Figs and fig trees are familiar to a wide cross-section of human society, both as a common food and for their spiritual importance. What is less well understood is the global nature of this association between figs and humans, which is maintained across species, continents and societies. This relationship is explored by David Wilson of Ecology and Heritage Partners and Anna Wilson from the University of Melbourne in Australia in a paper published in the Springer journal Human Ecology. Using examples from around the world, the authors show that figs are a vital resource ...

WASHINGTON, May 2, 2013—Asbestos was once called a miracle material because of its toughness and fire-resistant properties. It was used as insulation, incorporated into cement and even woven into firemen's protective clothing. Over time, however, scientists pinned the cause of lung cancers such as mesothelioma on asbestos fiber inhalation. Asbestos was banned in the many industrialized countries in the 1980s, but the threat lingers on in the ceilings, walls and floors of old buildings and homes. Now a team of researchers from the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K. ...

The new feature of the antidepressant drugs of the 1990s was that they had milder side-effects than their predecessors. Combined with aggressive marketing, this meant that annual sales in Sweden increased from just under EUR 18 million to over EUR 100 million in the space of just a few years. Most countries have an established system for self-regulation of pharmaceuticals advertising. Sweden has been held up internationally as a good example. The Swedish pharmaceutical industry's trade organisation appoints an information examiner to monitor the marketing to ensure it ...

A study appearing in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry¹ demonstrates that grapes are able to reduce heart failure associated with chronic high blood pressure (hypertension) by increasing the activity of several genes responsible for antioxidant defense in the heart tissue. Grapes are a known natural source of antioxidants and other polyphenols, which researchers believe to be responsible for the beneficial effects observed with grape consumption. This study, funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and conducted at the University of Michigan ...

Researchers at the Institute of Biotechnology at the Helsinki University and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) have developed the first three-dimensional simulation of the evolution of morphology by integrating the mechanisms of genetic regulation that take place during embryo development. The study, published in Nature, highlights the real complexity of the genetic interactions that lead to adult organisms' phenotypes (physical forms), helps to explain how natural selection influences body form and leads towards much more realistic virtual experiments on evolution. "Right ...

According to the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles, "A fast-moving, wind-driven brush fire in Riverside County was 40 percent contained as of early Thursday morning, CAL Fire officials said. The Summit Fire broke out around 12:30 p.m. Wednesday near North San Gorgonio Road and Summit Drive in Banning. Crews fought the nearly 3,000-acre fire overnight and were aided by diminished winds that allowed them to lay containment lines around the blaze." Over 400 firefighters have been involved in trying to quell the blaze since it began yesterday and several communities have been ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – The HPV vaccine can prevent both cervical cancer and a nasty sexually transmitted disease in women. But emphasizing the STD prevention will persuade more young women to get the vaccine, a new study suggests. These results go against the conventional wisdom that scaring women about the possibility of cancer is the best way to get them vaccinated. The failure of that cancer-threat message may be one reason that fewer than 20 percent of adolescent girls in the United States have received the HPV vaccine, said Janice Krieger, lead author of the study and ...

National Institutes of Health researchers used the popular anti-wrinkle agent Botox to discover a new and important role for a group of molecules that nerve cells use to quickly send messages. This novel role for the molecules, called SNARES, may be a missing piece that scientists have been searching for to fully understand how brain cells communicate under normal and disease conditions. "The results were very surprising," said Ling-Gang Wu, Ph.D., a scientist at NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. "Like many scientists we thought SNAREs were ...

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite detected hundreds of fires burning in the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola on May 01, 2013. The fires are outlined in red. Most of the fires burn in grass or cropland. The location, widespread nature, and number of fires suggest that these fires were deliberately set to manage land. Farmers often use fire to return nutrients to the soil and to clear the ground of unwanted plants. While fire helps enhance crops and grasses for pasture, the fires also produce smoke that ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C., – May 2, 2013 – For many people who have fibromyalgia, even the thought of exercising is painful. Yet a new study from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center shows that exercise does not worsen the pain associated with the disorder and may even lessen it over time. The findings are published in the current online issue of the journal Arthritis Care & Research. According to Dennis Ang, M.D., associate professor of internal medicine at Wake Forest Baptist and senior author of the study, doing light to moderate exercise over a prolonged period of time improves ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – A new study led by University of North Carolina School of Medicine researchers is the first to identify a genetic risk factor for persistent pain after traumatic events such as motor vehicle collision and sexual assault. In addition, the study contributes further evidence that persistent pain after stressful events, including motor vehicle collisions and sexual assaults, has a specific biological basis. A manuscript of the study was published online ahead of print by the journal Pain on April 29. "Our study findings indicate that mechanisms influencing ...

Medical researchers have manipulated human stem cells into producing types of brain cells known to play important roles in neurodevelopmental disorders such as epilepsy, schizophrenia and autism. The new model cell system allows neuroscientists to investigate normal brain development, as well as to identify specific disruptions in biological signals that may contribute to neuropsychiatric diseases. Scientists from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research led a study team that described their research in the journal ...

Today's image of southern Australia shows a combination of both planned fires and some bushfires. Fires are often deliberately set by fire officials and controlled in order to clean out dry underbrush and accumulations of debris. The fire burns away the detritus which could otherwise be the ignition for a devastating bushfire that may easily get out of control. In this image, most of the fires have been planned and are under control, however, there are some that are bushfires which, although started spontaneously, are currently under control by fire officials. This ...

