MADISON, Wis. — Field ecologists go to great lengths to get data: radio collars and automatic video cameras are only two of their creative techniques for documenting the natural world. So when a group of ecologists set out to see how wind moves seeds through isolated patches of habitat carved into a longleaf pine plantation in South Carolina, they twisted colored yarn to create mock seeds that would drift with the wind much like native seeds. The "seeds" were dusted with fluorescent powder and inserted into custom-made boxes mounted on poles, then released as the scientists ...

Livestock production is responsible for 12% of human-related greenhouse gas emissions, primarily coming from land use change and deforestation caused by expansion of agriculture, as well as methane released by the animals themselves, with a lesser amount coming from manure management and feed production. “There is a lot of discussion about reduction of meat in the diets as a way to reduce emissions,” says IIASA researcher Petr Havlík, who led the study “But our results show that targeting the production side of agriculture is a much more efficient way to reduce greenhouse ...

A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown for the first time that several types of aquatic algae can detect orange, green and blue light. Land plants have receptors to detect light on the red and far red of the spectrum, which are the common wavelengths in the air. These plants sense the light to move and grow as their environment changes, for example when another plant shades them from the sun. But in the ocean, the water absorbs red wavelengths, instead reflecting colours such as blue and green. As part of the study, a team of ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Cancer rates in developing nations have climbed sharply in recent years, and now account for 70 percent of cancer mortality worldwide. Early detection has been proven to improve outcomes, but screening approaches such as mammograms and colonoscopy, used in the developed world, are too costly to be implemented in settings with little medical infrastructure. To address this gap, MIT engineers have developed a simple, cheap, paper test that could improve diagnosis rates and help people get treated earlier. The diagnostic, which works much like a pregnancy ...

A biologist at the University of York is part of an international team which has shown that advanced DNA sequencing technologies can be used to accurately measure the levels of inbreeding in wild animal populations. The research by senior author Dr Kanchon Dasmahapatra, of the Department of Biology at York, and led by Dr Joseph Hoffman, of the Department of Animal Behaviour, Bielefeld University, Germany, may help efforts to conserve rare species. Laboratory studies show that inbreeding reduces fitness. However, studying the impact of inbreeding in wild populations has ...

When acupuncture first became popular in the western hemisphere it had its doubters. It still does. But over time, through detailed observation, scientists have produced real evidence that ancient Chinese practitioners of the medical arts were onto something. Now new research documents a direct connection between the use of acupuncture and physical processes that could alleviate sepsis, a condition that often develops in hospital intensive care units, springs from infection and inflammation, and takes an estimated 250,000 lives in the United States every year. "Sepsis ...

New research from the University of Toronto Scarborough shows that animal dispersal is influenced by a gene associated with feeding and food search behaviours. The study, which was carried out by UTSC Professor Mark Fitzpatrick and PhD student Allan Edelsparre, provides one of the first aimed at gaining a functional understanding of how genes can influence dispersal tendencies in nature. Using common fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), the researchers observed how two different foraging types – known as sitter flies and rover flies – moved over large distances ...

ATLANTA--Protected natural areas in Costa Rica reduced poverty by 16 percent in neighboring communities, mainly by encouraging ecotourism, according to new research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Although earlier studies indicated that establishing protected areas in poor regions can lead to reductions in poverty, there was no clear understanding why or how it happens. "Our goal was to show exactly how environmental protection can reduce poverty in poorer nations rather than exacerbate it, as many people fear," says co-author ...

HONOLULU – Scientists are revealing how microbes living on floating pieces of plastic marine debris affect the ocean ecosystem, and the potential harm they pose to invertebrates, humans and other animals. New research being presented here today delves deeper into the largely unexplored world of the "Plastisphere" – an ecological community of microbial organisms living on ocean plastic that was first discovered last year. When scientists initially studied the Plastisphere, they found that at least 1,000 different types of microbes thrive on these tiny plastic islands, ...

ANN ARBOR—Simply making nanoparticles spin coaxes them to arrange themselves into what University of Michigan researchers call 'living rotating crystals' that could serve as a nanopump. They may also, incidentally, shed light on the origin of life itself. The researchers refer to the crystals as 'living' because they, in a sense, take on a life of their own from very simple rules. Sharon Glotzer, the Stuart W. Churchill Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering, and her team found that when they spun individual nanoparticles in a simulation—some clockwise and some ...

In 2012, Dr. Nir Krakauer, an assistant professor of civil engineering in CCNY's Grove School of Engineering, and his father, Dr. Jesse Krakauer, MD, developed a new method to quantify the risk specifically associated with abdominal obesity. A follow-up study, published February 20 by the online journal PLOS ONE, supports their contention that the technique, known as A Body Shape Index (ABSI), is a more effective predictor of mortality than Body Mass Index (BMI), the most common measure used to define obesity. The team analyzed data for 7,011 adults, 18+, who participated ...

New research results suggest that magma sitting 4-5 kilometers beneath the surface of Oregon's Mount Hood has been stored in near-solid conditions for thousands of years. The time it takes to liquefy and potentially erupt, however, is surprisingly short--perhaps as little as a couple of months. The key to an eruption, geoscientists say, is to elevate the temperature of the rock to more than 750 degrees Celsius, which can happen when hot magma from deep within the Earth's crust rises to the surface. It was the mixing of hot liquid lava with cooler solid magma that ...

