Researchers from the Santa Fe Institute and the Smithsonian Institution have pieced together a highly detailed picture of feeding relationships among 700 mammal, bird, reptile, fish, insect, and plant species from a 48 million year old lake and forest ecosystem. Their analysis of fossilized remains from the Messel deposit near Frankfurt, Germany, provides the most compelling evidence to date that ancient food webs were organized much like modern food webs. Their paper describing the research appears online and open access this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society ...

What immune response should a vaccine elicit to prevent HIV infection? Two studies published online today bring scientists closer to answering this question by identifying previously unrecognized attributes of antibodies that appear to have reduced the risk of HIV infection in the only clinical trial to show efficacy, albeit modest, of an experimental vaccine regimen in people. Earlier analyses of the results of that trial, known as RV144, suggested that antibodies to sites within a part of the HIV envelope called V1V2 correlated with reduced risk of HIV infection. These ...

Beverly, MA, March 19, 2014 – Long-term survivors after esophagectomy with gastric pull-up can enjoy a satisfying meal and good quality of life according to a new study from a team of researchers at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, Los Angeles. This study concluded that pessimism about the long-term quality of life after an esophagectomy on the part of treating physicians and patients is unwarranted. It is published in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, an official publication of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery. ...

DALLAS, March 19, 2014 — Texans, known for enjoying local beers and Dr Pepper soft drinks, now have a growing beverage industry that would appeal to James Bond, who is well-known for enjoying a good martini. Distillers are producing at least 17 Texas vodkas, researchers reported here today, and the most popular are, surprisingly, those that are a bit salty. Their report, "Shaken not stirred, y'all: A comparison of select Texas vodkas," covered the results of group tastings on the vodkas, as well as some surprising facts about the state's alcoholic beverage market. ...

Why do neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's affect only the elderly? Why do some people live to be over 100 with intact cognitive function while others develop dementia decades earlier? More than a century of research into the causes of dementia has focused on the clumps and tangles of abnormal proteins that appear in the brains of people with neurodegenerative diseases. However, scientists know that at least one piece of the puzzle has been missing because some people with these abnormal protein clumps show few or no signs of cognitive decline. A new study ...

New research led by the University of Exeter suggests that rising global temperatures will increase the quantity of the key greenhouse gas methane emitted from freshwater ecosystems to the Earth's atmosphere – which could in turn lead to further warming. The collaborative study, led by Dr Gabriel Yvon-Durocher from the University of Exeter, collated data from hundreds of laboratory experiments and field surveys to demonstrate that the speed at which methane fluxes increase with temperature was the same whether single species populations of methanogens, microbial communities ...

DURHAM, N.C. – A multi-national research team led by Duke Medicine scientists has identified a subclass of antibodies associated with an effective immune response to an HIV vaccine. The finding, reported in the March 19, 2014, issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine, helps explain why a combination of two vaccines was able to show some effect, when one vaccine alone did not. The study also provides key insights that could aid development of new vaccines. "More is not always better with an antibody response," said senior author Georgia D. Tomaras, Ph.D., ...

Glasgow, UK: Women whose breast cancer has spread to just a few lymph nodes under their arm are less likely to have their disease recur or to die from it if they have radiotherapy after mastectomy, according to new research to be presented at the European Breast Cancer Conference (EBCC-9) on Thursday and published in The Lancet today (Wednesday). [1] Dr Paul McGale will tell the meeting that, until now, there has been uncertainty over whether women with early breast cancer that has spread to just one, two or three lymph nodes under the arm gain any benefit from radiotherapy ...

Researchers from USC and Nanjing University in China have documented evidence suggesting that part of the reason that the Earth has become neither sweltering like Venus nor frigid like Mars lies with a built-in atmospheric carbon dioxide regulator – the geologic cycles that churn up the planet's rocky surface. Scientists have long known that "fresh" rock pushed to the surface via mountain formation effectively acts as a kind of sponge, soaking up the greenhouse gas CO2. Left unchecked, however, that process would simply deplete atmospheric CO2 levels to a point that would ...

Berkeley — Academic research sponsored by industry has a strong track record of leading to innovative patents and licenses, challenging assumptions that corporate support skews science toward inventions that are less accessible and less useful to others than those funded by the government or non-profit organizations, according to a new analysis. The findings, to be published in a Wednesday, March 19, commentary in the journal Nature, are based upon a study of two decades of records from the University of California system. The authors, led by Brian Wright, UC Berkeley ...

New research shows an alternative DNA test offers clinically relevant genetic information to identify why a miscarriage may have occurred years earlier. Researchers were able to identify chromosomal variants and abnormalities in nearly 50 percent of the samples. This first-of-its-kind study was conducted by researchers from Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. The results were published in the March issue of Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology. The technique used in this study, called rescue karyotyping, allows ...

Building a strong connection to a social group helps clinically depressed patients recover and helps prevent relapse, according to a new study. For the paper, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Senior Fellow Alexander Haslam, lead author Tegan Cruwys and their colleagues at the University of Queensland conducted two studies of patients diagnosed with depression or anxiety. The patients either joined a community group with activities such as sewing, yoga, sports and art, or partook in group therapy at a psychiatric hospital. In both cases, patients responding ...

Scientists have discovered a new, persistent structure in Earth's inner radiation belt using data from the twin NASA Van Allen Probes spacecraft. Most surprisingly, this structure is produced by the slow rotation of Earth, previously considered incapable of affecting the motion of radiation belt particles, which have velocities approaching the speed of light. Data from the Van Allen Probes Ion Composition Experiment (RBSPICE) on board each of the twin spacecraft orbiting Earth revealed that the highly energized population of electrons of the inner radiation belt is ...

