt Katona at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business (pictured, left). The flood of tweets and posts washing across cyberspace has created a huge imbalance in the number of people creating content and the ...

OTTAWA, March 10, 2015 - The younger a person is when they immigrate to Canada, the higher their risk of developing inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and its major subtypes Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, according to a study by researchers at the University of Ottawa, the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) and the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO). Canada has one of the highest rates in the world of IBD and while immigrants to Canada have lower rates of IBD compared to Canadian-born residents, that risk goes up in immigrants who are ...

A team of astronomers from the University of Cambridge have identified nine new dwarf satellites orbiting the Milky Way, the largest number ever discovered at once. The findings, from newly-released imaging data taken from the Dark Energy Survey, may help unravel the mysteries behind dark matter, the invisible substance holding galaxies together. The new results also mark the first discovery of dwarf galaxies - small celestial objects that orbit larger galaxies - in a decade, after dozens were found in 2005 and 2006 in the skies above the northern hemisphere. The new ...

One of the most important areas in all of biology is the evolution of photosynthesis. Some species of single celled cyanobacteria, through photosynthesis, forever changed the atmosphere of the early Earth by filling it with oxygen, allowing a huge expansion in terms of what life was possible on the planet. Cardona et al., in the advanced online edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution, examined the evolution origins of the D1 protein in cyanobacteria, which forms the heart of Photosystem II, the oxygen-evolving machine of photosynthesis. Photosystem II's role is to ...

Researchers using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have produced the most detailed image yet of a fascinating region where clusters of hundreds of galaxies are colliding, creating a rich variety of mysterious phenomena visible only to radio telescopes. The scientists took advantage of new VLA capabilities to make a "true color" radio image. This image shows the region as it would appear if human eyes were sensitive to radio waves instead of light waves. In this image, red shows where longer radio waves predominate, and blue shows where shorter radio waves predominate, ...

As sailors and mountaineers know very well, every knot carries out a specific function. There's a knot that slides, one that "floats", and one that comes undone with a single pull. In the field of nanotechnology as well, it is useful to have several kinds of molecular knots to be used, for instance, as mechanically resistant nano-cages for delivering chemical compounds or for confining and controlling toxic reagents. So far, molecular knots have only been produced by chemical synthesis, obtaining constructs on an atomic scale. In the study coordinated by SISSA professor ...