Scientists discovered a new species of burying beetle, Nicrophorus efferens. Burying beetles are well known to most naturalists because of their large size, striking black and red colors, and interesting reproductive behaviors - they bury small vertebrate carcasses which their offspring eat in an underground crypt, guarded by both parents. The study was published in the open access journal Zookeys. This new species, known from only 6 specimens collected in 1968, sat unrecognized as an undescribed species for over 40 years. "It was a bit of good luck that led to our realization ...

Domestic dogs have been closely associated with humans for about 15,000 years. The animals are so well adapted to living with human beings that in many cases the owner replaces conspecifics and assumes the role of the dog's main social partner. The relationship between pet owners and dogs turns out to be highly similar to the deep connection between young children and their parents. The importance of the owner to the dog One aspect of the bond between humans and dogs is the so-called "secure base effect". This effect is also found in parent-child bonding: human infants ...

PHILADELPHIA-- The brain-preserving cooling treatment known as therapeutic hypothermia is rarely being used in patients who suffer cardiac arrest while in the hospital, despite its proven potential to improve survival and neurological function, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania report in the June issue of Critical Care Medicine. The authors suggest that scarce data about in-hospital cardiac arrest patients and guidelines that only call for health care providers to consider use of therapeutic hypothermia, rather than explicitly ...

When green algae "can't breathe", they get rid of excess energy through the production of hydrogen. Biologists at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum have found out how the cells notice the absence of oxygen. For this, they need the messenger molecule nitric oxide and the protein haemoglobin, which is commonly known from red blood cells of humans. With colleagues at the UC Los Angeles, the Bochum team reported in the journal "PNAS". Haemoglobin – an old protein in a new look In the human body, haemoglobin transports oxygen from the lungs to the organs and brings carbon dioxide, ...

For decades, electronic devices have been getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller. It's now possible—even routine—to place millions of transistors on a single silicon chip. But transistors based on semiconductors can only get so small. "At the rate the current technology is progressing, in 10 or 20 years, they won't be able to get any smaller," said physicist Yoke Khin Yap of Michigan Technological University. "Also, semiconductors have another disadvantage: they waste a lot of energy in the form of heat." Scientists have experimented with different materials and ...

Materials scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory have found an accurate way to explain the magnetic properties of a compound that has mystified the scientific community for decades. The compound of lanthanum, cobalt and oxygen (LaCoO3) has been a puzzle for over 50 years, due to its strange behavior. While most materials tend to lose magnetism at higher temperatures, pure LaCoO3 is a non-magnetic semiconductor at low temperatures, but as the temperature is raised, it becomes magnetic. With the addition of strontium on the La sites the magnetic ...

HEIDELBERG, 21 June 2013 – Researchers in Berlin and Munich, Germany and Oxford, United Kingdom, have revealed that a protein well known for its role in Alzheimer's disease controls spindle development in muscle and leads to impaired movement in mice when the protein is absent or treated with inhibitors. The results, which are published in The EMBO Journal, suggest that drugs under development to target the beta-secretase-1 protein, which may be potential treatments for Alzheimer's disease, might produce unwanted side effects related to defective movement. Alzheimer's ...

Washington, DC (June 20, 2013) — While intravenous iron is critical for maintaining the health of many dialysis patients, administering large doses over a short period of time increases patients' risk of developing serious infections, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). Smaller doses given for a longer period of time appears to be much safer. Dialysis patients often develop anemia, or low levels of red blood cells, and must receive intravenous treatments of iron to correct the condition. Unfortunately, ...

A landmark three-dimensional (3-D) digital reconstruction of a complete human brain, called the BigBrain, now for the first time shows the brain anatomy in microscopic detail—at a spatial resolution of 20 microns, smaller than the size of one fine strand of hair—exceeding that of existing reference brains presently in the public domain. The new tool is made freely available to the broader scientific community to advance the field of neuroscience. Researchers from Germany and Canada, who collaborated on the ultra-high resolution brain model, present their work in the ...

Cities have long been likened to organisms, ant colonies, and river networks. But these and other analogies fail to capture the essence of how cities really function. New research by Santa Fe Institute Professor Luis Bettencourt suggests a city is something new in nature – a sort of social reactor that is part star and part network, he says. "It's an entirely new kind of complex system that we humans have created," he says. "We have intuitively invented the best way to create vast social networks embedded in space and time, and keep them growing and evolving without ...

This news release is available in German. "BigBrain helps us to generate new knowledge on the healthy and also the diseased brain," says Katrin Amunts, director at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) and the C. and O. Vogt Institute of Brain Research at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. For example: "As a consequence of its evolution, the human cerebral cortex is very heavily folded," says the neuroscientist. She explains that this is the reason why, in some areas, the thickness of the cerebral cortex can only be determined very imprecisely using ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Men who are diagnosed as azoospermic — infertile because of an absence of sperm in their ejaculate — are more prone to developing cancer than the general population, a study led by a Stanford University School of Medicine urologist has found. And a diagnosis of azoospermia before age 30 carries an eight-fold cancer risk, the study says. "An azoospermic man's risk for developing cancer is similar to that for a typical man 10 years older," said Michael Eisenberg, MD, PhD, assistant professor of urology at the medical school and director of male reproductive ...

