This news release is available in French and Arabic. What if the earliest members of our Homo genus—those classified as Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo erectus and so forth—actually belonged to the same species and simply looked different from one another? That's precisely the implication of a new report, which describes the analysis of a complete, approximately 1.8-million-year-old skull that was unearthed in Dmanisi, Georgia. Unlike other Homo fossils, this skull, known as Skull 5, combines a small braincase with a long face and large teeth. It was ...

Scientists from Yale and Harvard have recoded the entire genome of an organism and improved a bacterium's ability to resist viruses, a dramatic demonstration of the potential of rewriting an organism's genetic code. "This is the first time the genetic code has been fundamentally changed," said Farren Isaacs, assistant professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale and co-senior author of the research published Oct. 18 in the journal Science. "Creating an organism with a new genetic code has allowed us to expand the scope of biological function in ...

Increased vitamin D levels may prevent a wide range of diseases, according to recent studies. However, some previous studies led to a concern that vitamin D supplementation could increase an individual's risk of developing kidney stones. However, a study of 2,012 participants – published in the American Journal of Public Health –found no statistically relevant association between 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25 (OH)D) serum level in the range of 20 to 100 ng/mL and the incidence of kidney stones. This study – led by Cedric F. Garland, DrPH, adjunct professor in the Division ...

TORONTO, ON - University of Toronto research has found that purple loosestrife – an invasive species that competes with native plants for light and nutrients and can degrade habitats for wildlife – has evolved extremely rapidly, flowering about three weeks earlier as it has spread to northern Ontario. This has allowed populations of the species to thrive in the colder climate with a more than 30-fold increase in seed production. "The ability of invasive species to rapidly adapt to local climate has not generally been considered to be an important factor affecting spread," ...

Researchers, taxonomists, and students from The Field Museum and 88 other institutions around the world have provided new answers to two simple but long-standing questions about Amazonian diversity: How many trees are there in the Amazon, and how many tree species occur there? The study will be published October 17, 2013 in Science. The vast extent and difficult terrain of the Amazon Basin (including parts of Brazil, Peru, Columbia) and the Guiana Shield (Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana), which span an area roughly the size of the 48 contiguous North American states, ...

A fungus that is killing frogs and other amphibians around the world releases a toxic factor that disables the amphibian immune response, Vanderbilt University investigators report Oct. 18 in the journal Science. The findings represent "a step forward in understanding a long-standing puzzle – why the amphibian immune system seems to be so inept at clearing the fungus," said Louise Rollins-Smith, Ph.D., associate professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology. Although the identity of the toxic fungal factor (or factors) remains a mystery, its ability to inhibit a ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine say high-priced cigarettes and smoke-free homes effectively reduce smoking behaviors among low-income individuals – a demographic in which tobacco use has remained comparatively high. Writing in the October 17, 2013 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, principal investigator John P. Pierce, PhD, professor and director of population sciences at UC San Diego School of Medicine, and colleagues found that expensive cigarettes – $4.50 or more per pack – were associated with lower consumption ...

Scientists have proposed that the most recently discovered ancient human relatives -- the Denisovans -- somehow managed to cross one of the world's most prominent marine barriers in Indonesia, and later interbred with modern humans moving through the area on the way to Australia and New Guinea. Three years ago the genetic analysis of a little finger bone from Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains in northern Asia led to a complete genome sequence of a new line of the human family tree -- the Denisovans. Since then, genetic evidence pointing to their hybridisation with ...

Cambridge scientists have discovered a rare genetic disease which predisposes patients to severe respiratory infections and lung damage. Because the scientists also identified how the genetic mutation affects the immune system, they are hopeful that new drugs that are currently undergoing clinical trials to treat leukaemia may also be effective in helping individuals with this debilitating disease. For the study, led by the University of Cambridge in collaboration with the Babraham Institute and the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology, the researchers first examined ...

MAYWOOD -- Women with common forms of urinary incontinence have various bacteria in their bladder, according to data presented today by researchers from Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. Researchers also found that some of these bacteria may differ based on their incontinence type. These findings were presented at the 34th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Urogynecologic Society in Las Vegas. They stem from Loyola's Urinary Research and Educational Collaboration, an institutional effort to identify and characterize urinary bacteria and how ...

The ability of invasive plants to rapidly adapt to local climates -- and potentially to climate change -- may be a key factor in how quickly they spread. According to new research published in Science by UBC evolutionary ecologist Rob Colautti, it is rapid evolution -- as much as resistance to local pests -- that has helped purple loosestrife to invade, and thrive in, northern Ontario. "The ability of invasive species to rapidly adapt to local climate has not generally been considered to be an important factor affecting spread," says Colautti, an NSERC Banting Postdoctoral ...

In two parallel projects, researchers have created new genomes inside the bacterium E. coli in ways that test the limits of genetic reprogramming and open new possibilities for increasing flexibility, productivity and safety in biotechnology. In one project, researchers created a novel genome—the first-ever entirely genomically recoded organism—by replacing all 321 instances of a specific "genetic three-letter word," called a codon, throughout the organism's entire genome with a word of supposedly identical meaning. The researchers then reintroduced a reprogramed version ...

