Metro Manila – the world's 10th largest megacity and 6th largest conurbation, based on official statistics – is not a place one would normally expect to discover new species, even in a country that is known as a biodiversity hotspot. In a 83-hectare green island amidst the unnatural ocean of countless man-made edifices, researchers of the Ateneo de Manila University have discovered a tiny new species of aquatic beetle, aptly named Hydraena ateneo. It was named after the University, a 154-year-old Jesuit-run institution that is recognized as one of the premier universities ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The immune system is normally known for protecting the body from illness. But a subset of immune cells appear to be doing more harm than good. A new study from researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center found that these cells, called myeloid derived suppressor cells, provide a niche where the cancer stem cells survive. Cancer stem cells are thought to be resistant to current chemotherapy and radiation treatments, and researchers believe that killing the cancer stem cells is crucial for eliminating cancer. At the same ...

Drought shriveled crops in the Midwest, massive wildfires raged in the West and East Coast cities sweltered. The summer of 2012 was a season of epic proportions, especially July, the hottest month in the history of U.S. weather record keeping. And it's likely that we'll continue to see such calamitous weather. In the north-central and northeastern United States, extreme weather is more than four times as likely to occur than it was in the pre-industrial era, according to a new study by Noah Diffenbaugh, a Stanford associate professor of environmental Earth system science, ...

Ever been trading a flurry of text messages when there's an awkward pause? Well, new research shows you probably should be suspicious. A Brigham Young University study finds when people lie in digital messages – texting, social media or instant messaging – they take longer to respond, make more edits and write shorter responses than usual. "Digital conversations are a fertile ground for deception because people can easily conceal their identity and their messages often appear credible," says Tom Meservy, BYU professor of information systems. "Unfortunately, humans are ...

Water and wastewater managers are missing substantial opportunities to save energy and money, according to a report published Wednesday (Sept. 4) by Water in the West, a research center at Stanford University. The report, "Water and Energy Nexus: A Literature Review," also identifies the amount of water used to extract resources such as natural gas, oil and coal, and to generate electricity. The report finds "robust opportunities for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, as well as for the conservation of scarce water resources, coupled with the potential for generating ...

Scientists in Melbourne, Australia, have revealed the structure of a protein that is essential for triggering a form of programmed cell death, making possible the development of new drugs to treat chronic inflammatory diseases such as Crohn's disease and rheumatoid arthritis. Dr James Murphy, Associate Professor John Silke, Dr Joanne Hildebrand, Dr Peter Czabotar, Professor Warren Alexander and colleagues from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute have shown that the protein MLKL plays a crucial role in the signalling pathways that trigger a recently discovered cell death ...

New research from the University of Adelaide has shown for the first time that pregnant women who smoke as well as having asthma are greatly increasing the risk of complications for themselves and their unborn children. In the first study of its kind in the world, researchers from the University's Robinson Institute compared data from more than 170,000 Australian women over 10 years. The results have been published online ahead of print in the European Respiratory Journal. Lead author Dr Nicolette Hodyl says: "We know that being pregnant and having asthma poses risks ...

September 5, 2013, Shenzhen, China – BGI in collaboration with Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and other Chinese institutes, have completed the genome sequencing of 161 Mycobacterium tuberculosis that can cause an infectious disease tuberculosis (TB). The study published online in Nature Genetics provides an invaluable resource for researchers to better understand the genetic basis underlying drug resistance TB. TB is one of the deadliest infectious diseases. The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world's population is infected ...

The Sun is a magnetically active star. Its activity manifests itself as dark sunspots and bright faculae on its visible surface, as well as violent mass ejections and the acceleration of high-energy particles resulting from the release of magnetic energy in its outer atmosphere. The frequency with which these phenomena occur varies in a somewhat irregular activity cycle of about 11 years, during which the global magnetic field of the Sun reverses. The solar magnetic field and the activity cycle originate in a self-excited dynamo mechanism based upon convective flows and ...

It is widely believed that bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells are highly adherent fibroblastic cells, defined as colony-forming unit-fibroblasts. Nevertheless, a few reports have shown that the non-adherent bone marrow cells can give rise to colony-forming unit-fibroblasts in vitro, and possess a certain differentiation potential. According to a recent study from Dr. Xiaoming Ben and colleagues, non-adherent bone marrow cell-derived mesenchymal stem cells from C57BL/6J mice cultured using the "pour-off" method developed colony-forming unit-fibroblasts, and could be expanded ...

Increased brain cell apoptosis in intrauterine growth-restricted fetal rats is a key reason for unfavorable long-term prognosis of the nervous system. The harmful effects of intrauterine growth restriction on fetal brain development originate in the womb. Therefore, it is difficult to obtain ideal outcomes through postnatal intervention. Taken together, active prenatal intervention is of great importance to the optimal prognosis of the intrauterine growth restricted fetus. Prof. Jing Liu and colleagues from the General Hospital of Beijing Military Command found that taurine ...

Death of neurons in the dorsal raphe nucleus and locus coeruleus is a pathological characteristic of the disease. Previous studies concerning the pathological characteristic of Alzheimer's disease mainly focus on learning and memory-related hippocampus, and less attention has been paid to the locus coeruleus. Noradrenergic neurons in the locus coeruleus can produce norepinephrine that has excitatory effects on the hippocampus and cortex, suggesting that the locus coeruleus has an important role for learning, memory and other cognitive functions. A recent study published ...

