Some birds come first -- a new approach to species conservation
2014-04-10
New Haven, Conn.— A Yale-led research team has developed a new approach to species conservation that prioritizes genetic and geographic rarity and applied it to all 9,993 known bird species.
"To date, conservation has emphasized the number of species, treating all species as equal," said Walter Jetz, the Yale evolutionary biologist who is lead author of a paper published April 10 in Current Biology. "But not all species are equal in their genetic or geographic rarity. We provide a framework for how such species information could be used for prioritizing conservation."
Worldwide, ...
Penn study finds mechanism that regulates lung function in disease Birt-Hogg-Dube syndrome
2014-04-10
(PHILADELPHIA) – Researchers at Penn Medicine have discovered that the tumor suppressor gene folliculin (FLCN) is essential to normal lung function in patients with the rare disease Birt-Hogg-Dube (BHD) syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects the lungs, skin and kidneys. Folliculin's absence or mutated state has a cascading effect that leads to deteriorated lung integrity and an impairment of lung function, as reported in their findings in the current issue of Cell Reports.
"We discovered that without normal FLCN the alveolar epithelial cells (AEC) in these patients' ...
Ancient 'spider' images reveal eye-opening secrets
2014-04-10
VIDEO:
This is a video showing the 305-million-year-old harvestman fossil.
Click here for more information.
Stunning images of a 305-million-year-old harvestman fossil reveal ancestors of the modern-day arachnids had two sets of eyes rather than one.
The researchers say their findings, published in the journal Current Biology, add significant detail to the evolutionary story of this diverse and highly successful group of arthropods, which are found on every continent except Antarctica.
University ...
Poor mimics can succeed as long as they mimic the right trait
2014-04-10
There are both perfect and imperfect mimics in nature. An imperfect mimic might have a different body shape, size or colour pattern arrangement compared to the species it mimics.
Researchers have long been puzzled by the way poor mimicry can still be effective in fooling predators not to attack. In the journal Current Biology, researchers from Stockholm University now present a novel solution to the question of imperfect mimicry.
Mimicry is when animals have the appearance of another species in order to avoid being attacked. For instance, hoverflies have a similar ...
Enzyme 'wrench' could be key to stronger, more effective antibiotics
2014-04-10
Builders and factory workers know that getting a job done right requires precision and specialized tools. The same is true when you're building antibiotic compounds at the molecular level. New findings from North Carolina State University may turn an enzyme that acts as a specialized "wrench" in antibiotic assembly into a set of wrenches that will allow for greater customization. By modifying this enzyme, scientists hope to be able to design and synthesize stronger, more adaptable antibiotics from less expensive, natural compounds.
Kirromycin is a commonly known antibiotic ...
NEJM: High-risk seniors surgery decisions should be patient-centered, & physician led
2014-04-10
Surgery for frail, senior citizen patients can be risky. A new patient-centered, team-based approach to deciding whether these high-risk patients will benefit from surgery is championed in an April 10 Perspective of the New England Journal of Medicine. The Perspective suggests that the decision to have surgery must balance the advantages and disadvantages of surgical and non-surgical treatment as well as the patient's values and goals in a team-based setting that includes the patient, his or her family, the surgeon, the primary care physician and the physician anesthesiologist.
One ...
Virus structure inspires novel understanding of onion-like carbon nanoparticles
2014-04-10
Symmetry is ubiquitous in the natural world. It occurs in gemstones and snowflakes and even in biology, an area typically associated with complexity and diversity. There are striking examples: the shapes of virus particles, such as those causing the common cold, are highly symmetrical and look like tiny footballs.
A research programme led by Reidun Twarock at the University of York, UK has developed new mathematical tools to better understand the implications of this high degree of symmetry in these systems. The group pioneered a mathematical theory that reveals unprecedented ...
New towns going up in developing nations pose major risk to the poor
2014-04-10
DENVER (April 10, 2014) – Satellite city projects across the developing world are putting an increasing number of poor people at risk to natural hazards and climate change, according to a new study from the University of Colorado Denver.
Throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America `new towns' are rapidly being built on the outskirts of major cities with the goal of relieving population pressures, according to study author Andrew Rumbach, PhD, assistant professor of planning and design at CU Denver's College of Architecture and Planning.
The towns often sit in high flood ...
