They may have tiny brains, but bumblebees are capable of some remarkable learning feats, especially when they might get a tasty reward, according to two studies by University of Guelph researchers. PhD student Hamida Mirwan and Prof. Peter Kevan, School of Environmental Sciences, are studying bees' ability to learn by themselves and from each other. In the first study, published in February in Animal Cognition, the researchers found bees capable of learning to solve increasingly complex problems. The researchers presented bees with a series of artificial flowers that ...

A new UBC study reveals that corporate leaders are victims of herd mentality when adopting new innovations, sometimes with deadly consequences. The paper, by Sauder School of Business Associate Professor Marc-David L. Seidel and INSEAD Professor Henrich R. Greve, shows leaders tend to pursue innovations, even as complex as airplanes, based on early adoption by competitors not close scrutiny of the technical merits. "Business leaders tend to panic when new innovations are about to hit the market. They scramble to buy an apparent early leader," says Seidel. "Sometimes ...

Neuroscientists and bioengineers at Stanford are working together to solve a mystery: how does nature construct the different types of synapses that connect neurons -- the brain cells that monitor nerve impulses, control muscles and form thoughts. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Thomas C. Südhof, M.D., a professor of molecular and cellular physiology, and Stephen R. Quake, a professor of bioengineering, describe the diversity of the neurexin family of proteins. Neurexins help to create the synapses that connect neurons. Think ...

PHOENIX, Ariz. — March 17, 2014 — Using genomic analysis to study cancer in dogs can help develop new therapies for humans with cancer, according to a proof-of-concept study led by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen). Pure-breed dogs, whose genetics have been standardized by hundreds of years of human intervention, provide highly predictable genetic models useful in designing clinical trials, in which specific drugs are matched to the molecular profiles of human patients, according to the study published today in ...

West Orange, NJ. March 18, 2014. Kessler Foundation researchers have demonstrated for the first time ever that body temperature is elevated endogenously in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) and linked to worse fatigue. The article was published ahead of print on Feb. 21, 2014 in Archives of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation. Sumowski J, Leavitt V: Body temperature is elevated and linked to fatigue in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, even without heat exposure. doi:10.1016/j.apmr.2014.02.004. Researchers measured body temperature in 50 patients with ...

The view back in time—way back to the origins of the universe—just got clearer. Much clearer. A team of U.S. cosmologists using the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole announced this week that they have discovered the first direct evidence of the rapid inflation of the universe at the dawn of time, thanks in part to technology developed and built by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The BICEP2 camera relies, in part, on the extraordinary signal amplification made possible by NIST's superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs). The ...

Dr. Jason Jolliff is an oceanographer with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). "The emphasis here," he says, "is on developing models of the ocean environment to help the naval warfighter." His most recent paper, published in Ocean Modeling (March 2014), shows NRL can also forecast where oil will go following a major spill. "If you're going to do forecasting," he says, "you have to get the ocean circulation correct. It's fundamental to all else." Jolliff plugged the distribution of surface oil following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill—when it was still well ...

A recent study by a University of Northern British Columbia-based scientist associated with the UBC Faculty of Medicine and UNBC's Northern Medical Program demonstrates that Canada's drinking-age laws have a significant effect on youth mortality. The study was published yesterday in the international journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence. In it, Dr. Russell Callaghan writes that when compared to Canadian males slightly younger than the minimum legal drinking age, young men who are just older than the drinking age have significant and abrupt increases in mortality, especially ...

Trading food involves the trade of virtually embedded water used for production, and the amount of that water depends heavily on the climatic conditions in the production region: It takes, for instance, 2.700 liters of water to produce 1 kilo of cereals in Morocco, while the same kilo produced in Germany uses up only 520 liters. Analyzing the impact of trade on local water scarcity, our scientists found that it is not the amount of water used that counts most, but the origin of the water. While parts of India or the Middle East alleviate their water scarcity through importing ...

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University and colleagues used "big data" analytics to predict if a patient is suffering from aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, slower-moving cancers or non-cancerous lesions with 95 percent accuracy. If the tiny patterns they found in magnetic resonance images prove consistent in further studies, the technique may enable doctors to use an MRI scan to diagnose more aggressive cancers earlier and fast track these patients for therapy. Their work is published online in the journal Radiology at http://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/10.1148/radiol.14131384. ...

BUFFALO. N.Y. — Cognitive scientists may have produced the strongest evidence yet that humans have separate and distinct cognitive systems with which they can categorize, classify, and conceptualize their worlds. "Our finding that there are distinct, discrete systems has implications for the fields of child development and cognitive aging," says lead researcher, cognitive psychologist J. David Smith, PhD, of the University at Buffalo. "These distinct systems may have different developmental courses as the cortex matures," he says, "meaning that children may categorize ...

The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) already assessed the added benefit of ipilimumab in advanced melanoma in 2012. A considerable added benefit was found for patients who had already received previous treatment. In the new dossier compiled by the drug manufacturer, the drug was now compared with the appropriate comparator therapy dacarbazine specified by the Federal Joint Committee (G-BA) also for non-pretreated patients. Again, the manufacturer claimed a noticeable gain in survival time and thus an added benefit. This time, IQWiG did ...