PHOENIX, Ariz. — March 19, 2014 — In a scientific first, the fusion of two genes, ALK and EML4, has been identified as the genetic driver in an aggressive type of thyroid cancer, according to a study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen). These groundbreaking findings are based on genetic sequencing of tumor cells from a 62-year-old patient with an aggressive tall cell variant of papillary thyroid cancer, according to the study published Tuesday, March 18, in the World Journal of Surgery, the official journal of the International Society of Surgery. The ...

Lotteries of different kinds have been part of the human culture since remote times. Apparently, the initial idea was to use the money gained through the game to finance government projects. This seems to be how the Great Wall of China was built. Then, lotteries started to be used as a simple form of entertainment. The first known European lottery dates back to the Roman Empire and since then many countries have created different types of lottery. According to Scientific Games, an authority in the global lottery and regulated gaming industry, lottery sales worldwide totaled ...

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 19, 2014 ─ Students who begin their postsecondary education at a community college and successfully transfer to a four-year college have BA graduation rates equal to similar students who begin at four-year colleges, according to new research published today. That rate would actually increase – to 54 percent from 46 percent – if not for the loss of academic credits when students transfer, said study authors. "The Community College Route to the Bachelor's Degree," by Paul Attewell and David Monaghan, both of the Graduate Center of the City ...

Irvine, Calif., March 19, 2014 – Titanium alloy golf clubs can cause dangerous wildfires, according to UC Irvine scientists. When a club coated with the lightweight metal is swung and strikes a rock, it creates sparks that can heat to more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit for long enough to ignite dry foliage, according to findings published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Fire and Materials. Orange County, Calif., fire investigators asked UC Irvine to determine whether such clubs could have caused blazes at Shady Canyon Golf Course in Irvine and Arroyo Trabuco Golf ...

Glasgow, UK: Genetic analyses of results from 1125 postmenopausal women being treated for oestrogen responsive breast cancer have shown that some of them are more likely than others to have a late recurrence of their cancer and might benefit from ten years of hormone therapy rather than five. Prof Mitch Dowsett told the opening press conference at the European Breast Cancer Conference (EBCC-9) that his research had shown that women who had tumours that were negative for the human epidermal growth factor protein (HER2-) but which were very sensitive to the oestrogen hormone, ...

Using a powerful data-crunching technique, Johns Hopkins researchers have sorted out how a protein keeps defective genetic material from gumming up the cellular works. The protein, Dom34, appears to "rescue" protein-making factories called ribosomes when they get stuck obeying defective genetic instructions, the researchers report in the Feb. 27 issue of Cell. "We already knew that binding to Dom34 makes a ribosome split and say 'I'm done,' and that without it, animals can't survive," says Rachel Green, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics ...

Scientists working on the world's leading particle collider experiments have joined forces, combined their data and produced the first joint result from Fermilab's Tevatron and CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), past and current holders of the record for most powerful particle collider on Earth. Scientists from the four experiments involved—ATLAS, CDF, CMS and DZero—announced their joint findings on the mass of the top quark on March 19, 2014 at the Rencontres de Moriond international physics conference in Italy. Together the four experiments pooled their data analysis ...

Verbal interactions between parents and children create a social feedback loop important for language development, according to research forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. That loop appears to be experienced less frequently and is diminished in strength in interactions with autistic children. "This loop likely has cascading impacts over the course of a child's development," says psychological scientist and study author Anne S. Warlaumont of the University of California, Merced. "Understanding how it works and ...

Boulder, Colo., USA – Geosphere articles posted online 17 Mar. 2014 include additions to two series: "CRevolution 2: Origin and Evolution of the Colorado River System II" and "Origin and Evolution of the Sierra Nevada and Walker Lane." Other articles present new seismic data for the Slate Range of California, USA; the first detailed geologic map from the Likhu Khola region of east central Nepal; and a review of pre-21st century ideas about the origin of Grand Canyon. Abstracts for these and other Geosphere papers are available at http://geosphere.gsapubs.org/. Representatives ...

New research in mice suggests that autism is characterized by reduced activity of inhibitory neurons and increased activity of excitatory neurons in the brain, but balance can be restored with low doses of a well-known class of drugs currently used in much higher doses to treat anxiety and epileptic seizures. The findings, which are reported in the March 19th issue of the Cell Press journal Neuron, point to a new therapeutic approach to managing autism. "These are very exciting results because they suggest that existing drugs—called benzodiazepines—might be useful in ...

March 19, 2014 – The open-access International Journal of Alcohol and Drug Research has released a special issue on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD), with the intention of increasing awareness of the negative effects of alcohol use in pregnancy and improving prevention, treatment and care for those living with FASD. "In most countries, FASD is not well recognized by health professionals," says guest editor Dr. Svetlana (Lana) Popova, Senior Scientist in the Social and Epidemiological Research Department at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). "If ...

In a study published today (19/3/2014) in the scientific journal Neuron, neuroscientists at the Champalimaud Foundation, in collaboration with neuroscientists from Harvard University, describe the first activity maps at the resolution of single cells and throughout the entire brain of behaving zebrafish. "This opens up new possibilities for studying neural circuits in the brain," says Michael Orger, principal investigator at the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme. "In order to understand how the brain works, it is imperative that we can record the activity of the cells ...