A research team from The University of Nottingham has carried out the first molecular characterisation of the African elephant's adipose tissue — body fat. This new information will form the basis of future studies aimed at securing the health and future survival of captive elephants. The population of captive elephants, both Asian and African, in Europe and North America is not self-sustaining, largely due to poor fertility, resulting in a fewer baby elephants being born. It is acknowledged that if a solution for these reproductive difficulties cannot be found quickly, ...

Millions of microbial species populate the world, but so far only a few have been identified due to the inability of most microbes to grow in the laboratory. Edgar Goluch, an engineer, and Slava Epstein, a biologist, aim to change this. The pair, both researchers at Northeastern University, has developed a device that allows scientists to cultivate a single species of bacteria that can then be studied and identified. Goluch's previous research devices incorporated permeable membranes that allow sequestered bacteria to be exposed to the nutrients and molecules of their ...

(Boston)--Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a significant health issue faced by women veterans, but little has been known up until now about their preferences for IPV-related care. A new study has found that most of these women support routine screening for IPV and want options, follow-up support, transparent documentation and Veterans Health Administration (VHA) and community resources. These findings appear in the journal Research in Nursing and Health. Although women of all socio-demographic groups are at risk for IPV, population-based research suggests that women ...

This news release is available in German and French. In Switzerland, between 7000 and 8000 persons fall ill with a campylobacter infection annually. This makes it the most frequent bacterial disease transmitted through food. Contamination of chicken meat with campylobacter bacteria during the slaughtering process is one of the known causes of the infection. An increase of campylobacteriosis case numbers is being observed throughout Europe. Human cases of campylobacteriosis must be reported to the relevant authorities in Switzerland. In Switzerland, an unusual increase ...

Persons with reduced levels of the TREM2 protein could be at greater risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease or frontotemporal dementia, according to an international study which included the participation of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Sant Pau Biomedical Research Institute (IIB Sant Pau). The study, published in Science Translational Medicine, reveals the molecular mechanism by which the mutated forms of this protein prevent the amyloid waste cleaning process from functioning correctly and detects a lower level of ...

"Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part," wrote Herman Melville in Moby Dick. Today, we no longer dread whales, but their subtlety remains. "For a long time, whales have been considered too rare to make much of a difference in the oceans," notes University of Vermont conservation biologist Joe Roman. That was a mistake. In a new paper, Roman and a team of biologists have tallied several decades of research on whales from around the world; it shows that whales, in fact, make a huge difference—they ...

A new paper by Dr. Jeremy Ross from the University of Oklahoma describes the use of tiny devices strapped to birds' backs called geolocators, which capture the individual migration routes of lark sparrows in North America. By sensing the light levels, these backpacks can pinpoint the location of a bird anywhere in the world, even if retrieving the data-logger can sometimes pose a major problem. This study, published in the online journal Animal Migration, mapped for the first time the routes traveled by three lark sparrows after they left their breeding grounds in Ohio. ...

There's more to trying to slow down climate change than just cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Technology, policies or plans that aim to do so should also take environmental factors such as water usage into account. A more integrated approach might make some options considerably more attractive than others, especially when implemented in arid countries such as Australia, advise Philip Wallis of Monash University in Australia and colleagues, in an article in Springer's journal Climatic Change. The researchers considered the example of Australia to show how water usage ...

VIDEO: Tree frogs reach great heights with their jumps, but do not cover much distance. Click here for more information. A frog's jump is not as simple as it seems....Australian scientists have discovered that different species adopt different jumping styles depending on their environment. Lead researcher, Miss Marta Vidal-Garcia ( PhD candidate, Australian National University ), found that tree dwelling frogs reached great heights but didn't cover much distance with their ...

AURORA, Colo. (July 3, 2014) – Physicians from the University of Colorado School of Medicine in collaboration with an international team of researchers have demonstrated that screening of genetically susceptible infants can lead to the diagnosis of celiac disease at a very early age. The collaborative group studied 6,403 children with specific genetic markers from birth to identify the factors involved in the development of both celiac disease and type 1 diabetes. The children are from the United States, Finland, Germany and Sweden and are part of The Environmental Determinants ...

Every organism has one aim: to survive. Its body cells all work in concert to keep it alive. They do so through finely tuned means of communication. Together with cooperation partners from Berlin and Cambridge, scientists at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg have now successfully revealed for the first time the laws by which cells translate signals from their surroundings into internal signals. Like an isolated note in a symphony orchestra, an isolated signal in the cell is of subordinate importance. "What is important ...

How nutrients are metabolised and how neurons communicate in the brain are just some of the messages coded by the 3 billion letters that make up the human genome. The detection and characterisation of the genes present in this mass of information is a complex task that has been a source of ongoing debate since the first systematic attempts by the Human Genome Project more than ten years ago. A study led by Alfonso Valencia, Vice-Director of Basic Research at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) and head of the Structural Computational Biology Group, and ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Deep inside the brains of people with dementia and Lou Gehrig's disease, globs of abnormal protein gum up the inner workings of brain cells – dooming them to an early death. But boosting those cells' natural ability to clean up those clogs might hold the key to better treatment for such conditions. That's the key finding of new research from a University of Michigan Medical School physician scientist and his colleagues in California and the United Kingdom. They reported their latest findings this week in the journal Nature Chemical Biology. Though ...

