Field and laboratory work by Omar Torres-Carvajal from Museo de Zoología QCAZ, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, and his former undergraduate student Simón Lobos has resulted in the discovery of a gem-looking new species of shade lizard from the cloudforests in northwestern Ecuador. This region is part of the 274,597 km2 Tumbes-Chocó-Magdalena hotspot that lies west of the Andes. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys. Shade lizards (genus Alopoglossus) are widely distributed across tropical South America. They differ from most other lizards ...

A tiny Mediterranean island visited by the likes of Madonna, Sting, Julia Roberts and Sharon Stone is now the focus of a ground-breaking study by University of Leicester geologists. Pantelleria, a little-known island between Sicily and Tunisia, is a volcano with a remarkable past: 45 thousand years ago, the entire island was covered in a searing-hot layer of green glass. Volcanologists Drs Mike Branney, Rebecca Williams and colleagues at the University of Leicester Department of Geology have been uncovering previously unknown facts about the island's physical history. And ...

Patients receiving chemical treatment for cancer often suffer fatigue and body weight loss, two of the most worrying effects of this therapy linked to the alteration of their circadian rhythms. The circadian system, better known as our biological clock, is responsible for coordinating all the processes that take place in our organism. If it does not function correctly, what is known as a circadian disruption or chronodisruption, has for years been linked to an increased incidence of cancer, obesity, diabetes, depression, cognitive problems or cardiovascular diseases. "Also, ...

A new way of measuring sea level using satellite navigation system signals, for instance GPS, has been implemented by scientists at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Sea level and its variation can easily be monitored using existing coastal GPS stations, the scientists have shown. Measuring sea level is an increasingly important part of climate research, and a rising mean sea level is one of the most tangible consequences of climate change. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have studied new ways of measuring sea level that could become important ...

Research from North Carolina State University finds that dam removal improves spawning grounds for American shad and seems likely to improve survival rates for adult fish, juveniles and eggs – but for different reasons. The researchers focused on a small tributary in North Carolina called the Little River, where three dams were removed in the late 1990s and early 2000s. American shad (Alosa sapidissima) spend the bulk of their adult lives in saltwater, but return to freshwater rivers like this one to spawn. While in these freshwater environments, the adult shad do not ...

Every time we have an infection or a headache and take a pill, we get a lot more drugs than our body actually needs. The reason is that only a fraction of the drugs in a pill reaches the right places in the body; the rest never reaches its destination and may cause unwelcome side effects before they are flushed out of the body again. This kind of major overdosing is especially true when doctors treat brain diseases, because the brain does not easily accept entering drugs. "People with brain diseases are often given huge amounts of unnecessary drugs. During a long life, ...

The headlights – two eyes, the radiator cowling – a smiling mouth: This is how our brain sometimes creates a face out of a car front. The same happens with other objects: in house facades, trees or stones – a "human face" can often be detected as well. Prof. Dr. Gyula Kovács from Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany) knows the reason why. "Faces are of tremendous importance for human beings," the neuroscientist explains. That's why in the course of the evolution our visual perception has specialized in the recognition of faces in particular. "This sometimes even ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. --- Cyberbullying isn't just a problem in middle class and affluent areas. Teenagers in poor, high-crime neighborhoods also experience online bullying, finds new research led by a Michigan State University criminologist. The study suggests the "digital divide" – the gap between people with access to online technologies and those without – may be nonexistent, at least when it comes to cyberbullying, said Thomas J. Holt, MSU associate professor of criminal justice. "We found neighborhood conditions that are indicative of poverty and crime are a significant ...

VIDEO: In this TRMM 3-D simulated flyby of System 92B from May 19, tall storms were shown reaching heights of over 14km (about 8.7 miles). Click here for more information. A tropical low pressure area known as System 92B has been organizing in the Northern Indian Ocean's Bay of Bengal and NASA's TRMM satellite has shown strong thunderstorms and heavy rainfall in the developing storm. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite passed over System 92B on May 19 and ...

It's no longer a certainty that American mothers will get custody over their children during a divorce. In fact, if Wisconsin Court Records of the past 20 years are anything to go by, joint custody is becoming the norm. So says Maria Cancian and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the US, whose findings are published in Springer's journal Demography. For most of the twentieth century, in both divorce and nonmarital cases, most children ended up living with their mothers after their parents' divorce. This conformed to gender norms that views mothers ...

A new method of generating mature nerve cells from skin cells could greatly enhance understanding of neurodegenerative diseases, and could accelerate the development of new drugs and stem cell-based regenerative medicine. The nerve cells generated by this new method show the same functional characteristics as the mature cells found in the body, making them much better models for the study of age-related diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, and for the testing of new drugs. Eventually, the technique could also be used to generate mature nerve cells for transplantation ...

VIDEO: Children identified as intellectually disabled or with low IQ learned to read at a first-grade level after persistent, intensive instruction from a scientifically based curriculum. The findings of the pioneering... Click here for more information. The findings of a pioneering four-year educational study offer hope for thousands of children identified with intellectual disability or low IQ who have very little, if any, reading ability. The study by researchers at Southern ...

Out of the thousands of chemicals used for countless everyday products, about 500 have been assessed for potential health risks by the federal program tasked with this colossal duty. The good news is the Environmental Protection Agency, which runs the program, has improved it, but more remains to be done, according to a report from the National Research Council (NRC). Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society, hits the report's highlights. Cheryl Hogue, senior correspondent for C&EN, explains that the EPA program, called ...

