Cows learn better when housed together, which may help them adjust faster to complex new feeding and milking technologies on the modern farm, a new University of British Columbia study finds. The research, published today in PLOS ONE, shows dairy calves become better at learning when a "buddy system" is in place. The study also provides the first evidence that the standard practice of individually housing calves is associated with certain learning difficulties. "Pairing calves seems to change the way these animals are able to process information," said Dan Weary, corresponding ...

Blunt force trauma to the skull of a mummy with signs of Chagas disease may support homicide as cause of death, which is similar to previously described South American mummies, according to a study published February 26, 2014 in PLOS ONE by Stephanie Panzer from Trauma Center Murau, Germany, and colleagues, a study that has been directed by the paleopathologist Andreas Nerlich from Munich University. For over a hundred years, the unidentified mummy has been housed in the Bavarian State Archeological Collection in Germany. To better understand its origin and life history, ...

A small piece of freshly cut sapwood can filter out more than 99 percent of the bacteria E. coli from water, according to a paper published in PLOS ONE on February 26, 2014 by Michael Boutilier and Jongho Lee and colleagues from MIT. Researchers were interested in studying low-cost and easy-to-make options for filtering dirty water, a major cause of human mortality in the developing world. The sapwood of pine trees contains xylem, a porous tissue that moves sap from a tree's roots to its top through a system of vessels and pores. To investigate sapwood's water-filtering ...

The convergent evolution of tail shapes in diving birds may be driven by foraging style, according to a paper published in PLOS ONE on February 26, 2014 by Ryan Felice and Patrick O'Connor from Ohio University. Birds use their wings and specialized tail to maneuver through the air while flying. It turns out that the purpose of a bird's tail may have also aided in their diversification by allowing them to use a greater variety of foraging strategies. To better understand the relationship between bird tail shape and foraging strategy, researchers examined the tail skeletal ...

If you've run out of drinking water during a lakeside camping trip, there's a simple solution: Break off a branch from the nearest pine tree, peel away the bark, and slowly pour lake water through the stick. The improvised filter should trap any bacteria, producing fresh, uncontaminated water. In fact, an MIT team has discovered that this low-tech filtration system can produce up to four liters of drinking water a day — enough to quench the thirst of a typical person. In a paper published this week in the journal PLoS ONE, the researchers demonstrate that a small ...

In the last year or two, you may have had some moments — during elections, sporting events, or weather incidents — when you found yourself sending out a flurry of messages on social media sites such as Twitter. You are not alone, of course: Such events generate a huge volume of social-media activity. Now a new study published by researchers in MIT's Senseable City Lab shows that social-media messages grow shorter as the volume of activity rises at these particular times. "This helps us better understand what is going on — the way we respond to things becomes faster ...

Remember that sound bite you heard on the radio this morning? The grocery items your spouse asked you to pick up? Chances are, you won't. Researchers at the University of Iowa have found that when it comes to memory, we don't remember things we hear nearly as well as things we see or touch. "As it turns out, there is merit to the Chinese proverb 'I hear, and I forget; I see, and I remember," says lead author of the study and UI graduate student, James Bigelow. "We tend to think that the parts of our brain wired for memory are integrated. But our findings indicate ...

BOSTON (Feb. 27) – A study in this week's New England Journal of Medicine potentially has significant implications for prenatal testing for major fetal chromosome abnormalities. The study found that in a head-to-head comparison of noninvasive prenatal testing using cell free DNA (cfDNA) to standard screening methods, cfDNA testing (verifi® prenatal test, Illumina, Inc.) significantly reduced the rate of false positive results and had significantly higher positive predictive values for the detection of fetal trisomies 21 and 18. A team of scientists, led by Diana W. Bianchi, ...

PHILADELPHIA – A simple vision test performed on the sidelines may help determine whether athletes have suffered a concussion, according to a study released today that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 66th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, April 26 to May 3, 2014. The study provides more evidence that the King-Devick test, a one-minute test where athletes read single-digit numbers on index cards, can be used in addition to other tests to increase the accuracy in diagnosing concussion. For the study, 217 members of the University of Florida men's ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- An Indiana University study in collaboration with medical researchers from Karolinska Institute in Stockholm has found that advancing paternal age at childbearing can lead to higher rates of psychiatric and academic problems in offspring than previously estimated. Examining an immense data set -- everyone born in Sweden from 1973 until 2001 -- the researchers documented a compelling association between advancing paternal age at childbearing and numerous psychiatric disorders and educational problems in their children, including autism, ADHD, bipolar ...

Bethesda, MD — Pay-for-performance—reimbursing health care providers based on the results they achieved with their patients as a way to improve quality and efficiency—has become a major component of health reforms in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other affluent countries. Although the approach has also become popular in the developing world, there has been little evaluation of its impact. A new study, being released today as a Web First by Health Affairs, examines the effects of pay-for-performance, combined with capitation, in China's largely rural Ningxia ...

Stars, diamonds, circles. Rather than your average bowl of Lucky Charms, these are three-dimensional cell cultures generated by an exciting new digital microfluidics platform, the results of which have been published in Nature Communications this week by researchers at the University of Toronto. The tool, which can be used to study cells in cost-efficient, three-dimensional microgels, may hold the key to personalized medicine applications in the future. "We already know that the microenvironment can greatly influence cell fate," says Irwin A. Eydelnant, recent doctoral ...