Four-eyed daddy longlegs fossil fills in evolutionary tree
2014-04-10
Living harvestmen—a group of arachnids more commonly known as daddy longlegs—have a single pair of eyes that help them navigate habitats in every continent except Antarctica. But a newly described 305-million-year-old fossil found in eastern France shows that wasn't always the case. New research recently published in the journal Current Biology and led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History and the University of Manchester indicates that primitive harvestmen had two pairs of eyes, adding significant details to the evolutionary story of this diverse and ...
New research on gigabit wireless communications
2014-04-10
Research on gigabit wireless communications has been presented by researchers from the University of Bristol at the world's leading wireless communications and networking conference, IEEE WCNC 2014, in Turkey earlier this week [Monday 6 to Wednesday 9 April].
The two research papers, led by Andrew Nix, Professor of Wireless Communication Systems and Dr Simon Armour, Senior Lecturer in Software Radio, from the University's Communication Systems and Networks research group in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, could have significant implications for ...
Thermoelectric generator on glass fabric for wearable electronic devices
2014-04-10
Wearable computers or devices have been hailed as the next generation of mobile electronic gadgets, from smart watches to smart glasses to smart pacemakers. For electronics to be worn by a user, they must be light, flexible, and equipped with a power source, which could be a portable, long-lasting battery or no battery at all but a generator. How to supply power in a stable and reliable manner is one of the most critical issues to commercialize wearable devices.
A team of KAIST researchers headed by Byung Jin Cho, a professor of electrical engineering, proposed a solution ...
Common sense health for young adult cancer survivors
2014-04-10
Many factors influence the life expectancy of childhood cancer survivors: not getting enough exercise, being underweight, and being worried about their future health or their health insurance. These are the findings of research led by Cheryl Cox of the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in the US, published in Springer's Journal of Cancer Survivorship. The study found that, on average, childhood cancer survivors passed away before they were 40 years old.
Health-related behavior, self-perceived health status, and health concerns often influence mortality in the general ...
Iconic boreal bird species declining in the Adirondacks, study says
2014-04-10
A new study from the Wildlife Conservation Society finds that several iconic Adirondack birds are in trouble, with declines driven by the size of their wetland habitats, how connected these wetlands are to one another, and how near they are to human infrastructure.
The Adirondack Park represents the southern range extent for several species of boreal forest birds in eastern North America. Like any species at the edge of its range, they face challenges in this environment. The habitats of these boreal specialists – cool, wet, sphagnum-draped bogs and swampy woods – are ...
Uncovering a new angle on mental distance
2014-04-10
Why does the second hour of a journey seem shorter than the first? According to research from University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) and the Rotman School of Management, the answer lies in how we're physically oriented in space.
In a series of six studies, Sam Maglio, an assistant professor in UTSC's Department of Management, demonstrated that a person's orientation — the direction they are headed — changed how they thought of an object or event.
The research is forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
"Feeling ...
Sunlight generates hydrogen in new porous silicon
2014-04-10
Porous silicon manufactured in a bottom up procedure using solar energy can be used to generate hydrogen from water, according to a team of Penn State mechanical engineers, who also see applications for batteries, biosensors and optical electronics as outlets for this new material.
The surface area of this porous silicon is high," said Donghai Wang, assistant professor of mechanical engineering. "It is widely used and has a lot of applications."
The standard method for manufacturing porous silicon is a subtraction method, similar to making a sculpture.
"Silicon is ...
Extending terrorism insurance program could lower federal costs, study finds
2014-04-10
Federal spending after future terrorist attacks on the United States may be higher if the nation's terrorism risk insurance program is allowed to expire, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
The analysis finds that in a terrorist attack with losses up to $50 billion, the federal government would spend more helping to cover losses than if it had continued to support a national terrorism risk insurance program.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism risk insurance quickly became either unavailable or very expensive. Congress reacted by ...
Health of ecosystems on US golf courses better than predicted
2014-04-10
COLUMBIA, Mo. – Currently, there are more than 18,300 golf courses in the U.S. covering over 2.7 million acres. The ecological impacts of golf courses are not always straightforward with popular opinion suggesting that environmentally, golf courses have a negative impact on ecosystems. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have determined that golf courses can offer a viable habitat for stream salamanders, and enhanced management practices may be beneficial to ecosystems within golf courses.
