Farmers in Africa can increase their food production if they avoid over dependence on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and practice agricultural intensification - growing more food on the same amount of land – using natural and resource-conserving approaches such as agroforestry. According to scientists at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), crop production in Africa is seriously hampered by the degradation of soil fertility, water and biodiversity resources. Currently, yields for important cereals such as maize have stagnated at 1 tone per hectare. Climate change ...

Archaeologists have found the oldest complete example in the world of a human with metastatic cancer in a 3,000 year-old skeleton. The findings are reported in the academic journal PLOS ONE today (17 March). The skeleton of the young adult male was found by a Durham University PhD student in a tomb in modern Sudan in 2013 and dates back to 1200BC. Analysis has revealed evidence of metastatic carcinoma, cancer which has spread to other parts of the body from where it started, from a malignant soft-tissue tumour spread across large areas of the body, making it ...

Augusta, Ga. – A bacterial infection can throw off the equilibrium between two key proteins in the lungs and put patients at risk for a highly lethal acute lung injury, researchers report. Bacteria can alter a single amino acid in the protein RhoA, pushing its activity level well above that of Rac1 and prompting blood vessels to leak and flood thousands of tiny air sacs in the lungs, said Dr. Stephen Black, cell and molecular physiologist at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University. The study in The Journal of Biological Chemistry also proposes ...

Severe and sometimes fatal lung disease caused by a group of bacteria in the same family as those that cause tuberculosis is much more common than previously thought, with Caucasians 55 and older at greatest risk, report researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine. The study is published online March 14 in PLOS ONE. Nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) include more than 150 types of bacteria, found in water and soil, that can infect the lungs when inhaled. Unlike tuberculosis, NTM is not contagious and cannot spread from person to person. The ...

PITTSBURGH—So many variables can contribute to shortness of breath that no person can keep them all straight. But a computer program, capable of tracking more than 100 clinical variables for almost 400 people, has shown it can identify various subtypes of asthma, which perhaps could lead to targeted, more effective treatments. Wei Wu, a Carnegie Mellon University computational biologist who led the analysis of patient data from the federally funded Severe Asthma Research Program, said many of the patient clusters identified by the computational methods are consistent ...

A team of observational cosmologists may have found evidence that cosmic inflation occurred a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, a point predicted 18 years ago by Johns Hopkins University cosmologist and theoretical physicist Marc Kamionkowski. At a news conference earlier today at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass, researchers from the BICEP2 collaboration, a partnership between Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology, announced the first direct evidence for this sudden and vast expansion of the newborn universe. ...

The frustrated attempts of a UCLA graduate student to quantify the amount of water draining from Greenland's melting ice sheet led him to devise a new way to measure river flows from outer space, he and his professor report in a new study. The new approach relies exclusively on the measurements of a river's width over time, which can be obtained from freely available satellite imagery. Currently, hydrologists calculate a river's discharge — the volume of water running through it at any given time — by taking a series of measurements on the ground, including not ...

CHESTNUT HILL, MA (March 17th): Workplace flexibility – it's a phrase that might be appealing to job seekers or make a company look good, but a new study by the Sloan Center on Aging and Work at Boston College shows flexible work options are out of reach for most employees and that when they are offered, arrangements are limited in size and scope. "While large percentages of employers report that they have at least some workplace flexibility, the number of options is usually limited and they are typically not available to the entire workforce," says Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, ...

PRINCETON, N.J.—Kyrgyzstan, a landlocked and mountainous country in Central Asia, serves a powerful role in the Eurasian drug trade by playing the "mule" that carts heroin and other opiates between Afghanistan and Russia. Many researchers theorize that this lucrative industry has taken root in Kyrgyzstan – a country with few natural resources and industries – with significant support and leeway from its government, making it a "narco-state." In the first examination of its kind, a researcher at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School writes in the International ...

D-Wave – a special computing machine with this name has been getting computer scientists and physicists talking for a number of years now. The Canadian technology company of the same name is advertising the machine as a quantum computer. However, whether or not the machine does in fact use quantum effects is the subject of controversial debate amongst experts in the field. If it does, then this would make D-Wave the world's first commercially available quantum computer. The company sold its system to illustrious customers, piquing the interest of the scientific community ...

NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Cyclone Gillian's remnants in the southern Arafura Sea today, as it passes north of Australia's "Top End." During the week of March 10, Tropical Cyclone Gillian formed in the northern Gulf of Carpentaria and made a brief landfall on the Western Cape York Peninsula, weakening to a remnant low. After re-emerging in the Gulf, Gillian became a tropical storm again and by March 17 had again weakened to a remnant low as it exited the Gulf and moved into the Arafura Sea. The MODIS or Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer ...

New Rochelle, NY, March 17, 2014–In response to the 2010 Affordable Care Act, employers may no long offer traditional employee health care benefits as they protect themselves from rising health care costs and seek to minimize their risk. How the shifting landscape of health care coverage will impact population health management providers, employers, and employees is the focus of a commentary in Population Health Management, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Population Health Management website at http://www.liebertpub.com/pop. Bruce ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Recent studies have shown that the Earth's tropical belt — demarcated, roughly, by the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn — has progressively expanded since at least the late 1970s. Several explanations for this widening have been proposed, such as radiative forcing due to greenhouse gas increase and stratospheric ozone depletion. Now, a team of climatologists, led by researchers at the University of California, Riverside, posits that the recent widening of the tropical belt is primarily caused by multi-decadal sea surface temperature variability in the ...