DURHAM, NH –– In a paper published today in Nature Communications, an international team of scientists, including three from the University of New Hampshire's Space Science Center, uncovers the origin and cause of an extreme space weather event that occurred on July 22, 2012 at the sun and generated the fastest solar wind speed ever recorded directly by a solar wind instrument. The formation of the rare, powerful storm showed striking, novel features that were detected by a UNH-built instrument on board NASA's twin-satellite Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) ...

GPS technology has broadly advanced science and society's ability to pinpoint precise information, from driving directions to tracking ground motions during earthquakes. A new technique led by a researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego stands to improve weather models and hurricane forecasting by detecting precise conditions in the atmosphere through a new GPS system aboard airplanes. The first demonstration of the technique, detailed in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), is pushing the project's leaders toward a goal of broadly implementing ...

PITTSBURGH, Mar.14, 2014 – A structured, standardized approach to diagnose and treat sepsis in its early stages did not change survival chances for people who develop this deadly condition, according to a national, randomized clinical trial led by experts at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Their findings, available online and published in the May 1 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, could change the way sepsis is diagnosed and treated. Each year, sepsis, the body's response to severe infections, kills more people than breast cancer, prostate ...

It takes only a fraction of a second to hit the retweet button on Twitter. But if thousands of people all retweet at once, a piece of information 140 characters long can go viral almost instantly in today's Internet landscape. If that information is incorrect, especially in a crisis, it's hard for the social media community to gain control and push out accurate information, new research shows. University of Washington researchers have found that misinformation spread widely on Twitter after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing despite efforts by users to correct rumors ...

The green of St. Patrick's Day in the Mid-Atlantic was covered by white snow as a result of a late winter snow storm. The covering of the green was captured in a movie made at NASA using NOAA's GOES satellite data. The winter storm dropped snow totals from 6" to 12" of snow from Baltimore, Md. to Richmond, Va. The storm arrived during the evening of March 16 and continued through March 17. As of 1 p.m. EDT, light bands of snow continued to fall throughout the Washington, D.C. area. NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured the path the storm took through the Mid-Atlantic ...

Adult survivors of childhood cancer face significant health problems as they age and are five times more likely than their siblings to develop new cancers, heart and other serious health conditions beyond the age of 35, according to the latest findings from the world's largest study of childhood cancer survivors. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital led the research, results of which appear in the March 17 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The federally funded Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (CCSS) found that the health gap between survivors and their siblings ...

Of thousands of known species of Drosophila fruit flies, just one is known as a crop pest, depositing eggs inside ripening fruit so its maggots can feed and grow. New research from the University of California, Davis, shows the similarities and crucial differences between this pest and its close relatives — and that one related fly has potential to also become a pest. Drosophila flies, found worldwide, lay their eggs in rotting fruit. Drosophila suzukii, also referred to as "spotted-wing Drosophila" because the male has large black blotches on his wings (as do males of ...

The success of having software programmers work in pairs greatly depends on the ability level of those individual programmers, two UT Arlington College of Business professors have written in a recently released paper. The paper also concluded that using design patterns can greatly improve the quality of software programs and the productivity of programmers. Professor Radha Mahapatra and Associate Professor Sridhar Nerur, both in the Information Systems and Operations Management Department of the College of Business, recently published "Distributed Cognition in Software ...

Certain micro-organisms can constitute the active matter to develop bioinsecticides used for pest control. In this case, the researcher used a virus of the baculovirus family, which specifically infect invertebrates and naturally regulate the population of insects of this type on the ground. "We selected a virus that displayed the best insecticidal characteristics," she explained. "Using this virus we developed a large-scale production system by means of which we could treat a surface area equivalent to that of a football pitch using just two larvae." When a larva infected ...

Carbon nanotubes are becoming increasingly attractive for photovoltaic solar cells as a replacement to silicon. Researchers at Umeå University in Sweden have discovered that controlled placement of the carbon nanotubes into nano-structures produces a huge boost in electronic performance. Their groundbreaking results are published in the prestigious journal Advanced Materials. Carbon nanotubes, CNTs, are one dimensional nanoscale cylinders made of carbon atoms that possess very unique properties. For example, they have very high tensile strength and exceptional electron ...

DALLAS – March 18, 2014 – UT Southwestern Medical Center cardiologists have defined a novel heart failure symptom in advanced heart failure patients: shortness of breath while bending over, such as when putting on shoes. The condition, which UT Southwestern cardiologists named "bendopnea" (pronounced "bend-op-nee-ah"), is an easily detectable symptom that can help doctors diagnose excessive fluid retention in patients with heart failure, according to the findings published in a recent edition of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Heart Failure. "Some ...

This news release is available in German. The hunt is on – for new materials to be used in the next generation of batteries that may one day replace current lithium ion batteries. Today, the latter are commonplace and provide a reliable power source for smartphones, laptops and many other portable electrical devices. On the one hand, however, electric mobility and stationary electricity storage demand a greater number of more powerful batteries; and the high demand for lithium may eventually lead to a shortage of the raw material. This is why conceptually identical ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Scientists from Indiana University are part of a consortium that has described the transcriptome of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster in unprecedented detail, identifying thousands of new genes, transcripts and proteins. In the new work, published Sunday in the journal Nature, scientists studied the transcriptome -- the complete collection of RNAs produced by a genome -- at different stages of development, in diverse tissues, in cells growing in culture, and in flies stressed by environmental contaminants. To do so, they used contemporary sequencing ...