A detailed study of marine animals that died out over the past 23 million years can help identify which animals and ocean ecosystems may be most at risk of extinction today, according to an international team of paleontologists and ecologists. In a paper to be published in the May 1 issue of the journal Science, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and other institutions report that worldwide patterns of extinction remained remarkably similar over this period, with the same groups of animals showing similar rates of extinction throughout and with a ...

Demand for seafood from wild fisheries and aquaculture around the world has nearly doubled over the past four decades. In the past several years, major retailers in developed countries have committed to source their seafood from only sustainably certified fisheries and aquaculture, even though it is not clear where that supply will come from. A team of researchers led by the University of California, Davis, has focused its attention on fishery improvement projects, or FIPs, which are designed to bring seafood from wild fisheries to the certified market, with only a promise ...

HIV-1 continues to spread globally. While neither a cure, nor an effective vaccine are available, recent focus has been put on 'treatment-for-prevention', which is a method by which treatment is used to reduce the contagiousness of an infected person. A study published this week in PLOS Computational Biology challenges current treatment paradigms in the context of 'treatment for prevention' against HIV-1. Sulav Duwal, Max von Kleist and their collaborators develop and employ optimal control theory to compute and assess diagnostic-guided vs. pro-active treatment strategies ...

Proteins inside a cell are in constant motion, changing shape continuously in order to carry out their functions. In addition, their multiple component atoms each have individual patterns of motion, making the entire protein a system of non-stop highly complex movement. Understanding how a protein moves is the key to developing drugs that can efficiently interact with it. But because of this complexity, protein motion has been notoriously difficult to study. Scientists at EPFL, IBS-Grenoble, and ENS-Lyon, have developed a new method for studying protein motion by first ...

The fossil record helps to predict which kinds of animals are more likely to go extinct. When combined with information about hotspots of human impacts and climate-change predictions, Smithsonian scientists and colleagues pinpoint animal groups and geographic areas of highest concern for marine conservation in the May 1 issue of Science magazine. "Just as some groups of people are more prone to health problems like diabetes or heart disease, we can tell from the fossil record which groups of animals are naturally more likely to go extinct," said Aaron O'Dea, paleontologist ...

If you thought that a beetle with a machine gun built into its rear end was something that only exists in sci-fi movies, you should talk to Wendy Moore at the University of Arizona. Many beetles secrete foul-smelling or bad-tasting chemicals from their abdomens to ward off predators, but bombardier beetles take it a step further. When threatened, they combine chemicals in an explosive chemical reaction chamber in their abdomen to simultaneously synthesize, heat and propel their defensive load as a boiling hot spray, complete with "gun smoke." They can even precisely ...

SEATTLE, Wash. -- More than 1000 dams have been removed across the United States because of safety concerns, sediment buildup, inefficiency or having otherwise outlived usefulness. A paper published today in Science finds that rivers are resilient and respond relatively quickly after a dam is removed. "The apparent success of dam removal as a means of river restoration is reflected in the increasing number of dams coming down, more than 1,000 in the last 40 years," said lead author of the study Jim O'Connor, geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. "Rivers quickly erode ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass--Bombardier beetles, which exist on every continent except Antarctica, have a pretty easy life. Virtually no other animals prey on them, because of one particularly effective defense mechanism: When disturbed or attacked, the beetles produce an internal chemical explosion in their abdomen and then expel a jet of boiling, irritating liquid toward their attackers. Researchers had been baffled by the half-inch beetles' ability to produce this noxious spray while avoiding any physical damage. But now that conundrum has been solved, thanks to research by a ...

The vivid pigmentation of zebras, the massive jaws of sharks, the fight or flight instinct and the diverse beaks of Darwin's finches. These and other remarkable features of the world's vertebrates stem from a small group of powerful cells, called neural crest cells, but little is known about their origin. Now Northwestern University scientists propose a new model for how neural crest cells, and thus vertebrates, arose more than 500 million years ago. The researchers report that, unlike other early embryonic cells that have their potential progressively restricted as ...

ORANGE, Calif. - Researchers in Chapman University's Argyros School of Business and Economics and their collaborators have just published a study on the evolution of yoga in the marketplace. Assistant Professor Gokcen Coskuner-Balli, Ph.D., co-authored the study, which examined how the meaning of yoga transformed in the past three decades. The results show that yoga became decreasingly associated with spirituality and increasingly associated with medicine and fitness. The study argues that the shift in the meanings are due to the changes in how yoga gurus are trained, market ...

Flowering plants, also known as angiosperms, add an allure to the world that is unlike anything else in nature, but more importantly, they sustain us. Most of the fruits, vegetables, grains, beans, nuts, and even herbs and spices that we consume are produced by flowering plants. They all belong to the green plant branch of the tree of life, and a novel DNA analysis software program named MarkerMiner facilitates identification of genes that can be used to elucidate the evolutionary relationships between them. University of Florida (UF) biologist Srikar Chamala, working ...

Over the past 35 years, California's high-wage workers have seen steady increases in their paychecks. But low-wage workers, 4.8 million strong and about one-third of the state's workforce, earned less in inflation-adjusted dollars in 2014 than they did in 1979, according to an analysis from the University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley researchers analyzing U.S. Census Bureau data at the campus's Center for Labor Research and Education found that low-wage workers, defined as those earning hourly wages of $13.63 or less, have seen steady declines in their inflation-adjusted ...

As the number of bills passed by Congress declines, fewer and fewer Congressional representatives are voting across party lines, leaving only a few key representatives as collaborative voters, according to researchers. "We can't say for sure that the decline in cooperation is the sole reason that there are fewer bills being introduced or passed by Congress, but we do know the two are statistically correlated, and both have been dropping steadily over the past 60 years," said Clio Andris, lead author and assistant professor of geography at Penn State. The researchers ...