Turning the "hydrogen economy" concept into a reality, even on a small scale, has been a bumpy road, but scientists are developing a novel way to store hydrogen to smooth out the long-awaited transition away from fossil fuels. Their report on a new solid, stable material that can pack in a large amount of hydrogen that can be used as a fuel appears in the ACS journal Chemistry of Materials. Umit B. Demirci and colleagues explain that storing hydrogen in solids is a recent development and a promising step toward building a hydrogen economy. That's the idea originated ...

To the relief of patients diagnosed with hepatitis C, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved two new treatments late last year, and a few more are on the way. Now scientists are solving another side of the disease's problem: identifying the millions more who have the virus but don't know it — and unwittingly pass it on. A report in the ACS journal Analytical Chemistry describes a novel, scrapbook-inspired test that does just that. Xuan Mu, Zhi Zheng and colleagues point out that the hepatitis C virus (HCV), a blood-borne pathogen that can cause liver cirrhosis, ...

For anyone searching for another reason to enjoy a glass of red wine with dinner, here's a good one: A new study has found that red wine, as well as grape seed extract, could potentially help prevent cavities. They say that their report, which appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, could lead to the development of natural products that ward off dental diseases with fewer side effects. M. Victoria Moreno-Arribas and colleagues explain that dental diseases are extremely common throughout the world. Cavities, periodontal disease and tooth loss affect ...

A team led by a University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM) researcher, working as a grantee from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has identified a number of existing drugs that could be "repurposed" to fight outbreaks of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV). Clinicians treating patients suffering from MERS currently have no drugs specifically targeted to the MERS-CoV, a virus first detected in humans in 2012 that has since caused 572 laboratory-confirmed infections, including ...

TORONTO, May 21, 2014 – Homeless clients using services at Toronto's Good Shepherd Ministries are nearly nine times more likely to have a history of problem or pathological gambling than the general population, a new study from St. Michael's Hospital has found. "Intuitively, one might think there's a connection between problem gambling and homelessness but very few studies have explored this in any depth.," said Dr. Flora Matheson, a research scientist with St. Michael's Centre for Research on Inner City Health. "By doing this kind of research, we help community organizations ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- Researchers at MIT have discovered a new way of harnessing temperature gradients in fluids to propel objects. In the natural world, the mechanism may influence the motion of icebergs floating on the sea and rocks moving through subterranean magma chambers. The discovery is reported this week in the journal Physical Review Letters by associate professor of mechanical engineering Thomas Peacock and four others. The finding was an unexpected outcome of research on other effects of temperature differences, such as the way winds form over glaciers in a valley, ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- Vast amounts of excess heat are generated by industrial processes and by electric power plants; researchers around the world have spent decades seeking ways to harness some of this wasted energy. Most such efforts have focused on thermoelectric devices, solid-state materials that can produce electricity from a temperature gradient, but the efficiency of such devices is limited by the availability of materials. Now researchers at MIT and Stanford University have found a new alternative for low-temperature waste-heat conversion into electricity — that ...

Pasadena, CA— The structures and star populations of massive galaxies appear to change as they age, but much about how these galaxies formed and evolved remains mysterious. Many of the oldest and most massive galaxies reside in clusters, enormous structures where numerous galaxies are found concentrated together. Galaxy clusters in the early universe are thought to be key to understanding the lifecycles of old galaxies, but to date astronomers have located only a handful of these rare, distant structures. New research from a team led by Carnegie's Andrew Newman has confirmed ...

WASHINGTON, May 21, 2014—Dark alleys might not feel so dangerous someday thanks to a new ultra-thin type of lens, which could pave the way to making smaller and cheaper heat-sensing imagers. A team of French researchers has found a way to make a thermal infrared (IR) camera with a lens made of silicon, a much less expensive material than is commonly used today. The new silicon lens is as thick as a fingernail with a diameter less than that of a No. 2 pencil. Although its resolution is not superb, the lens is good enough to reveal the presence of a person and some general ...

New Rochelle, NY, May 21, 2014—A targeted gene silencing strategy blocks production of the dysfunctional huntingtin (Htt) protein, the cause of Huntington's disease, a fatal, inherited neurodegenerative disorder. The effectiveness of this RNA interference (RNAi) approach in reducing levels of mutant Htt protein and disease symptoms in a mouse model of the disease is described in Human Gene Therapy, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Human Gene Therapy website. Lisa Stanek and coauthors from Genzyme (Framingham, ...

Hip osteoarthritis is a prevalent and costly chronic musculoskeletal condition. Clinical guidelines recommend physiotherapy as treatment, although its effectiveness has never been proven. Now, a study led by the University's Professor Kim Bennell has found that among adults with painful hip osteoarthritis, physical therapy does not produce greater improvements in pain or function compared with a placebo treatment. In an article published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, Professor Bennell and her colleagues randomly assigned patients with ...

The family history screening questionnaire can be used to provide insight into people's susceptibility to breast, ovarian, bowel and prostate cancer, melanoma, ischaemic heart disease and type 2 diabetes. These findings will lead to greater insight into the process of preventative treatment for cancer in primary care and provide a cost-effective intervention for tailored disease prevention in Australian primary care.. Lead researcher Professor of Primary Care Cancer Research at the University of Melbourne Jon Emery said this research is the first of its kind to validate ...