ITHACA, N.Y. – Have you ever noticed you find your candidate for political office more attractive than the opponent? New research from Cornell University shows you're not the only one. "We showed pictures of familiar and unfamiliar political leaders to voters in two different samples and found that familiarity and partisanship each significantly influenced how candidates were perceived," said the study's lead researcher, said Kevin M. Kniffin, a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell's Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. "For example, Democrats ...

PULLMAN, Wash. – With global food demand expected to outpace the availability of water by the year 2050, consumers can make a big difference in reducing the water used in livestock production. "It's important to know that small changes on the consumer side can help, and in fact may be necessary, to achieve big results in a production system," said Robin White, lead researcher of a Washington State University study appearing in the journal Food Policy. WSU economist Mike Brady demonstrated that the willingness of consumers to pay a little more for meat products labeled ...

More than 100 years since they were first discovered, some of the world's most bizarre fossils have been identified as distant relatives of humans, thanks to the work of University of Adelaide researchers. The fossils belong to 500-million-year-old blind water creatures, known to scientists as "vetulicolians" (pronounced: ve-TOO-lee-coal-ee-ans). Alien-like in appearance, these marine creatures were "filter-feeders" shaped like a figure-of-8. Their strange anatomy has meant that no-one has been able to place them accurately on the tree of life, until now. In a new ...

Philadelphia, PA, October 15, 2014 – Are deficits in attention limited to those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or is there a spectrum of attention function in the general population? The answer to this question has implications for psychiatric diagnoses and perhaps for society, broadly. A new study published in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry, by researchers at Cardiff University School of Medicine and the University of Bristol, suggests that there is a spectrum of attention, hyperactivity/impulsiveness and language function in society, ...

Galaxy clusters are the largest objects in the Universe held together by gravity but their formation is not well understood. The Spiderweb Galaxy (formally known as MRC 1138-262 [1]) and its surroundings have been studied for twenty years, using ESO and other telescopes [2], and is thought to be one of the best examples of a protocluster in the process of assembly, more than ten billion years ago. But Helmut Dannerbauer (University of Vienna, Austria) and his team strongly suspected that the story was far from complete. They wanted to probe the dark side of star formation ...

Obtaining access to private outpatient psychiatric care in the Boston, Chicago and Houston metropolitan areas is difficult, even for those with private insurance or those willing to pay out of pocket, a new study by Harvard researchers shows. The researchers, who posed on the phone as patients seeking appointments with individual psychiatrists, encountered numerous obstacles, including unreturned calls, wrong numbers and providers who were no longer taking new patients. They met with success in only one-quarter of their attempts, even after two tries. These and related ...

DURHAM, N.C. – Like discriminating thieves, prostate cancer tumors scavenge and hoard copper that is an essential element in the body. But such avarice may be a fatal weakness. Researchers at Duke Medicine have found a way to kill prostate cancer cells by delivering a trove of copper along with a drug that selectively destroys the diseased cells brimming with the mineral, leaving non-cancer cells healthy. The combination approach, which uses two drugs already commercially available for other uses, could soon be tested in clinical trials among patients with late-stage ...

A new study published in Cancer Research shows SIRT6—a protein known to inhibit the growth of liver and colon cancers—can promote the development of skin cancers by turning on an enzyme that increases inflammation, proliferation and survival of sun-damaged skin cells. Previously considered protective, SIRT6 is part of a family of seven proteins called sirtuins that help regulate genomic stability and prevent some of the genetic flaws associated with aging. SIRT6 helps repair DNA damage, which can lead to cancer. This study, in the journal's October 15 issue, ...

Risk factors for sexual assault, including young age and alcohol consumption, must be addressed when considering preventative strategies, suggests a new study, published today (15 October) in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (BJOG). The Danish study used data from all women attending the specialised centre for victims of sexual assault (CVSA) in Copenhagen for sexual assault or attempted sexual assault between March 2001 and December 2010. A total of 2541 women were included in the sample. The study aimed to describe the victims of sexual ...

It seems logical that a student who is interested in science as an academic subject would also know a lot about science, but new findings show that this link depends on the overall wealth of the country that the teen calls home. The research suggests that individual science achievement may be influenced as much by broad national-level resources as it is by personal interest and motivation. This is a photo of students in a chemistry class."Our results suggest that children with high levels of interest in science are able to turn their scientific interest into actual science ...

A new study, published online in the journal Age and Ageing today, shows that the homebound status of adults over the age of 65 in the aftermath of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake is still a serious public health concern. Of 2,327 older adults surveyed, approximately 20% were found to be homebound. A team of researchers led by Naoki Kondo of the University of Tokyo's School of Public Health studied data from the city of Rikuzentakata, an area that was seriously damaged by the disaster. Of its total population of 23,302 before the events of 2011, 1,773 people died ...

New Rochelle, October 14, 2014 –Big Data analytics are helping to provide answers to many complex problems in science and society, but they have not contributed to a better understanding climate science, despite an abundance of climate data. When it comes to analyzing the climate system, Big Data methods alone are not enough and sound scientific theory must guide data modeling techniques and results interpretation, according to an insightful article in Big Data, the highly innovative, peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available ...

ATHENS, Ohio (Oct. 14, 2014)—It's been millions of years since T. rex took its last breath, but a team led by Ohio University scientists is breathing life back into dinosaurs using high-powered computer simulations to model airflow through dinosaur snouts. The research has important implications for how dinosaurs used their noses to not only breathe but to enhance the sense of smell and cool their brains. "Dinosaurs were pretty 'nosy' animals," said Ohio University doctoral student Jason Bourke, lead author of the new study published today in the Anatomical Record. ...