China's government and other sources say that the country's carbon-dioxide emissions flattened out between 2013 and 2014. The leveling-off was a remarkable feat that could set the country on a course to beating its own goals for lowering emissions. But this optimistic outcome hinges on China overcoming some serious energy challenges, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society. Steven Gibb, a senior editor at C&EN, reports that a number of factors could help explain the emissions plateau. China ...

How and when does mom feed her embryo? We humans, like most mammals, experience pregnancy where a mother supplies nutrition directly to the embryo as it develops. But we're in the minority. Most members of the animal kingdom supply eggs with nutritious yolk before they are fertilized. With this yolk supply, fertilized eggs develop as embryos in the environment outside the mother's body. For over a century, the scientific understanding of matrotrophy ("mother-feeding") of an embryo developing inside a mom's body has come from vertebrate animals, especially mammals like ...

The latest Special Issue from ecancermedicalscience is dedicated to the memory of our late friend, Dr Mario Sideri. The Special Issue, "Prevention of gynaecological cancers: in memory of Mario Sideri," consists of nine articles centred around Dr Sideri's favoured research topic. Dr Sideri was one of the first doctors in the world to identify the connection between the human papillomavirus (HPV) and cervical cancer. He served as the Director of the Preventive Gynecology Unit at the European Institute of Oncology (IEO) in Milan from 1994 until his tragic death in June ...

When it comes to cracking nuts, wild bearded capuchin monkeys are more skilled than anyone had given them credit for, according to researchers who report new findings in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on April 30. The monkeys are known to use stone "hammers" to crack nuts. The new study shows that the monkeys are quite careful about the amount of force delivered to those nuts. They adjust the force applied with each strike based on the condition of the nutshell, making it less likely that they'll end up smashing the tasty kernel inside. "Wild bearded capuchin ...

Bats are masters of flight in the night sky, capable of steep nosedives and sharp turns that put our best aircraft to shame. Although the role of echolocation in bats' impressive midair maneuvering has been extensively studied, the contribution of touch has been largely overlooked. A study published April 30 in Cell Reports shows, for the first time, that a unique array of sensory receptors in the wing provides feedback to a bat during flight. The findings also suggest that neurons in the bat brain respond to incoming airflow and touch signals, triggering rapid adjustments ...

Neuroscientists have perfected a chemical-genetic remote control for brain circuitry and behavior. This evolving technology can now sequentially switch the same neurons - and the behaviors they mediate - on-and-off in mice, say researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health. Such bidirectional control is pivotal for decoding the brain workings of complex behaviors. The findings are the first to be published from the first wave of NIH grants awarded last fall under the BRAIN Initiative. "With its new push-pull control, this tool sharpens the cutting edge of ...

The feeling of being inside one's own body is not as self-evident as one might think. In a new study from Sweden's Karolinska Institutet, neuroscientists created an out-of-body illusion in participants placed inside a brain scanner. They then used the illusion to perceptually 'teleport' the participants to different locations in a room and show that the perceived location of the bodily self can be decoded from activity patterns in specific brain regions. The sense of owning one's body and being located somewhere in space is so fundamental that we usually take it for granted. ...

First study to show pattern of telomere changes at multiple time points as cancer develops Telomeres can look 15 years older in people developing cancer Pattern suggests when cancer hijacks the cell's aging process CHICAGO -- A distinct pattern in the changing length of blood telomeres, the protective end caps on our DNA strands, can predict cancer many years before actual diagnosis, according to a new study from Northwestern Medicine in collaboration with Harvard University. The pattern -- a rapid shortening followed by a stabilization three or four years before ...

Rochester, Minn. -- Over the last decade, numerous studies have shown that many Americans have low vitamin D levels and as a result, vitamin D supplement use has climbed in recent years. Vitamin D has been shown to boost bone health and it may play a role in preventing diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease and other illnesses. In light of the increased use of vitamin D supplements, Mayo Clinic researchers set out to learn more about the health of those with high vitamin D levels. They found that toxic levels are actually rare. Their study appears in the May issue of ...

LA JOLLA--Stem cells, which have the potential to turn into any kind of cell, offer the tantalizing possibility of generating new tissues for organ replacements, stroke victims and patients of many other diseases. Now, scientists at the Salk Institute have uncovered details about stem cell growth that could help improve regenerative therapies. While it was known that two key cellular processes--called Wnt and Activin--were needed for stem cells to grow into specific mature cells, no one knew exactly how these pathways worked together. The details of how Wnt and Activin ...

Many human communities want answers about the current status and future of Arctic marine mammals, including scientists who dedicate their lives to study them and indigenous people whose traditional ways of subsistence are intertwined with the fate of species such as ice seals, narwhals, walruses and polar bears. But there are many unknowns about the current status of 11 species of marine mammals who depend on Arctic sea ice to live, feed and breed, and about how their fragile habitat will evolve in a warming world. A recently published multinational study attempted ...

AUSTIN, Minn. (4/30/15) - Taking aspirin reduces a person's risk of colorectal cancer, but the molecular mechanisms involved have remained unknown until a recent discovery by The Hormel Institute, University of Minnesota. Researchers led by The Hormel Institute's Executive Director Dr. Zigang Dong and Associate Director Dr. Ann M. Bode, who co-lead the Cellular & Molecular Biology section, discovered that aspirin might exert its chemopreventive activity against colorectal cancer, at least partially, by normalizing the expression of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) ...