In western society, where keeping up with the Joneses — or, better yet, surpassing them — is expected and even encouraged, status matters. So important is it that for many people, physical and emotional wellbeing are directly connected to their place in the social hierarchy. That's hardly news to anthropologists at UC Santa Barbara, but they were taken by surprise when research findings indicated that the same relationship exists among the Tsimane, an egalitarian society of forager-farmers in the Bolivian Amazon. Their work is published online in the journal ...

The Northern Indian Ocean has awakened after a tropical slumber and created Tropical Storm Hudhud on Oct. 8 and NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Cyclone Hudhud on Oct. 8 at 6:53 UTC (2:53 a.m. EDT and captured infrared data on the storm revealing bands of strong thunderstorms around the center. Animated infrared satellite imagery showed that the low-level circulation center was consolidating, and there is an improvement in the banding of thunderstorms ...

TORONTO, October 7, 2014 – Health technology company Infonaut, a MaRS client, has released a study showing that hospital patients may be at significant risk of infection due to their own poor hand hygiene. The findings were measured in a Toronto hospital using Infonaut's Hospital Watch Live™ system, innovative technology designed to assist hospitals in monitoring and controlling the spread of infections by analyzing the movement and behaviour of hospital staff, patients and equipment. The study found that patients on average washed their hands only 30% of the time ...

Researchers at Children's Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) have described for the first time a specific perceptual learning deficit in mice with a mutation of the same gene as found in children with Fragile X Syndrome (FXS). Their findings, published on October 8 by PLOS ONE, may offer an effective pre-clinical platform for both investigating how brain circuitry is altered in FXS and testing drugs to improve these symptoms in children. FXS is the most common inherited form of mental impairment, affecting an estimated 1 in 4,000 males and 1 in 6,000 females. Symptoms include ...

Four families likely influenced violin shape over four centuries, with many imitating famous designs like Stradivarius, according to a study published October 8, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Daniel Chitwood from Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in Missouri. The first violins appeared in 16th century Italy and since then, their designers have continued to incorporate numerous innovations to improve the acoustical properties and playability of violins. However, details of the body outline can vary without significantly compromising sound quality and may ...

The discovery of new bones from a large land mammal that lived about 48 million years ago has led scientists to identify a new branch of mammals closely related to modern horses, rhinos, and tapirs, according to a study published October 8, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Lisa Noelle Cooper from Northeast Ohio Medical University and colleagues. This family of large mammals, Anthracobunidae, is only known from India and Pakistan and was commonly considered to be ancestors of modern elephants and sea cows. Geographically, this was a puzzling idea, because elephants ...

Healthier foods and beverages have been consistently more expensive than unhealthier ones from 2002-2012, with a gap that's growing, according to a study published October 8, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Nicholas Jones from University of Cambridge, UK, and colleagues. Governments have identified access to affordable healthy diets as a key factor in improving public health, yet methods for tracking prices of more and less healthy foods over time have not been established. The authors of this study analyzed existing government data on national food prices ...

For the first time, robotic prostheses controlled via implanted neuromuscular interfaces have become a clinical reality. A novel osseointegrated (bone-anchored) implant system gives patients new opportunities in their daily life and professional activities. In January 2013 a Swedish arm amputee was the first person in the world to receive a prosthesis with a direct connection to bone, nerves and muscles. An article about this achievement and its long-term stability will now be published in the Science Translational Medicine journal. "Going beyond the lab to allow the ...

CLEVELAND—Even before he lost his right hand to an industrial accident 4 years ago, Igor Spetic had family open his medicine bottles. Cotton balls give him goose bumps. Now, blindfolded during an experiment, he feels his arm hairs rise when a researcher brushes the back of his prosthetic hand with a cotton ball. Spetic, of course, can't feel the ball. But patterns of electric signals are sent by a computer into nerves in his arm and to his brain, which tells him different. "I knew immediately it was cotton," he said. That's one of several types of sensation ...

A new study, published today in the journal PLOS One, tracked the price of 94 key food and beverage items from 2002 to 2012. Its findings show that more healthy foods were consistently more expensive than less healthy foods, and have risen more sharply in price over time. Food prices in the UK have risen faster than the price of other goods in recent years, and this new research shows that the increase has been greater for more healthy foods, making them progressively more expensive over time. While less healthy foods had a slightly greater price rise relative to ...

Berkeley — Fad diets come and go, but might there be something to the ones that involve consuming grapefruit and grapefruit juice? New research at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that a closer look at grapefruit juice is warranted. A new study, to be published Wednesday, Oct. 8, in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE, found that mice fed a high-fat diet gained 18 percent less weight when they drank clarified, no-pulp grapefruit juice compared with a control group of mice that drank water. Juice-drinking mice also showed improved levels of glucose, ...

Cut off by freeways and human development, mountain lions in southern California are facing a severe loss of genetic diversity, according to a new study led by the University of California, Davis in partnership with The Nature Conservancy. The study, published today in the journal PLOS ONE, represents the largest genetic sampling of mountain lions, or pumas, in southern California. It raises concerns about the current status of mountain lions in the Santa Ana and Santa Monica mountains, as well as the longer-term outlook for mountain lions across southern California. UC ...

Plant scientists are working to improve important food crops such as rice, maize, and beans to meet the food needs of a growing world population. However, boosting crop output will require improving more than what can be seen of these plants above the ground. Root systems are essential to gathering water and nutrients, but understanding what's happening in these unseen parts of the plants has until now depended mostly on lab studies and subjective field measurements. To address that need, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Penn State University have ...

