Twenty-seven chemical elements are considered to be essential for human life. Now there is a 28th – bromine. In a paper published Thursday by the journal Cell, Vanderbilt University researchers establish for the first time that bromine, among the 92 naturally-occurring chemical elements in the universe, is the 28th element essential for tissue development in all animals, from primitive sea creatures to humans. "Without bromine, there are no animals. That's the discovery," said Billy Hudson, Ph.D., the paper's senior author and Elliott V. Newman Professor of Medicine. The ...

Like many other insect pollinators, bees find their way around by using a polarization sensitive area in their eyes to 'see' skylight polarization patterns. However, while other insects are known to use such sensitivity to identify appropriate habitats, locate suitable sites to lay their eggs and find food, a non-navigation function for polarization vision has never been identified in bees – until now. Professor Julian Partridge, from Bristol's School of Biological Sciences and the School of Animal Biology at the University of Western Australia, with his Bristol-based ...

Case Western Reserve researchers have discovered landmarks within pluripotent stem cells that guide how they develop to serve different purposes within the body. This breakthrough offers promise that scientists eventually will be able to direct stem cells in ways that prevent disease or repair damage from injury or illness. The study and its results appear in the June 5 edition of the journal Cell Stem Cell. Pluripotent stem cells are so named because they can evolve into any of the cell types that exist within the body. Their immense potential captured the attention ...

DARIEN, IL – A new study suggests that couples are more likely to sleep in sync when the wife is more satisfied with their marriage. Results show that overall synchrony in sleep-wake schedules among couples was high, as those who slept in the same bed were awake or asleep at the same time about 75 percent of the time. When the wife reported higher marital satisfaction, the percent of time the couple was awake or asleep at the same time was greater. "Most of what is known about sleep comes from studying it at the individual level; however, for most adults, sleep is a ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have, for the first time, described the sequence of early cellular responses to a high-fat diet, one that can result in obesity-induced insulin resistance and diabetes. The findings, published in the June 5 issue of Cell, also suggest potential molecular targets for preventing or reversing the process. "We've described the etiology of obesity-related diabetes. We've pinpointed the steps, the way the whole thing happens," said Jerrold M. Olefsky, MD, associate dean for Scientific Affairs and Distinguished ...

COLUMBIA, Mo — As the U.S. economy slowly recovers many investors remain wary about investing in the stock market. Now, Michael Guillemette, an assistant professor of personal financial planning in the University of Missouri College of Human Environmental Sciences, analyzed investors' "risk tolerance," or willingness to take risks, and found that it decreased as the stock market faltered. Guillemette says this is a very counterproductive behavior for investors who want to maximize their investment returns. "At its face, it seems fairly obvious that investors would be ...

This news release is available in French. As far back as the time of the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago, forests recovered from fires in the same manner they do today, according to a team of researchers from McGill University and the Royal Saskatchewan Museum. During an expedition in southern Saskatchewan, Canada, the team discovered the first fossil-record evidence of forest fire ecology - the regrowth of plants after a fire - revealing a snapshot of the ecology on earth just before the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. The researchers also found evidence that ...

TORONTO, ON – University of Toronto biologists leading an investigation into the cells that regulate proper brain function, have identified and located the key players whose actions contribute to afflictions such as epilepsy and schizophrenia. The discovery is a major step toward developing improved treatments for these and other neurological disorders. "Neurons in the brain communicate with other neurons through synapses, communication that can either excite or inhibit other neurons," said Professor Melanie Woodin in the Department of Cell and Systems Biology at the ...

Young children instinctively use a "language-like" structure to communicate through gestures, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research, led by the University of Warwick, shows that when young children are asked to use gestures to communicate, their gestures segment information and reorganize it into language-like sequences. This finding suggests that children are not just learning language from older generations — their own preferences in communication may have shaped how languages ...

WASHINGTON -- While civil aviation is on the threshold of potentially revolutionary changes with the emergence of increasingly autonomous unmanned aircraft, these new systems pose serious questions about how they will be safely and efficiently integrated into the existing civil aviation structure, says a new report from the National Research Council. The report identifies key barriers and provides a research agenda to aid the orderly incorporation of unmanned and autonomous aircraft into public airspace. "There is little doubt that over the long run the potential benefits ...

JUPITER, FL, June 5, 2014 – In the last few years, the benefits of short, intense workouts have been extolled by both researchers and exercise fans as something of a metabolic panacea capable of providing greater overall fitness, better blood sugar control and weight reduction—all of it in periods as short as seven minutes a few times a week. Now, in a new study, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) confirm that there is something molecularly unique about intense exercise: the activation of a single protein. The study, published ...

The key to helping students learn complicated math is to understand how to apply it to new ideas and make learning more interactive, according to a new study by UBC researchers. Pre-class assignments, small group discussions and clicker quizzes improve students' ability to grasp tricky first-year calculus concepts. Students taught in such active-engagement classes were 10 per cent more likely to understand key concepts on subsequent quizzes, according to the study published The International Journal on Mathematics Education. This was true even when compared to students ...

Dartmouth researchers have found that those caring for patients with advanced cancer experienced reduced depression and felt less burdened by caregiving tasks when palliative support services were offered soon after the patient's diagnosis. They presented their findings at the American Society of Clinical Oncologist (ASCO) annual meeting in Chicago on June 3, 2014. "Family caregivers are a crucial part of the patient care team. Because the well-being of one affects the well-being of the other, both parties benefit when caregivers receive palliative care," said senior ...

