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archive.

Space30 Jul 2014

ALMA finds double star with weird and wild planet-forming discs

BOWLING GREEN, O.—From movies to television, obesity is still considered "fair game" for jokes and ridicule. A new study from researchers at Bowling Green State University took a closer look at weight-related humor to see if anti-fat attitudes played into a person's appreciation or distaste for fat humor in the media. "Weight-Related Humor in the Media: Appreciation, Distaste and Anti-Fat Attitudes," by psychology Ph.D. candidate Jacob Burmeister and Dr. Robert Carels, professor of psychology, is featured in the June issue of Psychology of Popular Media Culture. Carels ...

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Technology30 Jul 2014

Innovative scientists update old-school pipetting with new-age technology

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (July 30, 2014) A team of Whitehead Institute researchers is bringing new levels of efficiency and accuracy to one of the most essential albeit tedious tasks of bench science: pipetting. And, in an effort to aid the scientific community at large, the group has established an open source system that enables anyone to benefit from this development free of charge. Dubbed "iPipet," the system converts an iPad or any tablet computer into a "smart bench" that guides the execution of complex pipetting protocols. iPipet users can also share their pipetting designs ...

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Technology30 Jul 2014

Mapping the optimal route between 2 quantum states

As a quantum state collapses from a quantum superposition to a classical state or a different superposition, it will follow a path known as a quantum trajectory. For each start and end state there is an optimal or "most likely" path, but it is not as easy to predict the path or track it experimentally as a straight-line between two points would be in our everyday, classical world. In a new paper featured this week on the cover of Nature, scientists from the University of Rochester, University of California at Berkeley and Washington University in St. Louis have shown ...

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Space30 Jul 2014

Young binary star system may form planets with weird and wild orbits

Unlike our solitary Sun, most stars form in binary pairs -- two stars that orbit a common center of mass. Though remarkably plentiful, binaries pose a number of questions, including how and where planets form in such complex environments. While surveying a series of binary stars with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers uncovered a striking pair of wildly misaligned planet-forming disks in the young binary star system HK Tau. These results provide the clearest picture ever of protoplanetary disks around a double star and could reveal important ...

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Science30 Jul 2014

Scientists reproduce evolutionary changes by manipulating embryonic development of mice

A group of researchers from the University of Helsinki and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona have been able experimentally to reproduce in mice morphological changes which have taken millions of years to occur. Through small and gradual modifications in the embryonic development of mice teeth, induced in the laboratory, scientists have obtained teeth which morphologically are very similar to those observed in the fossil registry of rodent species which separated from mice millions of years ago. To modify the development of their teeth, the team from the Institute ...

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Environment30 Jul 2014

Conservation scientists asking wrong questions on climate change impacts on wildlife

Scientists studying the potential effects of climate change on the world's animal and plant species are focusing on the wrong factors, according to a new paper by a research team from the Wildlife Conservation Society, University of Queensland, and other organizations. The authors claim that most of the conservation science is missing the point when it comes to climate change. While the majority of climate change scientists focus on the "direct" threats of changing temperatures and precipitation after 2031, far fewer researchers are studying how short-term human adaptation ...

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Environment30 Jul 2014

Antarctic ice sheet is result of CO2 decrease, not continental breakup

DURHAM, N.H. – Climate modelers from the University of New Hampshire have shown that the most likely explanation for the initiation of Antarctic glaciation during a major climate shift 34 million years ago was decreased carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. The finding counters a 40-year-old theory suggesting massive rearrangements of Earth's continents caused global cooling and the abrupt formation of the Antarctic ice sheet. It will provide scientists insight into the climate change implications of current rising global CO2 levels. In a paper published today in Nature, Matthew ...

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Space30 Jul 2014

NASA catches two tropical troublemakers in Northwestern Pacific: Halong and 96W

There are two tropical low pressure areas in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean today and they're close enough to each other to be captured in one image generated from data gathered by NASA's Aqua satellite. NASA's Aqua satellite flew over both Tropical Storm Halong and developing System 96W early on July 30 and the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured infrared data on them in one image. Both systems show powerful thunderstorms stretching high into the troposphere with cloud top temperatures as cold as -63F/-52C. Those thunderstorms have the potential for ...

