The average UK worker sends and receives 10,000 emails a year and one in ten spend the whole working day on a computer or mobile phone. That's according to new research released by npower, which documents how electronic devices have transformed our working lives over the past 60 years. The study, produced by Warwick Business School to support the 'Remember How We Used To Work' online archive from npower, which has been created on Historypin.com and maps out the increasing use of office gadgets through the years; from typewriters to telex, computers to smartphones, it ...

Environmental change can drive hard-wired evolutionary changes in animal species in a matter of generations. A study by Umeå University ecologist Tom Cameron and a research team at University of Leeds overturns the common assumption that evolution only occurs gradually over hundreds or thousands of years. The results are published in the journal Ecology Letters. Instead, researchers found significant genetically transmitted changes in laboratory populations of soil mites in just 15 generations leading to a doubling of the age at which the mites reached adulthood and large ...

Michael Woods m_woods@acs.org 504-670-4707 (New Orleans Press Center, April 5-10) 202-872-6293 American Chemical Society GUMBOS technology promises new drugs, electronic devices NEW ORLEANS, April 10, 2013 — Mention a breakthrough involving "gumbo" technology in this city, and people think of a new twist on The Local Dish, the stew that's the quintessence of southern Louisiana cooking. But scientific presentations at a meeting of the world's largest scientific society this week are focusing on what may be an advance in developing GUMBOS-based materials with far-reaching ...

Michael Woods m_woods@acs.org 504-670-4707 (New Orleans Press Center, April 5-10) 202-872-6293 American Chemical Society Overcoming a major barrier to medical and other uses of 'microrockets' and 'micromotors' NEW ORLEANS, April 10, 2013 — An advance in micromotor technology akin to the invention of cars that fuel themselves from the pavement or air, rather than gasoline or batteries, is opening the door to broad new medical and industrial uses for these tiny devices, scientists said here today. Their update on development of the motors — so small that thousands ...

Michael Woods m_woods@acs.org 504-670-4707 (New Orleans Press Center, April 5-10) 202-872-6293 American Chemical Society Major symposium on arsenic contamination in food and water supplies NEW ORLEANS, April 10, 2013 — After virtually eliminating arsenic as a useful tool for homicide, science now faces challenges in doing the same for natural sources of this fabled old "inheritance powder" that contaminates water supplies and food, threatening more than 35 million people worldwide. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a popular book documenting arsenic's ...

Michael Woods m_woods@acs.org 504-670-4707 (New Orleans Press Center, April 5-10) 202-872-6293 American Chemical Society Understanding the life of lithium ion batteries in electric vehicles NEW ORLEANS, April 10, 2013 — Scientists today answered a question that worries millions of owners and potential owners of electric and hybrid vehicles using lithium-ion batteries: How long before the battery pack dies, leaving a sticker-shock bill for a fresh pack or a car ready for the junk heap? Their answer, presented here at the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of ...

WASHINGTON, DC (April 10, 2013)—A common virus known to cause cervical and head and neck cancers may also trigger some cases of lung cancer, according to new research presented by Fox Chase Cancer Center at the AACR Annual Meeting 2013 on Wednesday, April 10. Examining tissue samples from lung cancer patients, the researchers found that nearly 6% showed signs they may have been driven by a strain of human papillomavirus (HPV) known to cause cancer. If HPV indeed plays a role in lung cancer in some patients, the next step is to better understand those tumors so they ...

MELBOURNE, FLA.—"What are the radiation doses to airplane passengers from the intense bursts of gamma-rays that originate from thunderclouds?" Florida Institute of Technology Department of Physics and Space Science faculty members addressed the issue and presented their terrestrial gamma ray flashes research modeling work at a press conference meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria, April 10. Joseph Dwyer, Ningyu Liu and Hamid Rassoul discussed a new physics-based model of radiation dose calculations and compared the calculations to previous work. Scientists ...

The majority of family doctors receive little or no information about harmful effects of medicines when visited by drug company representatives, according to an international study involving Canadian, U.S. and French physicians. Yet the same doctors indicated that they were likely to start prescribing these drugs, consistent with previous research that shows prescribing behaviour is influenced by pharmaceutical promotion. The study, which had doctors fill out questionnaires about each promoted medicine following sales visits, was published online today in the Journal ...

LA JOLLA, CA – April 10, 2013 – Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have shed light on one of the major toxic mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease. The discoveries could lead to a much better understanding of the Alzheimer's process and how to prevent it. The findings, reported in the April 10, 2013 issue of the journal Neuron, show that brain damage in Alzheimer's disease is linked to the overactivation of an enzyme called AMPK. When the scientists blocked this enzyme in mouse models of the disease, neurons were protected from loss of synapses—neuron-to-neuron ...

Estrogen and progesterone receptors, and the gene HER2 – these are the big three markers and/or targets in breast cancer. Evidence presented at the AACR Annual Meeting 2013 adds a fourth: androgen receptors. "This is a continuing line of work with all evidence pointing toward the addition of the androgen receptor as potential target and useful marker in all of the major subtypes of breast cancer," says Jennifer Richer, PhD, investigator at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and co-director of the CU Cancer Center Tissue Processing and Procurement Core. The finding ...

Stars the size of the Sun end their lives as tiny and faint white dwarf stars. But as they make the final transition into retirement their atmospheres are blown away into space. For a few tens of thousands of years they are surrounded by the spectacular and colourful glowing clouds of ionised gas known as planetary nebulae. This new image from the VLT shows the planetary nebula IC 1295, which lies in the constellation of Scutum (The Shield). It has the unusual feature of being surrounded by multiple shells that make it resemble a micro-organism seen under a microscope, ...