"If you look at the literature on golf courses, historically they get ...
Researchers bolster development of programmable quantum computers
2014-04-10
University of Chicago researchers and their colleagues at University College London have performed a proof-of-concept experiment that will aid the future development of programmable quantum computers.
Many complex problems are difficult and slow to solve using conventional computers, and over the last several years, research has grown steadily toward developing quantum computation. In particular, optimization problems such as the "traveling salesman" problem, which calculates the shortest possible route needed to visit a set of towns, become intractable as the number ...
MU researchers find rare fossilized embryos more than 500 million years old
2014-04-10
COLUMBIA, Mo. – The Cambrian Period is a time when most phyla of marine invertebrates first appeared in the fossil record. Also dubbed the "Cambrian explosion," fossilized records from this time provide glimpses into evolutionary biology when the world's ecosystems rapidly changed and diversified. Most fossils show the organisms' skeletal structure, which may or may not give researchers accurate pictures of these prehistoric organisms. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have found rare, fossilized embryos they believe were undiscovered previously. Their methods ...
Gutting of campaign finance laws enhances influence of corporations and wealthy Americans
2014-04-10
PRINCETON, N.J.—Affluent individuals and business corporations already have vastly more influence on federal government policy than average citizens, according to recently released research by Princeton University and Northwestern University. This research suggests that the Supreme Court's continuing attack on campaign finance laws is further increasing the political clout of business firms and the wealthy.
Martin Gilens, professor of politics at Princeton, and Benjamin I. Page, Gordon Scott Fulcher Professor of Decision Making, of Northwestern University used a unique ...
Pseudo-mathematics and financial charlatanism
2014-04-10
Providence, RI---Your financial advisor calls you up to suggest a new
investment scheme. Drawing on 20 years of data, he has set his
computer to work on this question: If you had invested according to
this scheme in the past, which portfolio would have been the best?
His computer assembled thousands of such simulated portfolios and
calculated for each one an industry-standard measure of return on
risk. Out of this gargantuan calculation, your advisor has chosen the
optimal portfolio. After briefly reminding you of the oft-repeated
slogan that "past performance ...
Name of new weakly electric fish species reflects hope for peace in Central Africa
2014-04-10
Two new species of weakly electric fishes from the Congo River basin are described in the open access journal ZooKeys. One of them, known from only a single specimen, is named "Petrocephalus boboto." "Boboto" is the word for peace in the Lingala language, the lingua franca of the Congo River, reflecting the authors' hope for peace in troubled Central Africa.
On a 2010 field trip to the Congo River of Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the riverside village of Yangambi-Lokélé, French ichthyologist Sébastien Lavoué of the Taiwan Institute of Oceanography and American ...
Planaria deploy an ancient gene expression program in the course of organ regeneration
2014-04-10
KANSAS CITY, MO - As multicellular creatures go, planaria worms are hardly glamorous. To say they appear rudimentary is more like it. These tiny aquatic flatworms that troll ponds and standing water resemble brown tubes equipped with just the basics: a pair of beady light-sensing "eyespots" on their head and a feeding tube called the pharynx (which doubles as the excretory tract) that protrudes from a belly sac to suck up food. It's hard to feel kinship with them.
But admiration is another thing, because many planaria species regenerate in wondrous ways—namely, when ...
Scarless wound healing -- applying lessons learned from fetal stem cells
2014-04-10
New Rochelle, NY, April 10, 2014—In early fetal development, skin wounds undergo regeneration and healing without scar formation. This mechanism of wound healing later disappears, but by studying the fetal stem cells capable of this scarless wound healing, researchers may be able to apply these mechanisms to develop cell-based approaches able to minimize scarring in adult wounds, as described in a Critical Review article published in Advances in Wound Care, a monthly publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers and an Official Journal of the Wound Healing Society. ...
Therapeutic options and bladder-preserving strategies in bladder cancer
2014-04-10
New Rochelle, NY, April 10, 2014—Men are three to four times more likely to get bladder cancer than women. The possible causes for this greater risk among men, the importance of early and accurate diagnosis, and the scope of available and emerging surgical, chemotherapeutic, and immunotherapeutic approaches for treating bladder cancer in men are the focus of a comprehensive Review article in Journal of Men's Health, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Journal of Men's Health website.
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