Helsinki/Jülich/Leipzig. Scientists made an important step in order to better understand the relationships between vegetation and climate. So-called extremely low-volatility organic compounds, which are produced by plants, could be detected for the first time during field and laboratory experiments in Finland and Germany. These organic species contribute to the formation of aerosol that can affect climate and air quality, they report in this week's issue of the journal Nature. The results may help to explain discrepancies between observations and theories about how volatile ...

Low-molecular-weight heparin is commonly used in surgeries to prevent dangerous blood clots. But when patients experience the other extreme – uncontrolled bleeding – in response to low-molecular-weight heparin, there is no antidote. Now researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created a synthetic form of low-molecular-weight heparin that can be reversed if things go wrong and would be safer for patients with poor kidney function. "When doctors talk to me about the kind of heparin they want to use during ...

In the span of a decade, Canada has gone from ecstasy importer to global supplier of the illegal party drug. At the same time, even newer designer highs—sometimes just a mouse-click away—are flooding the drug market faster than legislation can keep pace. It's a worrying problem that University of Alberta researchers say requires more education to help Canadians understand the very real, deadly risks of designer drug use. "The chemists who are making these drugs are coming up with about 10 new drugs per year; the legislation cannot keep up with the market," said Alan ...

Loads of studies over the years have shown that children who were breastfed score higher on IQ tests and perform better in school, but the reason why remained unclear. Is it the mother-baby bonding time, something in the milk itself or some unseen attribute of mothers who breastfeed their babies? Now a new study by sociologists at Brigham Young University pinpoints two parenting skills as the real source of this cognitive boost: Responding to children's emotional cues and reading to children starting at 9 months of age. Breastfeeding mothers tend to do both of those ...

HONOLULU – Twenty-five years after the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, beaches on the Alaska Peninsula hundreds of kilometers from the incident still harbor small hidden pockets of surprisingly unchanged oil, according to new research being presented here today. The focus of the study is to learn how oil persists long after a spill. Researchers presenting the work caution that the amount of oil being studied is a trace of what was originally spilled and that results from these sites cannot be simply extrapolated to the entire spill area. The ...

In the cells of humans and other organisms, only a subset of genes are active at any given time, depending largely on the stage of life and the particular duties of the cell. Cells use different molecular mechanisms to orchestrate the activation and deactivation of genes as needed. One central mechanism is an intricate DNA packaging system that either shields genes from activation or exposes them for use. In this system, the DNA strand, with its genes, is coiled around molecules known as histones, which themselves are assembled into larger entities called nucleosomes. ...

South Africa has been financing domestic rainwater harvesting tanks in informal low-income settlements and rural areas in five of that nation's nine provinces. But pathogens inhabit such harvested rainwater, potentially posing a public health hazard, especially for children and immunocompromised individuals, according to a team from the University of Stellenbosch. The research was published ahead of print in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. International studies had indicated that harvested rainwater frequently harbors pathogens, and that, in light of the financing ...

Extremely hot temperatures over land have dramatically and unequivocally increased in number and area despite claims that the rise in global average temperatures has slowed over the past 10 to 20 years. Scientists from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science and international colleagues made the finding when they focused their research on the rise of temperatures at the extreme end of the spectrum where impacts are felt the most. "It quickly became clear, the so-called "hiatus" in global average temperatures did not stop the rise in the number, intensity ...

Activation of beta-catenin, the primary mediator of the ubiquitous Wnt signaling pathway, alters the immune system in lasting and harmful ways, a team of Chicago-based researchers demonstrate in the February 26, 2014, issue of Science Translational Medicine. An increase in beta-catenin in certain types of T cells—a class of white blood cells—causes chronic inflammation in the intestine and colon, eventually leading to cancer. The same mechanism is used by colon cancer to propagate itself. The researchers combine data from patients suffering from colitis or colon cancer ...

This is a Hubble Space Telescope composite image of a supernova explosion designated SN 2014J in the galaxy M82. At a distance of approximately 11.5 million light-years from Earth it is the closest supernova of its type discovered in the past few decades. The explosion is categorized as a Type Ia supernova, which is theorized to be triggered in binary systems consisting of a white dwarf and another star — which could be a second white dwarf, a star like our sun, or a giant star. Astronomers using a ground-based telescope discovered the explosion on January 21, 2014. This ...

Brown marmorated stink bugs cause millions of dollars in crop losses across the United States because of the damage their saliva does to plant tissues. Researchers at Penn State have developed methods to extract the insect saliva and identify the major protein components, which could lead to new pest control approaches. "Until now, essentially nothing was known about the composition of stink bug saliva, which is surprising given the importance of these insects as pests and the fact that their saliva is the primary cause of feeding injury to plants and crop losses," said ...

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, released the largest and most comprehensive health and lifestyle analysis of people from a range of Hispanic/Latino origins. The data will enable individuals, communities, and policy makers to tailor better health intervention strategies. "This study lays the foundation for future research on the possible causes of chronic diseases and ways to prevent them, and to help us understand the reasons why Hispanics and Latinos live longer than the general population," said Gregory Talavera, ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A rodent in a maze is a staple — even a stereotype — of experimental psychology research. But the maze in the lab of Rebecca Burwell, professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown University, is not your grandfather's apparatus. In a new video article published in the Journal of Visualized Experiments, Burwell's research group demonstrates in full detail how the maze can be used to perform automated visual cognitive research tasks with great efficiency. The article is available here: http://www.jove.com/video/51316/automated-visual-cognitive-tasks-for-recording-neural-activity-using The ...