Sophia Antipolis, 10 April 2013. Despite their greater life expectancy, the adults of today are less "metabolically" healthy than their counterparts of previous generations. That's the conclusion of a large cohort study from the Netherlands which compared generational shifts in a range of well established metabolic risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Assessing the trends, the investigators concluded that "the more recently born generations are doing worse", and warn "that the prevalence of metabolic risk factors and the lifelong exposure to them have increased and ...

EGU Press Conference, Wednesday, 10 April-- Not only do humans emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but they also do things that help remove these gases from the atmosphere—for example, planting more forests or other land management techniques can lead to greater uptake of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. New research presented by IIASA researcher Hannes Böttcher at the EGU General Assembly this week estimates future land use emissions for the European Union. These scenarios provide the basis for policy discussions in the EU, and also help identify the least ...

New research has questioned the reliability of neuroscience studies, saying that conclusions could be misleading due to small sample sizes. A team led by academics from the University of Bristol reviewed 48 articles on neuroscience meta-analysis which were published in 2011 and concluded that most had an average power of around 20 per cent – a finding which means the chance of the average study discovering the effect being investigated is only one in five. The paper, being published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience today [10 April], reveals that small, low-powered studies ...

This press release is available in German. Fruit-eating animals are known to use their spatial memory to relocate fruit, yet, it is unclear how they manage to find fruit in the first place. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have now investigated which strategies chimpanzees in the Taï National Park in Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa, use in order to find fruit in the rain forest. The result: Chimpanzees know that trees of certain species produce fruit simultaneously and use this botanical knowledge during their daily ...

April 10, 2013, New York, NY – A dozen Ludwig scientists from around the world presented the latest advancements in basic and clinical cancer research at this week's American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2013. Progress in immunotherapy and epigenetics led the program with important diagnostic and treatment implications for emerging cancer therapy. "With new immunotherapy agents available to help patients with melanoma, researchers are developing prognostic biomarkers to determine who will benefit most to fully realize the potential of these ...

The "holy grail" for understanding how and why koalas respond to infectious diseases has been uncovered in an Australian-led, world-first genome mapping project. The joint undertaking between QUT (Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia) and The Australian Museum has unearthed a wealth of data, including the koala interferon gamma (IFN-g) gene - a chemical messenger that plays a key role in the iconic marsupial's defence against cancer, viruses and intracellular bacteria. Professor Peter Timms, from QUT's Institue of Health and Biomedical Innovation ...

Scientists have revealed a new technique to introduce disease-blocking bacteria into mosquitoes, with promising results that may halt the spread of diseases such as dengue, yellow fever and potentially malaria. When infected with the bacteria Wolbachia, mosquitoes are unable to spread viruses such as dengue, a disease which kills round 40,000 people each year with no vaccines or specific treatments currently available. There have been around 2,400 cases of dengue infection in Northern Australia in recent years. However, the bacteria has been difficult to spread within ...

An unusual fossil fish that has fins behind its anus could have implications for human evolution according to a scientist at The University of Manchester. Dr Robert Sansom from the Faculty of Life Sciences identified the paired fins of Euphanerops, a fossil jawless fish that swam in the seas around 370 million years ago. The find makes the fish one of the first vertebrate to develop paired appendages such as fins, legs or arms. However, their positioning is incredibly unusual, as Dr Sansom explains: "Euphanerops is unique because its anal fin is paired meaning there ...

A new study by scientists at the University of York and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) shows that bird species which have colonised the UK in recent decades breed initially almost exclusively in nature reserves and other areas specially protected for wildlife. First author, Jonathan Hiley, a PhD student in the Department of Biology at York, said: "Nature reserves provide ecological welcome mats for new arrivals." Published online in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B., the study shows that, of the 20 wetland bird species that bred for ...

New scientific evidence seems to confirm the famous Roman saying "Mens sana in corpore sano". Researchers from the University of Granada have demonstrated that people who normally practice sport have a better cognitive performance than those with bad physical health. More specifically, the results of this research indicate that the former have a better sustained attention span (they react more rapidly to an external stimulus introduced randomly while carrying out a monotonous task). Their autonomic nervous system also appears to work better when dealing with cognitive loads ...

A team led by David Reverter, a researcher at the Institute of Biotechnology and Biomedicine (IBB) of the UAB, has determined for the first time the three-dimensional structure of a protein pair: LC8 and Nek9. Depending on whether or not they bind, Nek9 ensures that the chromosomes group and separate correctly during cell division. By analysing the 3D structure, these scientists have discovered a new mechanism that interferes with the protein binding and therefore also contributes to the correct regulation of cell division and other cell processes. The discovery could ...

Variations in nutrient availability in the world's oceans could be a vital component of future environmental change, according to a multi-author review paper involving the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (NOCS). The paper, published this month in Nature Geoscience, reviews what we know about ocean nutrient patterns and interactions, and how they might be influenced by future climate change and other man-made factors. The authors also highlight how nutrient cycles influence climate by fuelling biological production, hence keeping carbon dioxide (CO2) locked ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Deep inside your brain, a legion of stem cells lies ready to turn into new brain and nerve cells whenever and wherever you need them most. While they wait, they keep themselves in a state of perpetual readiness – poised to become any type of nerve cell you might need as your cells age or get damaged. Now, new research from scientists at the University of Michigan Medical School reveals a key way they do this: through a type of internal "spring cleaning" that both clears out garbage within the cells, and keeps them in their stem-cell state. In a ...