Lebanon, NH, 10/8/14 —To reduce false positives when identifying genetic variations associated with human disease through genome-wide association studies (GWAS), Dartmouth researchers have identified nine traits that are not dependent on P values to predict single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) reproducibility as reported in Human Genetics on October 2, 2014. Reproducibility rates of SNPs based solely on P values is low. Dartmouth authors' analysis of GWAS studies published in Nature Genetics showed a 1-5 percent replication rate. "It is important to improve our ...

A new study from UCLA found that a drug being evaluated to treat an entirely different disorder helped slow the progression of Parkinson's disease in mice. The study, published in the October edition of the journal Neurotherapeutics, found that the drug, AT2101, which has also been studied for Gaucher disease, improved motor function, stopped inflammation in the brain and reduced levels of alpha-synuclein, a protein critically involved in Parkinson's. Although the exact cause of Parkinson's is unknown, evidence points to an accumulation of alpha-synuclein, which has ...

Astronomers working with NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), led by Caltech's Fiona Harrison, have found a pulsating dead star beaming with the energy of about 10 million suns. The object, previously thought to be a black hole because it is so powerful, is in fact a pulsar—the incredibly dense rotating remains of a star. "This compact little stellar remnant is a real powerhouse. We've never seen anything quite like it," says Harrison, NuSTAR's principal investigator and the Benjamin M. Rosen Professor of Physics at Caltech. "We all thought an ...

ATLANTA – October 08, 2014 – A study from American Cancer Society researchers finds the increased risk of premature death associated with a higher body mass index (BMI) is similar for African Americans and whites, in contrast to previous, smaller studies that indicated the association may be weaker for African Americans. The study, published in the open-access, online publication PLOS ONE, finds that among never smokers without prevalent disease, overweight and obesity are strongly associated with subsequent risk of mortality in every race. The authors say ...

New Haven, Conn. - HIV is adept at eluding immune system responses because the protein it uses to infect cells is constantly changing. Now a team of researchers including scientists from Yale have stripped the cloak from this master of disguise, providing a high resolution image of this surface spike protein and monitoring how it constantly changes its shape, information that suggests new ways to attack the virus through drugs and vaccines. In two papers published simultaneously online Oct. 8 in the journals Science and Nature. team of researchers led by scientists ...

Highly-detailed radio-telescope images have pinpointed the locations where a stellar explosion called a nova emitted gamma rays, the most energetic form of electromagnetic waves. The discovery revealed a probable mechanism for the gamma-ray emissions, which mystified astronomers when first observed in 2012. "We not only found where the gamma rays came from, but also got a look at a previously-unseen scenario that may be common in other nova explosions," said Laura Chomiuk, of Michigan State University. A nova occurs when a dense white dwarf star pulls material onto ...

New research has illuminated the movement and complete structure of the spikes on HIV that the virus uses to bind to the cells it infects. This research, led by scientists at the National Institutes of Health, Weill Cornell Medical College and Yale University School of Medicine, could help advance efforts to develop HIV vaccines and treatments. Three sets of a pair of molecules called gp120 and gp41 constitute each HIV spike, which adopts different configurations before and after the virus fuses with a cell. The atomic-level structures of pre-fusion gp120 and post-fusion ...

NEW YORK — (October 8, 2014) -- Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College have developed technologies that allow investigators, for the first time, to watch what they call the "dance" of HIV proteins on the virus' surface, which may contribute to how it infects human immune cells. Their discovery is described in the Oct. 8 issue of Science, and is also a part of a study published the same day in Nature. The new technology platform opens new possibilities for devising an approach to prevent HIV infection, says Dr. Scott Blanchard, an associate professor of physiology ...

Astronomers have discovered a black hole that is consuming gas from a nearby star 10 times faster than previously thought possible. The black hole—known as P13—lies on the outskirts of the galaxy NGC7793 about 12 million light years from Earth and is ingesting a weight equivalent to 100 billion billion hot dogs every minute. The discovery was published today in the journal Nature. International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research astronomer Dr Roberto Soria, who is based at ICRAR's Curtin University node, said that as gas falls towards a black hole it gets ...

An international team of astronomers has been able to see into the heart of an exploding star, by combining data from telescopes that are hundreds or even thousands of kilometres apart. Their results are published at 18:00 hours on Oct 8 2014 in the journal Nature. Highly-detailed images produced using radio telescopes from across Europe and America have pinpointed the locations where a stellar explosion (called a nova), emitted gamma rays (extremely high energy radiation). The discovery revealed how the gamma-ray emissions are produced, something which mystified astronomers ...

This news release is available in German. A team of ETH Zurich researchers led by professors Nenad Ban and Ruedi Aebersold have studied the highly complex molecular structure of mitoribosomes, which are the ribosomes of mitochondria. Ribosomes are found in the cells of all living organisms. However, higher organisms (eukaryotes), which include fungi, plants, animals and humans, contain much more complex ribosomes than bacteria. In eukaryotes, ribosomes can also be divided into two types: those in the cytosol – which comprises the majority of the cell – and ...

(PHILADELPHIA) – Transfer RNAs (tRNAs) are ancient workhorse molecules and part of the cellular process that creates the proteins, critical building blocks of life that keep a cell running smoothly. A new discovery suggests that the number of human genomic loci that might be coding for tRNAs is nearly double what is currently known. Most of the newly identified loci resemble the sequences of mitochondrial tRNAs suggesting unexpected new links between the human nuclear and mitochondrial genomes, links that are not currently understood. Transfer RNAs (tRNAs) represent ...