Lawrence Livermore scientists for the first time have experimentally re-created the conditions that exist deep inside giant planets, such as Jupiter, Uranus and many of the planets recently discovered outside our solar system. Researchers can now re-create and accurately measure material properties that control how these planets evolve over time, information essential for understanding how these massive objects form. This study focused on carbon, the fourth most abundant element in the cosmos (after hydrogen, helium and oxygen), which has an important role in many types ...

DALLAS (SMU) – Training principals for new roles is key to U.S. Department of Education school reforms, according to a new report by SMU researchers. But insufficient training and support for principals to meet the new expectations is leading to a leadership crisis. Twenty percent of newly minted principals leave the profession after two years and seasoned professionals are opting for early retirement. Education researchers Lee Alvoid and Watt Lesley Black Jr. examine school districts at the forefront of supporting and training effective principals in their report "The ...

An organism is healthy thanks to a good maintenance system: the normal functioning of organs and environmental exposure cause damage to tissues, which need to be continuously repaired. This process is not yet well understood, but it is known that stem cells in the organs play a key role, and that when repair fails, the organism ages more quickly. Researchers from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) have "discovered one of the key genes that make up the maintenance mechanism for tissues" says Miguel Foronda, the first author of the manuscript. The study ...

One of the major road blocks to the design and development of new, more efficient solar cells may have been cleared. Researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed the first ab initio method – meaning a theoretical model free of adjustable or empirical parameters – for characterizing the properties of "hot carriers" in semiconductors. Hot carriers are electrical charge carriers - electrons and holes – with significantly higher energy than charge carriers at thermal equilibrium. "Hot carrier thermalization is a major source of ...

For decades, the story of spider evolution went like this: As insects became more and more diverse, with some species taking to the skies, spiders evolved new hunting strategies, including the ability to weave orb-shaped webs to trap their prey. From that single origin, the story goes, orb-weaver spiders diverged along different evolutionary paths, leading to today, where several species weave similar – though not identical – webs. It's a good story, but there's just one problem – Harvard scientists now know it's not true. The largest-ever phylogenetic study of ...

Soul singer Betty Everett once proclaimed, "If you want to know if he loves you so, it's in his kiss." But a new study by University of Chicago researchers suggests the difference between love and lust might be in the eyes after all. Specifically, where your date looks at you could indicate whether love or lust is in the cards. The new study found that eye patterns concentrate on a stranger's face if the viewer sees that person as a potential partner in romantic love, but the viewer gazes more at the other person's body if he or she is feeling sexual desire. That automatic ...

Populations of Atlantic salmon have a surprisingly good capacity to adjust to warmer temperatures that are being seen with climate change, a group of scientists at the University of Oslo and University of British Columbia have discovered. The finding about Atlantic species adds to recent UBC-supported research on heat tolerance of Pacific salmon. The new study, a collaboration between Norwegian and Canadian researchers, was recently published in Nature Communications. Funded by the Norwegian Research Council, it addressed questions around how climate change might affect ...

Contrary to conventional wisdom, a growing body of evidence shows that eating lean beef can reduce risk factors for heart disease, according to recent research by nutritional scientists. "This research adds to the significant evidence, including work previously done in our lab, that supports lean beef's role in a heart-healthy diet," said Penny M. Kris-Etherton, Distinguished Professor of Nutrition, Penn State. "This study shows that nutrient-rich lean beef can be included as part of a heart-healthy diet that reduces blood pressure, which can help lower the risk for cardiovascular ...

Colorectal cancer has been linked to carbohydrate-rich western diets, but the underlying mechanisms have been unclear. A study published by Cell Press July 17th in the journal Cell shows that gut microbes metabolize carbohydrates in the diet, causing intestinal cells to proliferate and form tumors in mice that are genetically predisposed to colorectal cancer. Treatment with antibiotics or a low-carbohydrate diet significantly reduced tumors in these mice, suggesting that these easy interventions could prevent a common type of colorectal cancer in humans. "Because hereditary ...

VIDEO: Many patients with advanced stages of cancer, AIDS, tuberculosis, and other diseases die from a condition called cachexia, which is characterized as a "wasting " syndrome that causes extreme thinness with... Click here for more information. Many patients with advanced stages of cancer, AIDS, tuberculosis, and other diseases die from a condition called cachexia, which is characterized as a "wasting" syndrome that causes extreme thinness with muscle weakness. ...

Obese women have a deficit in reward-based learning, but only when food is involved. Importantly, say researchers who report their findings in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on July 17, those same women have no trouble at all forming accurate associations when the reward is money instead of food. The findings may lead to new, gender-appropriate ways to tackle the obesity epidemic. "Our study shows that obesity may involve a specific impairment not in the processing of food itself, but rather in how obese individuals—or at least obese women—learn about cues in ...

Scientists have identified a crucial molecular key to healthy embryo implantation and pregnancy in a study that may offer new clues about the medical challenges of infertility/subfertility, abnormal placentation, and placenta previa. Multi-institutional teams led by researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center report their results in Cell Reports on July 17. The authors found that uterine expression of a gene called Wnt5a – a major signaling molecule in cell growth and movement in both embryo development and disease – is also critical to healthy embryo ...

