Many black or racially mixed women in Venezuela are undergoing nose jobs in an effort to look whiter, but the procedure only temporarily improves their self-esteem and body image in a culture that values whiteness, a Dartmouth College study finds. Cosmetic surgery is increasingly common in many countries, including Venezuela, where an obsession with physical appearance prompts many women to get breast implants, face lifts, liposuction and other cosmetic procedures. But the trend has also sparked controversy -- the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez blamed cosmetic ...

Researchers have designed droplets using a technique that could have applications for everything from extracting oil from wells to creating makeup and food. You've seen Hollandaise sauce or mayonnaise that has separated, or that shiny layer of oil that forms on top of skin cream. This mixture of water and oil is called an emulsion, but it can be difficult to keep emulsions from separating. A special substance called an emulsifier is used to keep the mixture stable and prevent separation. This is an ongoing problem for the food and medical industries, as well as for ...

The surface of Mercury is rather different from those of well-known rocky bodies like the Moon and Mars. Early images from the Mariner 10 spacecraft unveiled a planet covered by smooth plains and cratered plains of unclear origin. A team led by Dr. Simone Marchi, a Fellow of the NASA Lunar Science Institute located at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Boulder, Colo., office, collaborating with the MESSENGER team, including Dr. Clark Chapman of the SwRI Planetary Science Directorate, studied the surface to better understand if the plains were formed by volcanic flows ...

The influenza virus' ability to mutate quickly has produced new, emerging strains that make drug discovery more critical than ever. For the first time, researchers at Seattle BioMed, along with collaborators at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and the University of Washington, have mapped how critical molecules regulate both the induction and resolution of inflammation during flu infection. The results are published this month in the journal Cell. Flu is an elusive foe The influenza virus mutates extremely ...

Ungulates like Tibetan antelope, Kiang, wild yak, Przewalski's gazelle, Tibetan gazelle, Mongolian gazelle, roam on the steppes and grasslands of Asia, need large open habitats. For examples, once millions of Mongolian gazelles migrate to the Inner Mongolian steppe in winter and return to steppes in eastern Mongolia and Durian, Russia during the breeding in summer. Hundreds of thousands of Przewalski's gazelles also roam in the Alpine steppe in Qinghai lake drainage (Fig. 1). Those wild ungulates move freely on the grasslands are animal spectacles in Eurasia. Area of ...

CHARGE syndrome* is a severe developmental disorder affecting multiple organs. It affects 1 in 8500 newborns worldwide. The majority of patients carry a mutation in a gene called CHD7. How this single mutation leads to the broad spectrum of characteristic CHARGE symptoms has been a mystery. CHD7 encodes a so-called chromatin remodeler, an important class of epigenetic regulators. DNA is wound around bead-like nucleosomes consisting of histone proteins. The string of beads is then twisted into a structure called chromatin. The more nucleosomes that occupy a gene, the ...

Risky behavior can lead to premature death – in humans. Anna Lindholm and her doctoral student Yannick Auclair investigated whether this also applies to animals by studying the behavior of 82 house mice. They recorded boldness, activity level, exploration tendency and energy intake of female and male house mice with two different allelic variants on chromosome 17, thereby testing predictions of "life-history theory" on how individuals invest optimally in growth and reproduction. According to this theory, individuals with a greater life expectancy will express reactive personality ...

A policy known as sustainable intensification could help meet the challenges of increasing demands for food from a growing global population, argues a team of scientists in an article in the journal Science. The goal of sustainable intensification is to increase food production from existing farmland says the article in the journal's Policy Forum by lead authors Dr Tara Garnett and Professor Charles Godfray from the University of Oxford. They say this would minimise the pressure on the environment in a world in which land, water, and energy are in short supply, highlighting ...

The earliest evidence of using flower beds for burial, dating back to 13,700 years ago, was discovered in Raqefet Cave in Mt. Carmel, during excavations led by the University of Haifa. In four different graves from the Natufian period, dating back to 13,700-11,700 years ago, dozens of impressions of Salvia plants and other species of sedges and mints (the Lamiaceae family), were found under human skeletons. "This is another evidence that as far back as 13,700 years ago, our ancestors, the Natufians, had burial rituals similar to ours, nowadays", said Prof. Dani Nadel, from ...

Imaging techniques in cancer medicine provide far more than merely information on the scale and location of cancerous ulcers. There are modern methods that additionally characterise the tumour cells precisely, for instance by specific molecules they carry on their surface. Such additional information gives doctors key clues as to the precise cancer type and enables them to predict the probability that a patient will respond to a particular form of therapy. Positron emission tomography (PET) is one such technique. Unlike with computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging, ...

An international project has developed a response programme for rapidly restoring the use of drinking water networks following a deliberate contamination event. The importance of water and of water infrastructures to human health and to the running of our economy makes water systems likely targets for terrorism and CBRN (chemical, biological and radionuclide) contamination. Reducing the vulnerability of drinking water systems to deliberate attacks is one of the main security challenges. SecurEau, a four-year Seventh Framework Programme funded project, involved 12 partners, ...

This news release is available in German. The experimental work, which was performed at the German Electron Synchrotron Facility (DESY) in Hamburg, involved levitating hot metal droplets and observing them as they cooled by irradiating them with x-rays from one of the world's strongest x-ray sources. The research work is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the results have just been published in 'Nature Communications'. Supercooled liquids demonstrate some interesting phenomena when they are irradiated with an extremely bright x-ray source. Shuai ...