A new research study has revealed that the cheetah, the world's fastest land animal, matches and may even anticipate the escape tactics of different prey when hunting, rather than just relying on its speed and agility, as previously thought. The study, which has just been published in the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters was carried out by a team of researchers from Queen's University Belfast, in collaboration with other Institutions in the UK (University of Aberdeen, University of Swansea, Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, University of Oxford), ...

Washington D.C. -- A study published in the September 2013 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that young adults with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have more difficulty transitioning into employment than their peers with different disabilities. Using data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study 2 (NLTS2; a longitudinal nationally-representative survey of youth ages 13-16 years as of December 2000 and receiving special education services), a group of researchers led by Dr. Paul Shattuck of Washington University ...

No two human beings are the same. Although we all possess the same genes, our genetic code varies in many places. And since genes provide the blueprint for all proteins, these variants usually result in numerous differences in protein function. But what impact does this diversity have? Bioinformatics researchers at Rutgers University and the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) have investigated how protein function is affected by changes at the DNA level. Their findings bring new clarity to the wide range of variants, many of which disturb protein function but have no ...

Leaders of the major world religions can play a key role in preserving biological diversity. A new study carried out by ecologists at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), among others, indicates that if the world's religious leaders wished to bring about a change, they would be ideally positioned to do so. – Our study investigates how the various religions are distributed around the world and how they overlap areas that are important for global biological diversity, says Grzegorz Mikusinski, a researcher at SLU who directs the project. Our analysis indicates ...

Philadelphia, PA, September 5, 2013 – We live in the most exciting and unsettling period in the history of psychiatry since Freud started talking about sex in public. On the one hand, the American Psychiatric Association has introduced the fifth iteration of the psychiatric diagnostic manual, DSM-V, representing the current best effort of the brightest clinical minds in psychiatry to categorize the enormously complex pattern of human emotional, cognitive, and behavioral problems. On the other hand, in new and profound ways, neuroscience and genetics research in psychiatry ...

ANN ARBOR—University of Michigan researchers today released seven technical reports that together form the most comprehensive Michigan-focused resource on hydraulic fracturing, the controversial natural gas and oil extraction process commonly known as fracking. The studies, totaling nearly 200 pages, examine seven critical topics related to the use of hydraulic fracturing in Michigan, with an emphasis on high-volume methods: technology, geology and hydrogeology, environment and ecology, public health, policy and law, economics, and public perceptions. While considerable ...

A new approach to calculating the cost of damage caused by flooding is to be presented at the International Conference of Flood Resilience: Experiences in Asia and Europe at the University of Exeter this week. The methodology combines information on land use with data on the vulnerability of the area to calculate the cost of both past and future flooding events. Climate change, along with increased building on flood plains, has led to both a greater likelihood and a higher impact of flooding across the globe. The method has already been employed to estimate the damage ...

Tropical Depression 12E formed off the southwestern coast of Mexico at 5 a.m. EDT on Sept. 5. Just 40 minutes before, NASA's TRMM satellite passed overhead and saw some "hot towers" around the center, indicating that the low pressure area that was previously known as System 99E would strengthen. A "hot tower" is a tall cumulonimbus cloud that reaches at least to the top of the troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere. It extends approximately nine miles (14.5 km) high in the tropics. The hot towers in Tropical Depression 12E were reaching heights of 15 km/9.3 miles ...

A new watermarking technology based on a system akin to the permutation rules used to solve the numeral puzzles known as Sudoku has been developed by computer scientists in Malaysia. Writing in the International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing the team reports how their system could resist attempts to "crop" the watermark in more than nine times out of ten cases. Images, photos and graphics on the web are easy pickings for plagiarists and those who might ignore copyright rules. Photographers and others often add a watermark to their images to reduce the risk of ...

Details of a survey of middle and high school student attitudes to cyberbullying and online safety will be published in the International Journal of Social Media and Interactive Learning Environments. The analysis of the results shows that many children are bullied and few understand internet safety. Stacey Kite, Robert Gable and Lawrence Filippelli of the Johnson & Wales University, in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, surveyed more than 4200 students about their knowledge of potential risks, appropriate use, and their behaviors on the internet and social networking sites, ...

One hour before midnight Eastern Daylight Time on Sept. 4, Tropical Depression 7 strengthened into Tropical Storm Gabrielle just 70 miles south of Ponce, Puerto Rico. NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured the development and NASA's GOES Project created an animation that showed the developing storm. VIDEO: This GOES-East series of animations from Sept. 1 through Sept. 5 shows the development of Tropical Depression 7 into Tropical Storm Gabrielle near Puerto Rico (lower right). ...

New Rochelle, NY -- Among a group of women with symptoms of angina who were tested for a suspected coronary blockage, nearly 3 times as many black women as white women died of heart disease. The study determined whether differences in the women's angina symptoms could affect the risk of death in these two groups, and the researchers report their findings in Journal of Women's Health, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Journal of Women's Health website at http://www.liebertpub.com/jwh. Jo-Ann Eastwood, ...

People who were deprived of one night's sleep purchased more calories and grams of food in a mock supermarket on the following day in a new study published in the journal Obesity, the official journal of The Obesity Society. Sleep deprivation also led to increased blood levels of ghrelin, a hormone that increases hunger, on the following morning; however, there was no correlation between individual ghrelin levels and food purchasing, suggesting that other mechanisms—such as impulsive decision making—may be more responsible for increased purchasing. Researchers in Sweden ...