Taking iron daily during pregnancy is associated with a significant increase in birth weight and a reduction in risk of low birth weight, finds a study published on bmj.com today. The effects were seen for iron doses up to 66 mg per day. The World Health Organization currently recommends a dose of 60 mg per day for pregnant women. Iron deficiency is the most widespread nutritional deficiency in the world. It is the most common cause of anaemia during pregnancy, especially in low and middle income countries, affecting an estimated 32 million pregnant women globally in ...

The efficient conversion of sunlight into useful energy is one of the challenges which stand in the way of meeting the world's increasing energy demand in a clean, sustainable way without relying on fossil fuels. Photosynthetic organisms, such as plants and some bacteria, have mastered this process: In less than a couple of trillionths of a second, 95 percent of the sunlight they absorb is whisked away to drive the metabolic reactions that provide them with energy. The efficiency of photovoltaic cells currently on the market is around 20 percent. What hidden mechanism does ...

Both the UK and Canada have experienced huge falls in diabetes-related mortality since the mid-1990s, with the result that the gap in mortality risk between those with and without diabetes has narrowed substantially. The findings are in new research published in Diabetologia, the Journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD), and written by Dr Lorraine Lipscombe, Women's College Hospital, Women's College Research Institute, Toronto, ON, Canada, and Adjunct Scientist, Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, Toronto, Canada; and Dr Marcus Lind, ...

Patients transferred to hospital via helicopter ambulance tend to have a higher survival rate than those who take the more traditional road route, despite having more severe injuries. The research, published in BioMed Central's open access journal Critical Care suggests that air ambulances are both effective and worthy of investment. Helicopters have been used as emergency ambulances for the past 40 years. For much of that time there has been ongoing debate about the cost of the service compared to the benefit in saving lives. The TraumaRegister DGU® of the German ...

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience Agency matters! Social preferences in the three-person ultimatum game The young field of "neureconomics" has shown that humans have a well-developed, innate sense of justice, presumably due to our evolutionary history as social animals. Johanna Alexopoulos and colleagues from the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, here show that two key variables determine whether we feel that a reward has been fairly distributed: how much we received compared to our peers, and how much influence we had over the distribution. Volunteers who were allowed ...

Patients given a clot-busting drug within six hours of a stroke are more likely to have a long-lasting recovery than those who do not receive the treatment, new research has found. A study of more than 3000 patients reviewed the effects of the drug rt-PA, which is given intravenously to patients who have suffered an ischaemic stroke. The international trial, led by the University of Edinburgh, found that 18 months after being treated with the drug, more stroke survivors were able to look after themselves. Patients who received rt-PA had fewer long-term problems with ...

The death of individual species is not the only concern for biologists worried about groups of animals, such as frogs or the "big cats," going extinct. University of California, Berkeley, researchers have found that lack of new emerging species also contributes to extinction. "Virtually no biologist thinks about the failure to originate as being a major factor in the long term causes of extinction," said Charles Marshall, director of the UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology and professor of integrative biology. "But we found that a decrease in the origin of new species ...

Raising a child is not cheap. Now try raising one on a fixed income and long past the age one associates with parenthood: 65 years and older. More than 300,000 grandparents in California have primary responsibility for their grandchildren, and of this group, almost 65,000 are over the age of 65. More than 20,000 care for their grandkids without any extended family assistance at home. A new study from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development shows that these families —older adults raising grandchildren alone ...

Washington, DC – One of the largest clinical trials done in infants with congenital (present at birth) heart diseases, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, shows that the increasingly common practice of using the drug clopidogrel (Plavix®) to reduce shunt-related blood flow issues is not effective in the dose studied. "Once again, pediatric-specific research shows that newborns and infants are not little adults," said David Wessel, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Children's National Medical Center, and lead author on the international study published in the June ...

Picture two light beams intersecting one another in space. When the beams touch one another, does the light bend? Reflect? Combine into a single beam? The answer, of course, is the light beams do nothing; they simply continue on their path. That is because in most media — including air, water, and vacuums — particles of quantized light beams called photons do not interact. But in certain crystalline materials and with a powerful enough laser, it is possible to make photons interact with one another and take on a special set of characteristics. Known as nonlinear optical ...

Mealybugs only eat plant sap, but sap doesn't contain all the essential amino acids the insects need to survive. Luckily, the bugs have a symbiotic relationship with two species of bacteria – one living inside the other in a situation unique to known biology – to manufacture the nutrients sap doesn't provide. The net result: The bacteria get a comfy mealybug home, and the bugs get the nutrition they need to live. University of Montana microbiologist John McCutcheon describes such mutually beneficial relationships used to solve life's little problems as "almost hilariously ...

Scientists have discovered the survival secret to a genetic mutation that stokes leukemia cells, solving an evolutionary riddle and paving the way to a highly targeted therapy for leukemia. In a paper published today in Cell, researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center describe how a mutated protein, called Fbxw7, behaves differently when expressed in cancer cells versus healthy cells. "Fbxw7 is essential for making blood cells, so the big mystery is why a mutation on a gene so important for survival would persist," says lead author Iannis Aifantis, PhD, chair of pathology ...

San Francisco, CA. (June 20, 2013) – Residents in anesthesiology training programs have high rates of burnout and depression, reports a survey study in the July issue of Anesthesia & Analgesia, official journal of the International Anesthesia Research Society (IARS). The findings raise concerns that, "In addition to effects on the health of anesthesiology trainees, burnout and depression may also affect patient care and safety," write Dr Gildasio S. de Oliveira, Jr, and colleagues of Northwestern University, Chicago. Burnout and Depression Are Common in Anesthesia Trainees… The ...