Iron is present in tiny concentrations in seawater. On the order of a few billionths of a gram in a liter. "I did a calculation once on a ton of ocean water," says Seth John, an assistant professor in the department of marine science at the University of South Carolina. "The amount of iron in that ton of water would weigh about as much as a single eyelash." Given that there is so little iron in seawater, one might conclude that its presence there is inconsequential. Hardly. Iron is one of the essential elements of life. Found in enzymes like myoglobin and hemoglobin ...

The July feature of Science Elements, the American Chemical Society's (ACS') weekly podcast series, shines the spotlight on the science of fireworks, just in time for the July 4th holiday. The episode is available at http://www.acs.org/scienceelements. Independence Day is a time for picnics, parades and, of course, fireworks. Those beautiful explosions in the sky would be nothing without chemistry. In today's episode, Science Elements talks to the man who literally wrote the book on fireworks. "Everything you see in a fireworks display is chemistry in action," says ...

With this week marking the tenth anniversary of the rezoning of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, prominent marine scientists from around the world have gathered in Canberra to discuss its successes - both expected and unexpected. "At the time, the rezoning of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park was the largest marine conservation measure in the world," says Professor Garry Russ from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE). "The Reef went from being five percent protected to about 30 percent. So now, a third of it is green, or no-take, zones." Designed ...

Scientists at a coral reef symposium in Canberra this week are examining degraded reefs off the Northwest Australian coast in an effort to determine what lies ahead for the Great Barrier Reef. "Reefs north of Exmouth have experienced large-scale bleaching in the past five years," says Professor Malcolm McCulloch from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at the University of Western Australia. McCulloch is in the midst of an autopsy of this Pilbara bleaching event, collecting and analysing both living and dead stony coral. He says the bleaching ...

A new report, Technological Breakthroughs for Scientific Progress (TECHBREAK), has been published today by the European Science Foundation. The European Science Foundation (ESF) was contacted at the end of 2009 to conduct a foresight activity for the European Space Agency (ESA), addressing the matter of technological breakthroughs for space originating in the non-space sector. A "Forward Look" project jointly funded by ESA and ESF and called 'TECHBREAK' was initiated as a result. Its goals were to forecast the development of such breakthrough technologies to enable novel ...

Researchers from the University of Cadiz have made an unprecedented discovery: they have shown that there are five large accumulations of plastic debris in the open oceans, coinciding with the five main ocean gyres in the surface waters of the ocean. As well as the well-known accumulation of plastic rubbish in the North Pacific, these experts have proven the existence of similar accumulations in the centre of the North Atlantic, the South Pacific, the South Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. And they have gone one step further to state that the surface water of the centre ...

Under the tutelage of Junior Professor Dr Simon Ebbinghaus, researchers from Bochum have demonstrated that the water surrounding the dissolved substances inside the cell plays a crucial role with regard to protein stability, which has frequently been neglected in the past. The researchers have published the results of their study, gained by means of simple model systems and thermodynamic analyses, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS). The results have been obtained following a collaboration under the umbrella of the Excellence Cluster RESOLV. The researchers ...

Researchers at the Royal Veterinary College have identified a highly specialised ligament structure that is thought to prevent giraffes' legs from collapsing under the immense weight of these animals. "Giraffes are heavy animals (around 1000 kg), but have unusually skinny limb bones for an animal of this size" explained lead investigator Christ Basu, a PhD student in the Structure & Motion Lab. "This means their leg bones are under high levels of mechanical stress." In giraffes, the equivalents to our metatarsal bone (in the foot) and metacarpal bone (in the hand) are ...

Contrary to what was thought, sequences of DNA called enhancers – which control a gene's output – find their targets long before they are activated during embryonic development, scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, have found. Their study, published online today in Nature, also reveals that, surprisingly, the degree of complexity of enhancers' interactions in the 'simple' fruit fly Drosophila is comparable to what is seen in vertebrates. "As an embryo develops, there are huge changes in transcription, much of which drives ...

An international team of researchers identified a pathogenic mechanism that is common to several neurodegenerative diseases. The findings suggest that it may be possible to slow the progression of dementia even after the onset of symptoms. The relentless increase in the incidence of dementia in aging societies poses an enormous challenge to health-care systems. An international team of researchers led by Professor Christian Haass and Gernot Kleinberger at the LMU's Adolf-Butenandt-Institute and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), has now elucidated ...

Paleontologists of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich are currently studying a new specimen of Archaeopteryx, which reveals previously unknown features of the plumage. The initial findings shed light on the original function of feathers and their recruitment for flight. A century and a half after its discovery and a mere 150 million years or so since it took to the air, Archaeopteryx still has surprises in store: The eleventh specimen of the iconic "basal bird" so far discovered turns out to have the best preserved plumage of all, permitting detailed comparisons ...

Researchers from the Cochrane Infectious Diseases Group, hosted at LSTM, conducted an independent review of the effects of adding a single dose of primaquine (PQ) to malaria treatment to prevent the transmission of the disease. Mosquitoes become infected with Plasmodium falciparum when they ingest gametocyte-stage parasites from an infected person's blood. PQ is an antimalarial drug that does not cure malaria illness, but is known to kill the gametocyte stage of the P falciparum parasite, thus potentially limiting transmission to further humans. PQ is known to have potentially ...