University of Cincinnati researchers are reporting on the educational and health benefits of specially created outdoor play environments for children. Victoria Carr, a UC associate professor of education and director of the UC Arlitt Child and Family Research and Education Center, and Eleanor Luken, a former UC research associate for the Arlitt Center and current doctoral student at City University of New York, take a look at this growing trend around the world in an article published this month in the International Journal of Play. Typically called playscapes, these ...

The term a "brighter future" might be a cliché, but in the case of ultra-small probes for lighting up individual proteins, it is now most appropriate. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have discovered surprising new rules for creating ultra-bright light-emitting crystals that are less than 10 nanometers in diameter. These ultra-tiny but ultra-bright nanoprobes should be a big asset for biological imaging, especially deep-tissue optical imaging of neurons in the brain. Working at the Molecular Foundry, ...

(Boston) –Boston Medical Center (BMC) and Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) physicians have helped create the first set of clinical guidelines for treating patients with pulmonary hypertension in sickle cell disease. Elizabeth Klings, MD, director of the pulmonary hypertension inpatient and education program at BMC and associate professor of medicine at BUSM, spearheaded the development of these guidelines, which are published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. Several studies conducted in the past decade have demonstrated that ...

The immune system plays a pivotal role in targeting cancer cells for destruction. However, tumor cells are smart and have developed ways to avoid immune detection. A collaborative team of researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center recently discovered a novel mechanism that lung cancer cells use to block detection by a type of immune cell called a natural killer cell (NK cell). NK cells find and destroy virally infected cells and also play an important role in detecting and killing tumor cells. However, tumors produce high amounts of a protein called Transforming Growth ...

Playing a science-based mobile gaming app for 25 minutes can reduce anxiety in stressed individuals, according to research published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study suggests that "gamifying" a scientifically-supported intervention could offer measurable mental health and behavioral benefits for people with relatively high levels of anxiety. "Millions of people suffering from psychological distress fail to seek or receive mental health services. A key factor here is that many evidence-based treatments ...

Just a fifth of people with hearing problems wear a hearing aid, a study by The University of Manchester has found. The study, published in the journal Ear and Hearing, looked at the habits of 160,000 people in the UK aged 40 to 69 years. It found 10.7 per cent of adults had significant hearing problems when listening to speech in the presence of background noise - but only 2.1 per cent used a hearing aid. One in 10 middle aged adults had substantial hearing problems and were more likely to be from a working class or ethnic minority background. Dr Piers Dawes, from ...

An area of the canine brain associated with reward responds more strongly to the scents of familiar humans than it does to the scents of other humans, or even to those of familiar dogs. The journal Behavioural Processes published the results of the first brain-imaging study of dogs responding to biological odors. The research was led by Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University. "It's one thing when you come home and your dog sees you and jumps on you and licks you and knows that good things are about to happen," Berns says. "In our experiment, ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have analyzed 50 years' worth of hit songs to identify key themes that marketing professionals can use to craft advertisements that will resonate with audiences. "People are exposed to a barrage of advertisements and they often respond by tuning out those advertisements. We wanted to see what we could learn from hit songs to help advertisers break through all that clutter," says Dr. David Henard, a professor of marketing at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the research. "We also wanted to see if there were ...

Rats' brains may remember odors they were exposed to while deeply anesthetized, suggests research in rats published in the April issue of Anesthesiology. Previous research has led to the belief that sensory information is received by the brain under general anesthesia but not perceived by it. These new findings suggest the brain not only receives sensory information, but also registers the information at the cellular level while anesthetized without behavioral reporting of the same information after recovering from anesthesia. In the study, rats were exposed to a ...

Researchers with the National Science Foundation-funded BICEP2 Collaboration today announced that their telescope in Antarctica has allowed them to collect what they believe is the first direct evidence for cosmic inflation. Inflation is the cataclysmic event in which, in a fleeting fraction of a second following the Big Bang, the infant universe expanded exponentially, stretching far beyond the view of the best telescopes. Modern astronomy is built around the theory that almost 14 billion years ago, the universe burst into existence in an extraordinary event that ...

VIDEO: Ben-Shahar describes research with fruit flies that shows messenger RNA plays an active as well as a passive role in the cell. In addition to encoding for a protein, it... Click here for more information. Our genome, we are taught, operates by sending instructions for the manufacture of proteins from DNA in the nucleus of the cell to the protein-synthesizing machinery in the cytoplasm. These instructions are conveyed by a type of molecule called messenger RNA (mRNA). Francis ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke engineers have devised a way to improve the efficiency of lithotripsy -- the demolition of kidney stones using focused shock waves. After decades of research, all it took was cutting a groove near the perimeter of the shock wave-focusing lens and changing its curvature. "I've spent more than 20 years investigating the physics and engineering aspects of shock wave lithotripsy," said Pei Zhong, the Anderson-Rupp Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University. "And now, thanks to the willingness of Siemens (a leading lithotripter ...