People punish generous group members by rejecting them socially — even when the generosity benefits everyone — because the "big givers" are nonconformists, according to a Baylor University study. The study, published in Social Science Research journal, showed that besides socially rejecting especially generous givers, others even "paid" to punish them through a points system. "This is puzzling behavior," said researcher Kyle Irwin, Ph.D., an assistant professor of sociology in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences. "Why would you punish the people who are doing the most ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Automakers and other private firms should be required by law to carry insurance policies to pay for tearing down their factories and buildings, recommends a hard-hitting study from Michigan State University's Center for Community and Economic Development. Such a requirement would prevent commercial and industrial companies from "walking away" from shuttered facilities – a problem plaguing the nation, said Rex LaMore, director of the CCED and lead author on the study. In the automotive industry alone, there are 135 abandoned plants nationwide. ...

We know it's out there, debris from 50 years of space exploration — aluminum, steel, nylon, even liquid sodium from Russian satellites — orbiting around the Earth and posing a danger to manned and unmanned spacecraft. According to NASA, there are more than 21,000 pieces of 'space junk' roughly the size of a baseball (larger than 10 centimeters) in orbit, and about 500,000 pieces that are golf ball-sized (between one to 10 centimeters). Sure, space is big, but when a piece of space junk strikes a spacecraft, the collision occurs at a velocity of 5 to 15 kilometers per ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- The power of the brain lies in its trillions of intercellular connections, called synapses, which together form complex neural "networks." While neuroscientists have long sought to map these complex connections to see how they influence specific brain functions, traditional techniques have yet to provide the desired resolution. Now, by using an innovative brain-tracing technique, scientists at the Gladstone Institutes and the Salk Institute have found a way to untangle these networks. Their findings offer new insight into how specific brain regions ...

They have also shown that any pancreatic β cells can be regenerated several times and that chemically-induced diabetes in mice can thus be "treated" repeatedly. The challenge for the researchers is now to show that these procedures can be applied to humans. Their work is published online in the Developmental Cell journal dated 27 June 2013. Type I diabetes, characterised by the selective loss of pancreatic, insulin-producing β cells, is a condition that affects more than 30 million people worldwide. Despite current treatments, type I diabetic patients have ...

CHICAGO --- The minds of murderers who kill impulsively, often out of rage, and those who carefully carry out premeditated crimes differ markedly both psychologically and intellectually, according to a new study by Northwestern Medicine® researcher Robert Hanlon. "Impulsive murderers were much more mentally impaired, particularly cognitively impaired, in terms of both their intelligence and other cognitive functions," said Hanlon, senior author of the study and associate professor of clinical psychiatry and clinical neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School ...

When young children gaze intently at something or furrow their brows in concentration, you know their minds are busily at work. But you're never entirely sure what they're thinking. Now you can get an inside look. Psychologists led by the University of Iowa for the first time have peered inside the brain with optical neuroimaging to quantify how much 3- and 4-year-old children are grasping when they survey what's around them and to learn what areas of the brain are in play. The study looks at "visual working memory," a core cognitive function in which we stitch together ...

The Inserm researchers at unit 1018, "The Epidemiology and Public Health Research Centre", working in collaboration with researchers from England and Finland have demonstrated that it is essential to be vigilant about this and to take it very seriously when people say that they are stressed, particularly if they believe that stress is affecting their health. According to the study performed by these researchers, with 7268 participants, such people have twice as much risk of a heart attack, compared with others. These results have been published in European Heart Journal. ...

Ingestion of commonly encountered nanoparticles at typical environmental levels is unlikely to cause overt toxicity, according to US researchers. Nevertheless there is insufficient evidence to determine whether chronic exposures could lead to subtle alterations in intestinal immune function, protein profiles, or microbial balance. Writing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Biomedical Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, researchers have compared existing laboratory and experimental animal studies pertaining to the toxicity of nanoparticles most likely to ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A computer analysis of nearly 2 million text messages (tweets) on the online social network Twitter found that Christians use more positive words, fewer negative words and engage in less analytical thinking than atheists. Christians also were more likely than atheists to tweet about their social relationships, the researchers found. The findings are reported in the journal Social Psychological & Personality Science. "Whether religious people experience more or less happiness is an important question in itself," the authors of the new analysis wrote. ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Many researchers around the world are seeking ways to "scrub" carbon dioxide (CO2) from the emissions of fossil-fuel power plants as a way of curbing the gas that is considered most responsible for global climate change. But most such systems rely on complex plumbing to divert the steam used to drive the turbines that generate power in these plants, and such systems are not practical as retrofits to existing plants. Now, researchers at MIT have come up with a scrubbing system that requires no steam connection, can operate at lower temperatures, and would ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Engineers at Oregon State University are studying a new approach to organize and route truck transportation that could save millions of dollars, improve the quality of life for thousands of truck drivers and make freight transportation far more efficient. The findings, published recently in Transportation Research Part E, show the feasibility of the new system. More research is still needed before implementation, but there's potential to revolutionize the way that truck transportation is handled in the United States and around the world, some experts ...

(Santa Barbara, California) –– Building on research published eight years ago in the journal Chemistry and Biology, Kenneth S. Kosik, Harriman Professor in Neuroscience and co-director of the Neuroscience Research Institute (NRI) at UC Santa Barbara, and his team have now applied their findings to two distinct, well-known mouse models, demonstrating a new potential target in the fight against Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases. The results were published online June 4 as the Paper of the Week in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. As a Paper of the Week, ...

