When a University of Oklahoma researcher and an international team of experts analyzed the dental calculus or plaque from teeth preserved for 1,000 years, the results revealed human health and dietary information never seen before. The team discovered disease-causing bacteria in a German Medieval population, which is the same or very similar to inflammatory disease-causing bacteria in humans today—unlikely scientific results given modern hygiene and dental health practices. Christina Warinner, research associate in the Molecular Anthropologies Laboratories, OU College ...

Recovering from natural disasters usually means rebuilding infrastructure and reassembling human lives. Yet ecologically sensitive areas need to heal, too, and scientists are pioneering new methods to assess nature's recovery and guide human intervention. The epicenter of China's devastating Wenchuan earthquake in 2008 was in the Wolong Nature Reserve, a globally important valuable biodiversity hotspot and home to the beloved and endangered giant pandas. Not only did the quake devastate villages and roads, but the earth split open and swallowed sections of the forests ...

When deciding what materials to use in building something, determining how those materials respond to stress and strain is often the first task. A material's macroscopic, or bulk, properties in this area — whether it can spring back into shape, for example — is generally the product of what is happening on a microscopic scale. When stress causes a material's constituent molecules to rearrange in a way such that they can't go back to their original positions, it is known as "plastic deformation." Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have devised a method to study ...

Older parents frequently give help to their middle-aged offspring, and their perceptions about giving this help may affect their mental health, according to a team of researchers. "We usually view the elderly as needy, but our research shows that parents ages 60 and over are giving help to their children, and this support is often associated with lower rates of depression among the older adults," said Lauren Bangerter, Ph.D. student in human development and family studies, Penn State. The team -- which included researchers at Penn State, the University of Texas ...

Although maintaining good blood sugar control is crucial for avoiding complications of diabetes, it has been estimated that only about half of patients are successful in meeting target blood glucose levels. The prevalence of depression among diabetes patients – up to twice as high as in the general population – can interfere with patients' ability to manage their diabetes. Now a group of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators report that a program of cognitive behavioral therapy that addresses both mood and diabetes self-care led to improved blood sugar control ...

An inventory of wild-caught caterpillars, its food plants and parasitoids, has been going on for more than 34 years in Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG), a protected area of approximately 1200 km2 in northwestern Costa Rica. As a result, more than 10,000 species of moths and butterflies are estimated to live in ACG. Their caterpillars are in turn attacked by many parasitoid wasps, also numbering thousands of species. However, most of those wasps have never been described and remain unknown. For the past few years researchers from Canada, Costa Rica and the United ...

Cells in our body are constantly dividing to maintain our body functions. At each division, our DNA code and a whole machinery of supporting components has to be faithfully duplicated to maintain the cell's memory of its own identity. Researchers at BRIC, University of Copenhagen, have developed a new technology that has revealed the dynamic events of this duplication process and the secrets of cellular memory. The results are published in Nature Cell Biology. In 2009, two women at BRIC, University of Copenhagen joined forces to develop a new technology that could elucidate ...

The 2003 development of the so-called hyperpolarization technique by a Danish research was a groundbreaking moment that made it possible to see all the body's cells with the help of a new contrast agent for MRI scans. Researchers from Aarhus have now taken another big step towards understanding the body's cells and with it also the development of diseases: "With the hyperpolarization method, sensitivity to specific contrast agents is up to 10,000 times higher than with a traditional MRI scanning. What we have now documented is that with the hyperpolarization MRI scanning ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A multi-institutional team reports that it can increase sugarcane's geographic range, boost its photosynthetic rate by 30 percent and turn it into an oil-producing crop for biodiesel production. These are only the first steps in a bigger initiative that will turn sugarcane and sorghum – two of the most productive crop plants known – into even more productive, oil-generating plants. The team will present its latest findings Tuesday (Feb. 25) at the U.S. Department of Energy's ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in Washington, D.C. "Biodiesel is attractive ...

VIDEO: Catalan researchers have studied the acquisition and development of language in babies on the basis of the temporary coordination of gestures and speech. The results are the first in showing... Click here for more information. Catalan researchers have studied the acquisition and development of language in babies on the basis of the temporary coordination of gestures and speech. The results are the first in showing how and when they acquire the pattern of coordination ...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 24, 2014 — Forget ketchup and mustard — Sriracha might be the world's new favorite condiment. Beloved by millions for its unique spicy, garlicky, slightly sweet flavor, the chemistry of "rooster sauce" is the subject of the American Chemical Society's latest Reactions video. The video is available at http://youtu.be/U2DJN0gnuI8. INFORMATION: Subscribe to the series at Reactions YouTube, and follow us on Twitter @ACSreactions to be the first to see our latest videos. The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. ...

ATLANTA – February 24, 2014 – A new American Cancer Society study shows that uninsured adolescents and young adults were far more likely to be diagnosed with late-stage cancer, which is more difficult and expensive to treat and more deadly, compared to young patients with health insurance. The study, published early online, will appear in the March issue of the journal CANCER. The study's authors says their data suggest a way forward for cancer control efforts in the adolescent and young adult (AYA) population, a group that has benefited the least from recent progress ...

This news release is available in German. So far, film studios have had to put in huge amounts of effort to set monsters, superheroes, fairies or other virtual characters into real feature film scenes. Within the so-called motion capturing process, real actors wear skintight suits with markers on them. These suits reflect infrared light that is emitted and captured by special cameras. Subsequent to this, the movements of the actors are rendered with the aid of software into animated characters. The most popular example of this is "Gollum" from the film Lord of the ...