Death from analgesic overdose, including the painkillers oxycodone and codeine, is more concentrated in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods with a prevalence of high divorce, single-parent homes than deaths from unintentional causes, according to research conducted at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Yet, compared to heroin overdose deaths, analgesic overdoses were found to occur in higher-income neighborhoods. This study is among the first to provide a framework that helps explain the geographical distribution of analgesic overdose in urban areas. ...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should consider the unique features of probiotics — bacteria that help maintain the natural balance of organisms in the intestines — in regulating their use and marketing, says Diane Hoffmann, JD, director of the Law and Health Care Program at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law and lead author of the a newly released Science article, "Probiotics: Finding the Right Regulatory Balance." "The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has no definition of probiotics and regulates them based on whether they ...

Changes in gene regulation have been used to study the evolutionary chasm that exists between humans and chimpanzees despite their largely identical DNA. However, scientists from the University of Chicago have discovered that mRNA expression levels, long considered a barometer for differences in gene regulation, often do not reflect differences in protein expression—and, therefore, biological function—between humans and chimpanzees. The work was published Oct. 17 in Science. "We thought that we knew how to identify patterns of mRNA expression level differences between ...

UCLA psychologists report new insights on human brain, consciousness UCLA psychologists have used brain-imaging techniques to study what happens to the human brain when it slips into unconsciousness. Their research, published Oct. 17 in ...

Lithium-ion batteries are in our cellphones, laptops, and digital cameras. Few portable electronic devices exist that do not rely on these energy sources. Currently battery electrodes contain active materials known as intercalation compounds. These materials store charge in their chemical structure without undergoing substantial structural change. That makes these batteries comparatively long-lived and safe. However, intercalation materials have one drawback: their limited energy density, the amount of energy they can store per volume and mass. In the search for higher ...

Supermassive black holes: every large galaxy's got one. But here's a real conundrum: how did they grow so big? A paper in today's issue of Science pits the front-running ideas about the growth of supermassive black holes against observational data — a limit on the strength of gravitational waves, obtained with CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia. "This is the first time we've been able to use information about gravitational waves to study another aspect of the Universe — the growth of massive black holes," co-author Dr Ramesh Bhat from the Curtin University ...

AMES, Iowa – Using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, an international team of astronomers has discovered a distant planetary system featuring multiple planets orbiting at a severe tilt to their host star. Such tilted orbits had been found in planetary systems featuring a "hot Jupiter," a giant planet in a close orbit to its host star. But, until now, they hadn't been observed in multiplanetary systems without such a big interloping planet. The discovery is reported in a paper, "Stellar Spin-Orbit Misalignment in a Multiplanet System," published in the Oct. 18 ...

AMHERST, Mass. – In a new review of how psychology research has illuminated the causes of war and violence, three political psychologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst say this understanding can and should be used to promote peace and overturn the belief that violent conflict is inevitable. Writing in the current special "peace psychology" issue of American Psychologist, lead author Bernhard Leidner, Linda Tropp and Brian Lickel of UMass Amherst's Psychology of Peace and Violence program say that if social psychology research focuses only on how to soften ...

A good night's rest may literally clear the mind. Using mice, researchers showed for the first time that the space between brain cells may increase during sleep, allowing the brain to flush out toxins that build up during waking hours. These results suggest a new role for sleep in health and disease. The study was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the NIH. "Sleep changes the cellular structure of the brain. It appears to be a completely different state," said Maiken Nedergaard, M.D., D.M.Sc., co-director of the Center ...

In recent years, studies have reported inconsistent findings regarding whether calcium supplements used to prevent fractures increase the risk of heart attack. Now, in an assessment of the scientific literature, reported as a perspective piece in the October 17, 2013 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, a UC San Francisco researcher says patients and health care practitioners should focus on getting calcium from the diet, rather than supplements, when possible. "Osteoporosis may result from inadequate calcium intake and it's quite common for certain segments ...

(SALT LAKE CITY)—A 30-year-old woman with a history of upper respiratory infections had no idea she carried an immunodeficiency disorder – until her 6-year-old son was diagnosed with the same illness. After learning she has common variable immunodeficiency (CVID), a disorder characterized by recurrent infections, such as pneumonia, and decreased antibodies, the woman, her husband, their three children and parents joined a multidisciplinary University of Utah study and researchers identified a novel gene mutation that caused the disease in the mom and two of her children. ...

A team of researchers has identified a novel mutation in the hepatitis B virus (HBV) in Korea that appears only in men and could help explain why HBV-infected men are roughly five times more likely than HBV-infected women to develop liver cancer. Although some women do progress to cirrhosis and liver cancer, the mutation is absent in HBV in women. The research is published ahead of print in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology. "This is the first mutation found that can explain the gender disparity in incidence of hepatocellular carcinoma," says Bum-Joon Kim of Seoul ...

WASHINGTON, DC (October 17, 2013)—The District of Columbia Department of Health (DOH) has released a study by the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS) investigating prescribing of antipsychotics to District seniors. The study combines pharmaceutical marketing data collected by the District with publicly available data on nursing home quality and Medicare drug claims. "The good news is that nursing homes in the District of Columbia generally are not prescribing antipsychotic medication at rates higher than the rest of the country," ...