Boulder, Colo., USA – New Geosphere postings cover using traditional geochemistry with novel micro-analytical techniques to understand the western Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt; an investigation of mafic rock samples from a volcanic field near Yampa, Colorado, travertine deposits in the southeastern Colorado Plateau of New Mexico and Arizona; a study "Slushball Earth" rocks from Karelia, Russia, using field and micro-analytical techniques; and an addition to the "The History and Impact of Sea-level Change Offshore New Jersey" special issue. Abstracts for these and other ...

Engineers like to make things that work. And if one wants to make something work using nanoscale components—the size of proteins, antibodies, and viruses—mimicking the behavior of cells is a good place to start since cells carry an enormous amount of information in a very tiny packet. As Erik Winfree, professor of computer science, computation and neutral systems, and bioengineering, explains, "I tend to think of cells as really small robots. Biology has programmed natural cells, but now engineers are starting to think about how we can program artificial cells. We want ...

Kawasaki Disease (KD) is a severe childhood disease that many parents, even some doctors, mistake for an inconsequential viral infection. If not diagnosed or treated in time, it can lead to irreversible heart damage. Signs of KD include prolonged fever associated with rash, red eyes, mouth, lips and tongue, and swollen hands and feet with peeling skin. The disease causes damage to the coronary arteries in a quarter of untreated children and may lead to serious heart problems in early adulthood. There is no diagnostic test for Kawasaki disease, and current treatment fails ...

Scientists on the CDF and DZero experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have announced that they have found the final predicted way of creating a top quark, completing a picture of this particle nearly 20 years in the making. The two collaborations jointly announced on Friday, Feb. 21 that they had observed one of the rarest methods of producing the elementary particle – creating a single top quark through the weak nuclear force, in what is called the "s-channel." For this analysis, scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations ...

AMHERST, Mass. – Like a kindergarten or a busy airport where cold viruses and other germs circulate freely, flowers are common gathering places where pollinators such as bees and butterflies can pick up fungal, bacterial or viral infections that might be as benign as the sniffles or as debilitating as influenza. But "almost nothing is known regarding how pathogens of pollinators are transmitted at flowers," postdoctoral researcher Scott McArt and Professor Lynn Adler at the University of Massachusetts Amherst write. "As major hubs of plant-animal interactions throughout ...

VIDEO: The mental health conditions of most people who commit suicide remain undiagnosed, even though many visit a primary care provider or medical specialist in the year before they die, according... Click here for more information. DETROIT – The mental health conditions of most people who commit suicide remain undiagnosed, even though many visit a primary care provider or medical specialist in the year before they die, according to a national study led by Henry Ford Health ...

PHILADELPHIA (February 24, 2014) – The increasing use of expensive medical imaging procedures in the U.S. like positron emission tomography (PET) scans is being driven, in part, by patient decisions made after obtaining information from lay media and non-experts, and not from health care providers. That is the result from a three-year-long analysis of survey data, and is published in the article , "Associations between Cancer-Related Information Seeking and Receiving PET Imaging for Routine Cancer Surveillance – An Analysis of Longitudinal Survey Data," appearing in ...

PPAR-γ agonist reverses cigarette smoke induced emphysema in mice Pulmonary emphysema results in irreversible lung damage and is most often the result of long term cigarette smoke exposure. Immune cells, such as macrophages and myeloid dendritic cells (mDCs) accumulate in the lungs of smokers with emphysema and release cytokines associated with autoimmune and inflammatory responses. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation Farrah Kheradmand and colleagues at Baylor University found that peroxisome proliferator activated receptor-γ (PPARγ) ...

Cancer cells have long been known to have higher rates of the energy-generating metabolic pathway known as glycolysis. This enhanced glycolysis, a phenomenon known as the Warburg effect, is thought to allow cancer cells to survive the oxygen-deficient conditions they experience in the center of solid tumors. A study in The Journal of Cell Biology reveals how damaged cells normally switch off glycolysis as they shut down and shows that defects in this process may contribute to the early stages of tumor development. Various stresses can cause cells to cease proliferating ...

A novel two-pronged strategy targeting DNA synthesis can treat leukemia in mice, according to a study in The Journal of Experimental Medicine. Current treatments for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), an aggressive form of blood cancer, include conventional chemotherapy drugs that inhibit DNA synthesis. These drugs are effective but have serious side effects on normal dividing tissues. In order to replicate, cells must make copies of their DNA, which is made up of building blocks called deoxyribonucleotide triphosphates (dNTPs). Cells can either make dNTPs from scratch ...

PHILADELPHIA— Half of melanoma patients with the BRAF mutation have a positive response to treatment with BRAF inhibitors, but nearly all of those patients develop resistance to the drugs and experience disease progression. Now, a new preclinical study published online ahead of print in the Journal of Clinical Investigation from Penn Medicine researchers found that in many cases the root of the resistance may lie in a never-before-seen autophagy mechanism induced by the BRAF inhibitors vermurafenib and dabrafenib. Autophagy is a process by which cancer cells recycle ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – We are a product of our parents. Maybe you have your mother's large, dark eyes, and you inherited your father's infectious smile. Both parents contribute one copy, or allele, of each gene to their offspring, so that we have two copies of every gene for a given trait – one from mom, the other from dad. In general, both copies of a gene are switched on or off as an embryo develops into an adult. The "switching on" of a gene begins the process of gene expression that ultimately results in the production of a protein. Occasionally, a cell will arbitrarily ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (February 21, 2014) – The millions of Americans living with more than one chronic disease are at high risk of poor health outcomes, and account for a disproportionate share of health care costs. A special March supplement to Medical Care presents updates from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ) Multiple Chronic Conditions (MCC) Research Network, formed to address knowledge gaps and research challenges in meeting the complex health care needs of this growing population. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part ...