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Science30 Jul 2014

Watching Schrödinger's cat die (or come to life)

One of the famous examples of the weirdness of quantum mechanics is the paradox of Schrödinger's cat. If you put a cat inside an opaque box and make his life dependent on a random event, when does the cat die? When the random event occurs, or when you open the box? Though common sense suggests the former, quantum mechanics – or at least the most common "Copenhagen" interpretation enunciated by Danish physicist Neils Bohr in the 1920s – says it's the latter. Someone has to observe the result before it becomes final. Until then, paradoxically, the cat is both dead and ...

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Science30 Jul 2014

Fear of losing money, not spending habits, affects investor risk tolerance, MU study finds

As the U.S. economy slowly recovers, many investors remain wary about investing in the stock market. Investors' "risk tolerance," or their willingness to take risks, is an important factor for investors deciding whether, and how much, to invest in the stock market. Now, Michael Guillemette, an assistant professor of personal financial planning in the University of Missouri College of Human Environmental Sciences, along with David Nanigian, an associate professor at the American College, analyzed the causes of risk tolerance and found that loss aversion, or the fear of losing ...

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Science30 Jul 2014

When cooperation counts

Everybody knows the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and now Harvard researchers have evidence that sperm have been taking the familiar axiom to heart. Though competition among individual sperm is usually thought to be intense, with each racing for the chance to fertilize the egg, Harvard scientists say in some species, sperm form cooperative groups that allow them to take a straighter path to potential fertilization. A new study, conducted by Heidi Fisher, a post-doctoral student working in the lab of Hopi Hoekstra, Howard Hughes Investigator ...

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Science30 Jul 2014

Scientists call for new strategy in pursuit of HIV-free generation

In light of the recent news that HIV has been detected in the Mississippi baby previously thought to have been cured of the disease, researchers are assessing how to help those born to HIV-infected mothers. These infants around the world are in need of new immune-based protective strategies, including vaccines delivered to mothers and babies and the means to boost potentially protective maternal antibodies, say researchers who write in the Cell Press journal Trends in Microbiology on July 30th. "There is a real need for additional HIV-1 prevention methods for infants," ...

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Medicine30 Jul 2014

Study: Marine pest provides advances in maritime anti-fouling and biomedicine

A team of biologists, led by Clemson University associate professor Andrew S. Mount, performed cutting-edge research on a marine pest that will pave the way for novel anti-fouling paint for ships and boats and also improve bio-adhesives for medical and industrial applications. The team's findings, published in Nature Communications, examined the last larval stage of barnacles that attaches to a wide variety of surfaces using highly versatile, natural, possibly polymeric material that acts as an underwater heavy-duty adhesive. "In previous research, we were trying to ...

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Medicine30 Jul 2014

Dissolvable fabric loaded with medicine might offer faster protection against HIV

Soon, protection from HIV infection could be as simple as inserting a medicated, disappearing fabric minutes before having sex. University of Washington bioengineers have discovered a potentially faster way to deliver a topical drug that protects women from contracting HIV. Their method spins the drug into silk-like fibers that quickly dissolve when in contact with moisture, releasing higher doses of the drug than possible with other topical materials such as gels or creams. "This could offer women a potentially more effective, discreet way to protect themselves from ...

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Space30 Jul 2014

NASA sees zombie Tropical Depression Genevieve reborn

Infrared imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite helped confirm that the remnant low pressure area of former Tropical Storm Genevieve has become a Zombie storm, and has been reborn as a tropical depression on July 30. Tropical Storm Genevieve weakened to a tropical depression on Sunday, July 27 and the National Hurricane Center issued their final advisory on the system as it was entering the Central Pacific. Now, after three days of living as a remnant low pressure area, Genevieve reorganized and was classified as a tropical depression again. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring ...

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Medicine30 Jul 2014

Birthweight and breastfeeding have implications for children's health decades later

Young adults who were breastfed for three months or more as babies have a significantly lower risk of chronic inflammation associated with cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, according to research from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. "This study shows that birthweight and breastfeeding both have implications for children's health decades later," said Molly W. Metzger, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School and a co-author of the study with Thomas W. McDade, PhD, of Northwestern University. "Specifically, we are looking at the effects ...

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Science30 Jul 2014

Appreciation for fat jokes, belief in obese stereotypes linked

BOWLING GREEN, O.—From movies to television, obesity is still considered "fair game" for jokes and ridicule. A new study from researchers at Bowling Green State University took a closer look at weight-related humor to see if anti-fat attitudes played into a person's appreciation or distaste for fat humor in the media. "Weight-Related Humor in the Media: Appreciation, Distaste and Anti-Fat Attitudes," by psychology Ph.D. candidate Jacob Burmeister and Dr. Robert Carels, professor of psychology, is featured in the June issue of Psychology of Popular Media Culture. Carels ...