The day of the big barbecue arrives and it's time to fire up the grill. But rather than toss the hamburgers and hotdogs haphazardly onto the grate, you wait for the heat to reach an optimal temperature, and then neatly lay them out in their apportioned areas according to size and cooking times. Meanwhile, your friend is preparing the beverages. Cups are grabbed face down from the stack, turned over, and – using the other hand – filled with ice. While these tasks – like countless, everyday actions – may seem trivial at first glance, they are actually fairly complex, according ...

To keep costs low, companies often incentivize healthy lifestyles. Now, new research suggests that how these incentives are framed — as benefits for healthy-weight people or penalties for overweight people — makes a big difference. The research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that policies that carry higher premiums for overweight individuals are perceived as punishing and stigmatizing. Researcher David Tannenbaum of the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles wanted ...

A new UC San Francisco study highlights the potential importance of the vast majority of human DNA that lies outside of genes within the cell. The researchers found that about 85 percent of these stretches of DNA make RNA, a molecule that increasingly is being found to play important roles within cells. They also determined that this RNA-making DNA is more likely than other non-gene DNA regions to be associated with inherited disease risks. The study, published in the free online journal PLOS Genetics on June 20, 2013, is one of the most extensive examinations of the ...

When University of Alberta researcher Duane Froese found an unusually large horse fossil in the Yukon permafrost, he knew it was important. Now, in a new study published online today in Nature, this fossil is rewriting the story of equine evolution as the ancient horse has its genome sequenced. Unlike the small ice age horse fossils that are common across the unglaciated areas of the Yukon, Alaska and Siberia that date to the last 100,000 years, this fossil was at least the size of a modern domestic horse. Froese, an associate professor in the U of A Department of Earth ...

For most terrestrial life on Earth, oxygen is necessary for survival. But the planet's atmosphere did not always contain this life-sustaining substance, and one of science's greatest mysteries is how and when oxygenic photosynthesis—the process responsible for producing oxygen on Earth through the splitting of water molecules—first began. Now, a team led by geobiologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has found evidence of a precursor photosystem involving manganese that predates cyanobacteria, the first group of organisms to release oxygen into the ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass- Most efforts at improving solar cells have focused on increasing the efficiency of their energy conversion, or on lowering the cost of manufacturing. But now MIT researchers are opening another avenue for improvement, aiming to produce the thinnest and most lightweight solar panels possible. Such panels, which have the potential to surpass any substance other than reactor-grade uranium in terms of energy produced per pound of material, could be made from stacked sheets of one-molecule-thick materials such as graphene or molybdenum disulfide. Jeffrey ...

You say tomato, I say comparative transcriptomics. Researchers in the U.S., Europe and Japan have produced the first comparison of both the DNA sequences and which genes are active, or being transcribed, between the domestic tomato and its wild cousins. The results give insight into the genetic changes involved in domestication and may help with future efforts to breed new traits into tomato or other crops, said Julin Maloof, professor of plant biology in the College of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis. Maloof is senior author on the study, published ...

All stars begin their lives in groups. Most stars, including our Sun, are born in small, benign groups that quickly fall apart. Others form in huge, dense swarms that survive for billions of years as stellar clusters. Within such rich and dense clusters, stars jostle for room with thousands of neighbors while strong radiation and harsh stellar winds scour interstellar space, stripping planet-forming materials from nearby stars. It would thus seem an unlikely place to find alien worlds. Yet 3,000 light-years from Earth, in the star cluster NGC 6811, astronomers have found ...

New research suggests that the rapid rise of antibiotic resistance correlates with oral ingestion of antibiotics, raising the possibility that other routes of administration could reduce the spread of resistance. The manuscript appears online ahead of print in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. "For more than 40 years, a few doses of penicillin were enough to take care of deadly bacterial infections," says Hua Wang of the Ohio State University, Columbus, a researcher on the study. But since the 1980s, antibiotic resistance has been spreading rapidly, ...

A business may build a better reputation as a good corporate citizen by donating $100,000 to ten charities, as opposed to $1million to one charity, suggested University of Missouri anthropologist Shane Macfarlan. Contrary to earlier assumptions in theoretical biology, Macfarlan's research found that helping a greater number of people builds a positive reputation more than helping a few people many times. The results of this research can offer guidance to businesses and politicians on how to improve their public images. "Good reputations are good business. For example, ...

WOODS HOLE, Mass.– A new study helps explain how parts of the brain maintain their delicate balance of zinc, an element required in minute but crucial doses, particularly during embryonic development. The study, led at the MBL by Dr. Mark Messerli in collaboration with scientists from the University of California, Davis, shows that neural cells require zinc uptake through a membrane transporter referred to as ZIP12.. If that route is closed, neuronal sprouting and growth are significantly impaired and is fatal for a developing embryo. Their discovery was published in ...

U.S. residents today are living longer than previous generations, thanks to improved public health and medical treatment. But they're also living longer with chronic geriatric health conditions like dementia, urinary incontinence, depression and debilitating falls, which often require complex medical care. Doctors spend significant time and resources treating individuals with chronic conditions, and the average family physician can become severely overtaxed managing care for such patients. The picture becomes even worse with chronic geriatric conditions. Several ...