Researchers have created the first comprehensive library of genetic switches in plants, setting the stage for scientists around the globe to better understand how plants adapt to environmental changes and to design more robust plants for future food security. The collection, which took more than 8 years and $5 million to create, contains about 2,000 clones of plant transcription factors, nature's genetic on/off switches. Manipulating these transcription factors enables scientists to improve plant traits such as cold resistance or seed quantity. The research will be published ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (July 17, 2014) – From fertilized egg to adult, the cells of the human body go through an astronomical number of divisions. During division of any of the body's roughly 30 trillion cells, DNA from the initial cell must be split precisely between the two resulting cells. Critical to successful cell division is the integrity of the centromere—a region of DNA on each chromosome where the cell division machinery attaches to segregate the chromosomes. For the segregation machinery to recognize this region, it must contain many copies of a pivotal protein known ...

VIDEO: One third of cancer patients are killed by a 'fat-burning' process known as cachexia. Click here for more information. Most cancer researchers are working on the biology of the tumour. However, Michele Petruzzelli, a member of Erwin Wagner's group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), has been looking for ways to attack the disease indirectly. He focused on the effects of tumours on the rest of the body, and not on the tumour itself. His work on the body's ...

La Jolla, Calif., July 17, 2014 - A new study by researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) has identified a new signal that triggers the events leading to insulin resistance in obesity. The signal causes inflammation in adipose tissue and leads to metabolic disease. The study, published July 17 in Cell Metabolism, suggests that blocking this signal may protect against the development of metabolic disease, type 2 diabetes, and other disorders caused by obesity-linked inflammation. "We have uncovered a precise mechanism that explains how ...

VIDEO: Salk scientists have discovered the gene responsible for the aggressive spread of a common lung cancer. Click here for more information. LA JOLLA—Scientists at the Salk Institute have identified a gene responsible for stopping the movement of cancer from the lungs to other parts of the body, indicating a new way to fight one of the world's deadliest cancers. By identifying the cause of this metastasis—which often happens quickly in lung cancer and results in a bleak ...

The mysterious condition once known as "water on the brain" became just a bit less murky this week thanks to a global research group led in part by a Case Western Reserve researcher. Professor Anthony Wynshaw-Boris, MD, PhD, is the co-principal investigator on a study that illustrates how the domino effect of one genetic error can contribute to excessive cerebrospinal fluid surrounding the brains of mice — a disorder known as hydrocephalus. The findings appear online July 17 in the journal Neuron. Cerebrospinal fluid provides a cushion between the organ and the skull, ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (July 17, 2014) – A signaling pathway once thought to have little if any role during embryogenesis is a key player in the formation of the front-most portion of developing vertebrate embryos. Moreover, signals emanating from this region—referred to as the "extreme anterior domain" (EAD)—orchestrate the complex choreography that gives rise to proper facial structure. The surprising findings, reported by Whitehead Institute scientists this week in the journal Cell Reports, shed new light on a key process of vertebrate embryonic development. "The results ...

(TORONTO, Canada – July 17, 2014) – The journal Cancer Cell today published research led by Dr. Tak Mak mapping the path of discovery to developing a potential anticancer agent. "What began with the question 'what makes a particular aggressive form of breast cancer cells keep growing?' turned into 10 years of systematic research to identify the enzyme PLK4 as a promising therapeutic target and develop a small molecule inhibitor to block it," says Dr. Mak, Director of The Campbell Family Institute for Breast Cancer Research at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University ...

Toronto – Quotas probably won't get more women into the boardroom in places like the U.S. and Canada. They have a better chance however in countries such as China or Germany where people place a higher value on obeying authority and conforming to cultural norms, say a pair of researchers at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. Their conclusions are published in the journal Organizational Dynamics and in a blog for the Harvard Business Review. It all comes down to a culture's "tightness" or "looseness" -- the degree to which a culture maintains social ...

New research out of Queen's University has shed light on how exercise and relaxation activities like yoga can positively impact people with social anxiety disorders. Adam Heenan, a Ph.D. candidate in the Clinical Psychology, has found that exercise and relaxation activities literally change the way people perceive the world, altering their perception so that they view the environment in a less threatening, less negative way. For people with mood and anxiety disorders, this is an important breakthrough. For his research, Mr. Heenan used point-light displays, a depiction ...

(PHILADELPHIA) – Research derived from early national experience of liver transplantation has shown that deceased donor liver transplants offered recipients better survival rates than living donor liver transplants, making them the preferred method of transplantation for most physicians. Now, the first data-driven study in over a decade disputes this notion. Penn Medicine researchers found that living donor transplant outcomes are superior to those found with deceased donors with appropriate donor selection and when surgeries are performed at an experienced center. The ...

WASHINGTON (July 17, 2014) — The road to finding a cure for HIV-1 is not without obstacles. However, thanks to cutting-edge research by Douglas Nixon, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues, performed at the George Washington University (GW), Oregon Health & Science University, the University of Rochester, and UC San Francisco, the scientific community is one step closer to finding a viable immunotherapy option for HIV-1, using an immune attack against a fossil virus buried in the genome. A major hurdle in eradicating HIV-1 has been outsmarting the frequent mutations, or changing ...

EUGENE, Ore. -- Soil deep in a crater dating to some 3.7 billion years ago contains evidence that Mars was once much warmer and wetter, says University of Oregon geologist Gregory Retallack, based on images and data captured by the rover Curiosity. NASA rovers have shown Martian landscapes littered with loose rocks from impacts or layered by catastrophic floods, rather than the smooth contours of soils that soften landscapes on Earth. However, recent images from Curiosity from the impact Gale Crater, Retallack said, reveal Earth-like soil profiles with cracked surfaces ...