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Social Science30 Jul 2014

Many depressed preschoolers still suffer in later school years

Children diagnosed with depression as preschoolers are likely to suffer from depression as school-age children and young adolescents, new research shows. Depressed preschoolers were 2.5 times more likely to suffer from the condition in elementary and middle school than kids who were not depressed at very young ages, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Their study is published in the July issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. "It's the same old bad news about depression; it is a chronic and recurrent disorder," ...

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Medicine30 Jul 2014

Penn researchers: Naltrexone may diminish impulse control disorders in Parkinson's disease patients

(PHILADELPHIA) – Up to 20 percent of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients and their families may confront a common but largely unrecognized challenge: the occurrence of impulse control disorders (ICDs) such as compulsive gambling, sexual behavior, eating, or spending. Yet the presence of PD in these patients can severely limit or complicate treatment options. A team of investigators from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Parkinson's Disease Research, Education and Clinical Center (PADRECC) at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical ...

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Medicine30 Jul 2014

Study: Telephone support program beneficial for caregivers of those with dementia

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Rhode Island Hospital researchers have found that a support program administered entirely by telephone can significantly reduce depression and other symptoms in informal caregivers, such as family or friends, of individuals with dementia. The study is published online in advance of print in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia. "Those caring for people with Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia are often under a great deal of pressure," said principal investigator Geoffrey Tremont, Ph.D, of the division of neuropsychology in the department of ...

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Science30 Jul 2014

Supportive moms and sisters boost female baboon's rank

DURHAM, N.C. -- A study of dominance in female baboons suggests that the route to a higher rank is to maintain close ties with mom, and to have lots of supportive sisters. A female baboon's social status is dictated not by size or strength, but by the rank of her mother -– the higher the mother is ranked, the higher-ranked her daughter will be. For this reason, dominance rank in female baboons is thought to be determined at birth. Females born to high-ranking mothers are guaranteed a good spot in the pecking order, whereas females born to low-ranking mothers are usually ...

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Medicine30 Jul 2014

Scientists pinpoint bladder cancer patients who could benefit from 'tumor-softening' treatment

Scientists in Manchester have identified a protein that could help doctors decide which bladder cancer patients would benefit from a treatment that makes radiotherapy more effective, according to a study* published in the British Journal of Cancer (BJC). The team from The University of Manchester, funded by the Medical Research Council, found that patients whose bladder tumour had high levels of a protein, called 'HIF-1α', were more likely to benefit from having carbogen – oxygen mixed with carbon dioxide gas – and nicotinamide tablets at the same time as their radiotherapy. ...

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Social Science30 Jul 2014

The promise and profits driving our pill-popping culture

New Rochelle, NY, July 30, 2014—We have pills to ease pain, to cure infection, to help us lose weight, to treat chronic conditions, and to enhance our sexual and athletic prowess. Why do pills play such a central role in today's society and could we benefit from taking fewer pills? This provocative topic is explored in the article "'Take Your Pill': The Role and Fantasy of Pills in Modern Medicine," published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on The ...

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Science30 Jul 2014

Decades-old amber collection offers new views of a lost world

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Scientists are searching through a massive collection of 20-million-year-old amber found in the Dominican Republic more than 50 years ago, and the effort is yielding fresh insights into ancient tropical insects and the world they inhabited. When the collection is fully curated, a task that will take many years, it will be the largest unbiased Dominican amber collection in the world, the researchers report. Perhaps the most striking discovery thus far is that of a pygmy locust, a tiny grasshopper the size of a rose thorn that lived 18- to 20-million ...

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Science30 Jul 2014

F1000Research brings static research figures to life

F1000Research today published new research from Bjorn Brembs, professor of neurogenetics at the Institute of Zoology, Universitaet Regensburg, in Germany, with a proof-of-concept figure allowing readers and reviewers to run the underlying code within the online article. This represents an important leap forward for scientific publishing, by demonstrating a completely novel framework for assessing the quality of a scholarly output. Figure 3 in fact doesn't really exist. The authors submitted their data and their code to F1000Research, and the figure is generated 'on the ...

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