In 2012, the "Mars One" project, led by a Dutch nonprofit, announced plans to establish the first human colony on the Red Planet by 2025. The mission would initially send four astronauts on a one-way trip to Mars, where they would spend the rest of their lives building the first permanent human settlement. It's a bold vision — particularly since Mars One claims that the entire mission can be built upon technologies that already exist. As its website states, establishing humans on Mars would be "the next giant leap for mankind." But engineers at MIT say the project ...

This week, an international team of researchers, led by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing, published in the journal Nature Genetics a brief genomic history of tomato breeding, based on sequencing of 360 varieties of the tomato plant. The C.M. Rick Tomato Genetics Resource Center at UC Davis played an important role in this study by providing seed of both cultivated tomato varieties and related wild species. This study, which builds on the first tomato genome sequence completed just two years ago, shows in great detail how the processes of early ...

Researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have chemically modified an anti-diabetic agent so as to make its action dependent on light. The resulting prototype compound, termed JB253, induces release of insulin only when pancreas cells are exposed to blue light. Synthetic, light-sensitive, molecular switches can be utilized to control biochemical signaling processes in living cells. In a new study, a research team led by LMU Professor Dirk Trauner (Chemical Biology and Genetics) and his colleague Johannes Broichhagen, in collaboration with Prof. Guy ...

Imagine the world waking up one morning to discover that all compasses pointed south instead of north. It's not as bizarre as it sounds. Earth's magnetic field has flipped – though not overnight – many times throughout the planet's history. Its dipole magnetic field, like that of a bar magnet, remains about the same intensity for thousands to millions of years, but for incompletely known reasons it occasionally weakens and, presumably over a few thousand years, reverses direction. Now, a new study by a team of scientists from Italy, France, Columbia University ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Scientists have sequenced the house fly genome for the first time, revealing robust immune genes, as one might expect from an insect that thrives in pathogen-rich dung piles and garbage heaps. The research, published Oct. 14 in the journal Genome Biology, will increase understanding of house fly genetics and biology and of how flies quickly adapt to resist insecticides, which could lead to novel control methods. Adult house flies (Musca domestica) carry and transmit more than 100 human and animal diseases, including salmonellosis, anthrax, typhoid ...

NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Ana on Monday, Oct. 13 after it formed in the Central Pacific Ocean. Ana formed on Oct. 13 at 5 p.m. EDT (11 a.m. HST) as Tropical Depression 2-C, about 920 miles (1,480 km) east-southeast of Hilo, Hawaii. By 9 p.m. EDT that day, the depression had strengthened into Tropical Depression Ana. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Ana on Monday, Oct. 13 at 11:11 UTC (7:11 a.m. EDT) and the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument gathered infrared data that showed some strong thunderstorms and cold cloud ...

WASHINGTON, DC— The 1934 drought was by far the most intense and far-reaching drought of the last 1,000 years in North America, and was caused in part by an atmospheric phenomenon that may have also led to the current drought in California, according to a new study. New research finds that the extent of the 1934 drought was approximately seven times larger than droughts of comparable intensity that struck North America between 1000 A.D. and 2005, and nearly 30 percent worse than the next most severe drought that struck the continent in 1580. "We noticed that ...

One of the planet's leading questions is how to produce enough food to feed the world in an increasingly variable climate. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations predicts that food production must rise 70% over the next 40 years to feed a growing global population, and plants are one major component of the necessary rise in food production. Plants—grains, cereals, fruits, vegetables, and more—feed humans directly and indirectly by supporting livestock. Current research must tap into our knowledge of how plants work to develop more efficient ...

From AGU's blogs: Health check reveals how glacier is declining due to warming climate http://blogs.agu.org/geospace/2014/10/13/health-check-reveals-glacier-declining-due-warming-climate/ Researchers from the British Geological Survey have taken the very first comprehensive health check of a rapidly melting glacier. Their latest study reveals that their icy patient, the Falljökull glacier in southeast Iceland, has been dramatically declining as it tries to adjust to recent changes in the climate. The new findings on Falljökull show unhealthy changes in the ...

URBANA, Ill. – For about a decade, Chinese consumers weren't getting what they paid for when they purchased Wuchang, a special brand of gourmet rice that has a peculiar scent. The quality was being diluted when less expensive rice was aromatized, added to the packages of the high-quality rice, and sold at the premium price. Researchers at the University of Illinois studied how the tampering scandal affected the public's perception of risk and their subsequent behavior. Because public anxiety over the fake rice issue was more pronounced in urban districts, the researchers ...

A Mount Sinai-led research team has discovered a new kind of stem cell that can become either a liver cell or a cell that lines liver blood vessels, according to a study published today in the journal Stem Cell Reports. The existence of such a cell type contradicts current theory on how organs arise from cell layers in the embryo, and may hold clues to origins of, and future treatment for, liver cancer. Thanks to stem cells, humans develop from a single cell into a complex being made up of more than 200 cell types. The original, single human stem cell, the fertilized embryo, ...

Montreal, October 14, 2014 – High doses of fish oil supplements, rich in omega-3 fatty acids, do not reduce atrial fibrillation, a common type of irregular heartbeat in which the heart can beat as fast as 150 beats a minute. The results of the AFFORD trial led by the Montreal Heart Institute were published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology on October 7th. For the trial, 337 patients with atrial fibrillation not receiving conventional antiarrhythmic therapy were randomly assigned to 4 grams of fish oil a day or to placebo for up to 16 months. 64.1 ...