Japanese films have retaken the box office in their home market in a major shift not seen since the 1960s, according to new research by the University of East Anglia (UEA). A boom in production numbers has taken place since 2000 - in 2012 Japan produced 554 films, the first time it had broken the 500-film barrier since 1961. This is in contrast to the period from the 1950s to the end of the 1990s, when Japanese production steadily declined from about 500 movies a year to only around 250. However, despite their popularity at home this success has yet to translate into ...

News agencies continue to have an edge over Twitter in being first with the news, a study found. Research into reporting of news events by Twitter and newswire services has found that while Twitter can sometimes break news before newswires, for major events there is little evidence that it can replace traditional news outlets. Twitter's main benefits for news are bringing additional coverage of events, and for sharing news items of interest to niche audiences or with a short lifespan, such as local sports results. Scientists at the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow ...

The radioactive element astatine, the name of which is derived from the Greek word for 'instability,' is so rare on earth that it has not yet been investigated to any greater extent and, as a consequence, very little is known about it. Using artificially generated astatine, the Mainz-based physicist Sebastian Rothe has now managed for the first time to experimentally explore one of its fundamental parameters, the ionization potential, and thus determine one of the most important properties of the rare element. The ionization potential is the binding energy, i.e., the amount ...

High-resolution mapping of the epigenome has discovered unique patterns that emerge during the generation of brain circuitry in childhood. While the 'genome' can be thought of as the instruction manual that contains the blueprints (genes) for all of the components of our cells and our body, the 'epigenome' can be thought of as an additional layer of information on top of our genes that change the way they are used. "These new insights will provide the foundation for investigating the role the epigenome plays in learning, memory formation, brain structure and mental ...

Very little is known about the Sahamalaza sportive lemur (Lepilemur sahamalazensis), other than the fact it roosts during the day in rather open situations, such as tree holes, and therefore risks falling victim to predators from both the air and the ground. Sportive lemurs are not kept in any zoo. Prior to this research virtually nothing was known about this particular species despite the fact that it has been classified as Critically Endangered, the top threat category of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, at ...

BOWLING GREEN, O.—Lake Vostok, buried under a glacier in Antarctica, is so dark, deep and cold that scientists had considered it a possible model for other planets, a place where nothing could live. However, work by Dr. Scott Rogers, a Bowling Green State University professor of biological sciences, and his colleagues has revealed a surprising variety of life forms living and reproducing in this most extreme of environments. A paper published June 26 in PLOS ONE (Public Library of Science - http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0067221) details the thousands of species ...

TORONTO - A team of Toronto-based researchers may be one step closer to a 'recipe' for large-scale production of stem cells for use in research and therapy. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) can be of great value for medical research because they can flexibly develop into many different types of cells. However, producing these cells is challenging because the proteins that control their generation are largely unknown. But researchers from the University of Toronto, the Hospital for Sick Children and Mount Sinai Hospital (with colleagues from the United States and ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – With fewer than a dozen flowering plants out of 300,000 species accounting for 80 percent of humanity's caloric intake, people need to tap unused plants to feed the world in the near future, claims Cornell University plant geneticist Susan McCouch in the Comment feature of the July 4 issue of Nature. To keep pace with population growth and rising incomes around the world, researchers estimate that food availability must double in the next 25 years. The biodiversity stored in plant gene banks coupled with advances in genetics and plant breeding may hold ...

The Great Barrier Reef humpbacked conch snail jumps when it senses the odour of its main predator, the marbled cone shell. Together with a team of researchers from the James Cook University, Dr Sjannie Lefevre and Prof Göran Nilsson at the University of Oslo in Norway looked for the first time at the effects of increased temperature on the ability of the snail to deliver oxygen to tissues during jumping provoked by the predator odour. The researchers analysed resting and active jumping oxygen consumption rates in snails exposed to seawater at the normal temperature of ...

The researchers removed starfish with and without eyes from their food rich habitat, the coral reef, and placed them on the sand bottom one metre away, where they would starve. They monitored the starfishes' behaviour from the surface and found that while starfish with intact eyes head towards the direction of the reef, starfish without eyes walk randomly. Dr Garm said: "The results show that the starfish nervous system must be able to process visual information, which points to a clear underestimation of the capacity found in the circular and somewhat dispersed central ...

The team of researchers headed Dr Steven Portugal (Royal Veterinary College, University of London) discovered the nano-scale cone-like structures. Dr Steven Portugal explained: "This work was started by accident. A water spillage over an egg collection revealed how differently water droplets acted on the guillemot eggshells in comparison to other species. The water droplets stayed as a sphere on the eggs, typically an indication of a hydrophobic surface." The researchers identified that these structures are unique to guillemot eggshells in a comparative study of over ...

A research team headed by Prof Jonathan Lynch at the Pennsylvania State University, United States, found that maize roots show natural variation in the number of cortical cells in their roots which can be selected preferentially for cultivation on land where deep roots are an advantage. A field study in collaboration with the Bunda College of Agriculture in Malawi shows that a lower number of cortical cells, reduces the energetic cost of soil exploration by the roots. Prof Jonathan Lynch said: "A lower number of cortical cells means that the plants spend less nutrients ...

Research by Michael Oellermann, Hans Pörtner and Felix Mark at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, looked at how octopods are able to supply oxygen to tissues in freezing temperatures. The researchers compared the properties of blood pigment haemocyanin, responsible for oxygen transport, of Antarctic, Temperate and Warm-Adapted octopods. The researchers found that the forms of haemocyanin of the Antarctic octopod Pareledone charcoti, are genetically and functionally different from the temperate and warmer climate octopods, facilitating ...