If you had to explain what causes the change in seasons, could you? Surprisingly, studies have shown that as many as 95 percent of people — including most college graduates — hold the incorrect belief that the seasons are the result of the Earth moving closer to or further from the sun. The real answer, scientists say, is that as Earth's axis is tilted with respect to its orbit, when on its journey it is angled inward, the sun rises higher in the sky, and that results in more direct sunlight, longer days, and warmer temperatures. Distance plays no role; we are actually ...

What do all Twitter users want? Followers – and lots of them. But unless you're a celebrity, it can be difficult to build your Twitter audience (and even some celebs have trouble). Looking at a half-million tweets over 15 months, a first-of-its-kind study from Georgia Tech has revealed a set of reliable predictors for building a Twitter following. The research was performed by Eric Gilbert, assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing. Gilbert found that Twitter users can grow their followers by such tactics as: Don't talk about yourself: Informational ...

A multimillion dollar University of Colorado Boulder instrument package to study space weather has passed its pre-installation testing and is ready to be incorporated onto a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite for a 2015 launch. Designed and built by CU's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, the instrument suite known as the Extreme Ultraviolet and X-ray Irradiance Sensors, or EXIS, is the first of four identical packages that will fly on four NOAA weather satellites slated for launch beginning in 2015. CU-Boulder's EXIS will measure energy ...

TORONTO: Prompt use of an automated external defibrillator, or AED, can greatly increase the survival rates of people who suffer a cardiac arrest. And MIE Professor Tim Chan, working with Dr. Laurie Morrison at St. Michael's Hospital, has developed a formula to determine where best to place these costly but life-saving devices. In a paper published in Circulation, Chan and Morrison note that publicly registered AEDs in Toronto are not in the best locations to help victims of cardiac arrest. In fact, less than one in four of all cardiac arrests had an AED close by (within ...

By bouncing eye-safe laser pulses off a mirror on a hillside, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have transferred ultraprecise time signals through open air with unprecedented precision equivalent to the "ticking" of the world's best next-generation atomic clocks. Described in Nature Photonics,* the demonstration shows how next-generation atomic clocks at different locations could be linked wirelessly to improve geodesy (altitude mapping), distribution of time and frequency information, satellite navigation, radar arrays and other ...

Three years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, crude oil toxicity continues to sicken a sentinel Gulf Coast fish species, according to new findings from a research team that includes a University of California, Davis, scientist. With researchers from Louisiana and South Carolina, the scientists found that Gulf killifish embryos exposed to sediments from oiled locations show developmental abnormalities, including heart defects, delayed hatching and reduced hatching success. The killifish is an environmental indicator species, or a "canary in the ...

Wide-eyed expressions that typically signal fear may enlarge our visual field and mutually enhance others' ability to locate threats, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research, conducted by psychology graduate student Daniel Lee of the University of Toronto with advisor Adam Anderson, suggests that wide-eyed expressions of fear are functional in ways that directly benefit both the person who makes the expression and the person who observes it. The findings show that widened eyes ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– By using light, researchers at UC Santa Barbara have manipulated the quantum state of a single atomic-sized defect in diamond –– the nitrogen-vacancy center –– in a method that not only allows for more unified control than conventional processes, but is more versatile, and opens up the possibility of exploring new solid-state quantum systems. Their results are published in the latest edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences. "In contrast to conventional electronics, we developed an all-optical scheme for controlling ...

According to the Cape Cod Times of April 30, 2013: "The Massachusetts Army National Guard's Natural Resource Program is conducting a prescribed burn at the Upper Cape base. The burn will be held in partnership with federal, state and non-profit agencies. The objective of the burn is to reduce the risk of wildfire by eliminating the heavy buildup of dead wood and debris that can act as fuel. Prescribed burns also manage the habitat for endangered and rare species on the 22,000 acre base. Local fire departments receive training during the prescribed burns. The fire, on a ...

An old, somewhat passé, trick used to purify protein samples based on their affinity for water has found new fans at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where materials scientists are using it to divvy up solutions of carbon nanotubes, separating the metallic nanotubes from semiconductors. They say it's a fast, easy and cheap way to produce high-purity samples of carbon nanotubes for use in nanoscale electronics and many other applications.* Carbon nanotubes are formed from rolled-up sheets of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal pattern resembling ...

CHAMPAIGN, lll. — There's hope for patients with myotonic dystrophy. A new small molecule developed by researchers at the University of Illinois has been shown to break up the protein-RNA clusters that cause the disease in living human cells, an important first step toward developing a pharmaceutical treatment for the as-yet untreatable disease. Steven C. Zimmerman, the Roger Adams Professor of Chemistry at the U. of I., led the group in developing and demonstrating the compound. The National Institutes of Health supported the work published in the journal ACS Chemical ...

NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of Cyclone Zane headed toward the northern Cape York Peninsula of Queensland where it is expected to make landfall by May 2 and cross into the Gulf of Carpentaria. A cyclone Warning is in effect for coastal areas from Mapoon to Cape York to Cape Flattery. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Zane on May 1 at 04:05 UTC (12:05 a.m. EDT) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument captured a visible image of the cyclone. Zane's most powerful thunderstorms continue to be around the low-level circulation center, ...