A tabletop device invented at Rice University can tell how efficiently a nanoparticle would travel through a well and may provide a wealth of information for oil and gas producers. The device gathers data on how tracers – microscopic particles that can be pumped into and recovered from wells – move through deep rock formations that have been opened by hydraulic fracturing. Drilling companies use fracturing to pump oil and gas from previously unreachable reservoirs. Fluids are pumped into a wellbore under high pressure to fracture rocks, and materials called "proppants," ...

Native red squirrels have declined throughout Britain and Ireland for the last century due to a combination of habitat loss and the introduction of the North American eastern grey squirrel. But more recently its few remaining populations have been devastated by an insidious pox virus passed to them by the alien invaders. A study by the biodiversity and conservation research centre Quercus at Queen's University Belfast (QUB), and published in the journal PLOS ONE, found the situation may be worse than previously thought as the disease appears to have multiple modes of ...

In a three-year GM research trial, scientists boosted resistance of potatoes to late blight, their most important disease, without deploying fungicides. The findings, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and The Gatsby Foundation, will be published in 'Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B' on 17 February. In 2012, the third year of the trial, the potatoes experienced ideal conditions for late blight. The scientists did not inoculate any plants but waited for races circulating in the UK to blow in. Non-transgenic Desiree ...

Hamilton, ON (Feb. 24, 2014) – High performance athletes like Olympians can push their bodies to optimal potential, but some of the ways the human body actually works is still a mystery. Now McMaster University researchers have cleared up one aspect of how the bowels move that had mystified scientists for, well, forever. Gastroenterology scientist Jan Huizinga and his team have learned that of the two types of movement, the segmentation motion occurs when not one but two sets of pacemakers interact with each other to create a specific rhythm. Then they work together ...

The fast pace and amount of information available today requires flexibility in how one works. Those who are interested in expanding their knowledge but need more options with education can take part in the launch of the first university that allows you to pick your path. The Omatrix Center has launched a program that offers flexibility with finances, timing and with your personal needs as the first university that has a pick your path program. The pick your path university is an innovative concept to balance out the fast track that many are now on while offering educational ...

Motivation, as described by the Merriam Webster dictionary, is the act or process of giving someone a reason for doing something. It is a force, stimulus, or influence that propels one into action. Every day, thousands of Americans raid libraries, sift through blogs, and task friends and family for hours of conversation as they desperately struggle to find the motivation to live; for there is something in the human psyche that declares mere existence insufficient. It is not enough to eat, sleep, reproduce; to simply survive. Our souls demand that we live, that we discover ...

SPARQL City is proud to introduce to the database management community version 1.0 SPARQLverse, in both open-source and commercial forms.The SPARQLverse product is specifically designed to seamlessly perform analytics on NoSQL key-value systems including MongoDB, Cassandra and RDF. SPARQLverse is a key element in the corporate data stack, providing direct analytic access without the need to create complex schemas, ETL processes, or writing poor performing, map-reduce style software. Instead, SPARQLverse extends the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) standard for SPARQL ...

Anaplan, the leader of cloud-based, in-memory business modeling and planning for sales, operations, and finance, today announced the appointment of Nicolas Forcade as Managing Director for France. In this role, Forcade will manage Anaplan's growth in the French market, overseeing pre-sales, sales management, marketing, and customer success. "Since opening our EMEA HQ in Paris about a year ago, we have received tremendous interest from many European companies requiring a more flexible, user-friendly platform to empower their business users to rapidly respond to changing ...

Anoka Middle School for the Arts teacher Linda Keller is making a big impact on student's lives by using an infant simulator for child abuse prevention. Keller, a seventh-grade Family & Consumer Sciences (FACS) teacher, acquired one of Realityworks' RealCare Shaken Baby simulators during a drawing at the Minnesota Family & Consumer Science Conference this past January. Each year, Keller teaches 250-300 students a variety of lifetime skills, from food and nutrition to caring for and understanding infants, toddlers and preschoolers. She has a passion for families, ...

Atlantic Tire & Service, a locally owned and operated automotive care and repair center in the Triangle, has been awarded the 2013 Better Business Bureau (BBB) of Eastern North Carolina Torch Award in the Large Business Category. This award recognizes exemplified trustworthy business practices, ethical marketing and management practices, positive community relations and solid industry reputation. All of the entries for this award were evaluated by an independent panel of prestigious judges who represent business communities in Eastern North Carolina. Atlantic Tire ...

The Grand Canyon travel season will start in earnest next month. In anticipation of that, Grand Canyon Helicopters has released a free report that lists the best air tour deals for the remainder of Q2 2014. "Right now is one of the best times to book a helicopter tour," said Keith Kravitz, owner of Grand Canyon Helicopters (GCH), a consumer information site focused on finding the best fares on Canyon flights. "Winter is traditionally the slowest time of the year for flights and prices have been suppressed in order to stimulate demand. For savvy travelers, ...

Jackson Design & Remodeling today announced that voting is now open for the 2014 JDR Industry Blogger Awards. This year there are 46 nominees in six categories: Interior Design, Construction Business, Remodeling, Architecture, Green and Microblog. Now in its fifth year, the awards program has continued to expand its reach. "The Blogger Awards recognize the work of the best blogs in the business," said Todd Jackson, President and CEO of JDR. "They underline the importance of online communication in building community within our industry. Last year, ...