ANN ARBOR – With precarious particles called polaritons that straddle the worlds of light and matter, University of Michigan researchers have demonstrated a new, practical and potentially more efficient way to make a coherent laser-like beam. They have made what's believed to be the first polariton laser that is fueled by electrical current as opposed to light, and also works at room temperature, rather than way below zero. Those attributes make the device the most real-world ready of the handful of polariton lasers ever developed. It represents a milestone like none ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (June 5, 2014) – A study by a Korean team of neuroscientists has concluded that when mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs; multipotent structural stem cells capable of differentiation into a variety of cell types) are transplanted into the brains of mice modeled with Alzheimer's disease (AD), the cells stimulate neural cell growth and repair in the hippocampus, a key brain area damaged by AD. The finding could lead to improved AD therapies. The study will be published in a future issue of Cell Transplantation and is currently freely available on-line as an ...

New research from Case Western Reserve University found that compassion can produce counterintuitive results, challenging prevailing views of empathy's effects on moral judgment. To understand how humans make moral choices, researchers asked subjects to respond to a variety of moral dilemmas, for instance: Whether to stay and defend a mortally wounded soldier until he dies or shoot him to protect him from enemy torture and enable you and five other soldiers to escape unharmed. Leading research has said people make choices based on a struggle within their brains between ...

New psychology research shows that exposing people to alcohol-related words can influence aggressive behaviour in ways similar to actually consuming alcohol. Researchers found however that this aggressive behaviour occurred when people were subjected to provocation in a way that was not a clear-cut insult. Although it has been long known that drinking alcohol can increase aggression, a team of five psychologists, including Dr Eduardo Vasquez of the University of Kent in the UK and others from two US universities, demonstrated in two experiments that participants exhibited ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (June 5, 2014) – Scientists in Taiwan have found that intravenous injections of stem cells derived from human exfoliated deciduous tooth pulp (SHED) have a protective effect against brain damage from heat stroke in mice. Their finding was safe and effective and so may be a candidate for successfully treating human patients by preventing the neurological damage caused by heat stroke. The study is published in a future issue of Cell Transplantation and is currently freely available on-line as an unedited early e-pub at: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cog/ct/pre-prints/content-CT1100Tseng. ...

The June feature of Science Elements, the American Chemical Society's (ACS') weekly podcast series, shines the spotlight on devices that use chemistry to locate people trapped in collapsed buildings. The episode is available at http://www.acs.org/scienceelements. Every second counts when people are trapped in the rubble of a collapsed building. As survivors breathe in a confined space, oxygen levels go down and carbon dioxide levels go up, a potentially lethal combination. People also can have severe injuries from the falling walls and other debris. In the episode, ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif.—Scientists know that wildland fire emissions play a significant role in the global carbon cycle and that its principal component – carbon dioxide – is a primary driver of climate change. But predicting and quantifying the effects of potential future emissions is a difficult process requiring the integration of complex interactions of climate, fire, and vegetation. The current state of knowledge, critical knowledge gaps, and importance of fire emissions for global climate and terrestrial carbon cycling is the focus of nine science syntheses published in ...

Imagine a technology that could allow us to see through opaque surfaces without exposure to harmful x-rays, that could give us the ability to detect harmful chemicals and bio-agents from a safe distance, and that could enable us to peer so deeply into space that scientists could better understand the formation of the universe. All of these scenarios are possible with terahertz radiation, electromagnetic waves with lengths that fall between microwaves and infrared light. However, the potential of terahertz waves has yet to be reached because they are difficult to generate ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. — The national survival rates for African-Americans diagnosed with head and neck cancer have not improved in the last 40 years despite advances in the treatment and management of the disease, University of Missouri School of Medicine researchers have found in a new study. More than 52,000 men and women in the United States currently are living with head and neck cancer. Using data from the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and Ends Results (SEER) program, MU researchers under the guidance of Mosharraf Hossain, M.D., assistant professor ...

Scientists have routinely used mice to replicate aspects of human breast cancer in an effort to find a cure to the most common type of cancer among women. But how effective are these preclinical models in actually mimicking the disease and giving scientists the ability to develop real comparisons? Eran Andrechek, a physiology professor in the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University, has discovered that many of the various models used in breast cancer research can replicate several characteristics of the human disease, especially at the gene level. The ...

A route for constructing protein nanomachines engineered for specific applications may be closer to reality. Biological systems produce an incredible array of self-assembling, functional protein tools. Some examples of these nanoscale protein materials are scaffolds to anchor cellular activities, molecular motors to drive physiological events, and capsules for delivering viruses into host cells. Scientists inspired by these sophisticated molecular machines want to build their own, with forms and functions customized to tackle modern-day challenges. The ability to ...

African-Americans such as Brown University President Ruth Simmons, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, and of course President Barack Obama have reached the pinnacle of success in historically white domains. But a new study finds there is a downside to African-American success stories: these positive examples prompt white Americans to think less successful African-Americans simply need to apply more effort to achieve their own success. The findings are reported in the paper, "If He Can Do It, So Can They: Exposure to Counterstereotypically Successful Exemplars Prompts Automatic ...