Prehistoric farming communities in Europe constructed water wells out of oak timbers, revealing that these first farmers were skilled carpenters long before metal was discovered or used for tools. The research published December 19 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Willy Tegel and colleagues from the University of Freiburg, Germany, contradicts the common belief that metal tools were required to make complex wooden structures. The wooden water wells discovered in eastern Germany are over 7000 years old, and suggest that these early farmers had unexpectedly refined ...

Like sheets of paper marked with perforated lines, gecko tails have unique structural marks that help them sever their tails to make a quick getaway. Though voluntarily shedding a body part in this manner is a well-known phenomenon, research published December 19 in the open access journal PLOS ONE reveals aspects of the process that may have applications for structural engineers making similar, quickly detachable structures. VIDEO: Bridging structures are not present between ...

Humpback whales might be expected to take their food seriously given their enormous size, but a new study shows that they may multi-task as they eat, singing mating or breeding songs as they forage in their Antarctic feeding grounds. The research, published December 19 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Alison Stimpert from the Naval Postgraduate School and colleagues, sheds new light on the whales' singing habits in different seasons, which are still a mystery. Whales sing most frequently during the breeding season but are known to sing on other occasions, such as ...

A new mosasaur species discovered in Hungary is the first known example of this group of scaled reptiles to have lived in freshwater river environments similar to modern freshwater dolphins, according to research published December 19 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Laszlo Makadi from the Hungarian Natural History Museum, Hungary and colleagues from the University of Alberta, Canada and MTA-ELTE Lendület Dinosaur Research Group, Hungary. The species lived about 84 million years ago, the largest specimens reached about 20 feet in length, and belongs to a family ...

LA JOLLA, Calif., December 19, 2012 – Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, is untreatable and fatal. Nerve cells in the spinal cord die, eventually taking away a person's ability to move or even breathe. A consortium of ALS researchers at multiple institutions, including Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, tested transplanted neural stem cells as a treatment for the disease. In 11 independent studies, they found that transplanting neural stem cells ...

From the stockings decorating mantles to the new outfits in display windows calling to shoppers, cotton is woven into the fabric of the holiday season. For bioenergy researchers, however, fiber composition matters more than color and texture as each cotton strand is composed of more than two dozen coils of cellulose, a target biomass for next-generation biofuels. In the December 20, 2012 edition of Nature, an international consortium of researchers from 31 institutions including a team from the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) present a high-quality ...

Eating meals together as a family, even if only once or twice a week, increases children's daily fruit and vegetable intake to near the recommended 5 A Day, according to researchers at the University of Leeds. The study of primary school-aged children, funded by the National Institute for Health Research Public Health Research (NIHR PHR) Programme, also suggests parental consumption of fruit and vegetables and cutting up portions of these foods boosted children's intake. It is published today in the British Medical Journal's Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. Overall, ...

Globular clusters are spherical collections of stars, tightly bound to each other by their mutual gravity. Relics of the early years of the Universe, with ages of typically 12-13 billion years (the Big Bang took place 13.7 billion years ago), there are roughly 150 globular clusters in the Milky Way and they contain many of our galaxy's oldest stars. But while the stars are old and the clusters formed in the distant past, astronomers using the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have found that some of these clusters are still young at heart. ...

Globular clusters are spherical collections of stars, tightly bound to each other by their mutual gravity. Relics of the early years of the Universe, with ages of typically 12-13 billion years (the Big Bang took place 13.7 billion years ago), there are roughly 150 globular clusters in the Milky Way and they contain many of our galaxy's oldest stars. But while the stars are old and the clusters formed in the distant past, astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the ESO La Silla Observatory have found that some of these ...

Achieving a goal considered nearly impossible, JILA physicists have chilled a gas of molecules to very low temperatures by adapting the familiar process by which a hot cup of coffee cools. Evaporative cooling has long been used to cool atoms, at JILA and elsewhere, to extraordinarily low temperatures. The process was used at JILA in 1995 to create a then-new state of matter, the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of rubidium atoms. The latest demonstration, reported in the Dec. 20, 2012, issue of Nature,* marks the first time evaporative cooling has been achieved with molecules—two ...

NEW YORK, NY (December 19, 2012) – A joint team of scientists from The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Laboratory and Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) has developed a technique that may prevent the inheritance of mitochondrial diseases in children. The study is published online today in Nature. Dieter Egli, PhD, and Daniel Paull, PhD, of the NYSCF Laboratory with Mark Sauer, MD, and Michio Hirano, MD, of CUMC demonstrated how the nucleus of a cell can be successfully transferred between human egg cells. This landmark achievement carries significant implications ...

WORCESTER, MA — An international team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, the University of Bonn and the Center for Advanced European Studies and Research in Germany have shown that a well-known immune and inflammatory process plays an important role in the pathology of Alzheimer's disease. This process, which results in the mature production of the pro-inflammatory cytokine called interleukin-1 beta (IL-1B) and is involved in the body's defense against infection, has also been established as a clinical target for rheumatoid arthritis. The ...

NEW YORK, NY (December 19, 2012) – A joint team of scientists from The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Laboratory and Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) has developed a technique that may prevent the inheritance of mitochondrial diseases in children. The study is published online today in Nature. Dieter Egli, PhD, and Daniel Paull, PhD, of the NYSCF Laboratory with Mark Sauer, MD, and Michio Hirano, MD, of CUMC demonstrated how the nucleus of a cell can be successfully transferred between human egg cells. This landmark achievement carries significant implications ...

People with asthma have an increased risk of pulmonary embolism, according to new research. A new study, published online ahead of print today (20 December 2012) in the European Respiratory Journal, looked at whether people with moderate or severe asthma had an increased risk of developing deep vein thrombosis, or pulmonary embolism. Pulmonary embolism is when the main artery of the lung or the bronchi becomes blocked. It usually results from deep vein thrombosis; a blood clot in the veins, which can break off and move around the body to the lung. Previous research ...

As digital cameras become better and cheaper, ecologists are turning these ubiquitous consumer devices into scientific tools to study how forests are responding to climate change. And, they say, digital cameras could be a cost-effective way of visually monitoring the spread of tree diseases. The results – which come from 38,000 photographs – are presented at this week's British Ecological Society's Annual Meeting at the University of Birmingham. Because trees fix carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and store carbon as biomass and soil organic matter, forests play ...

Ethnically or religiously diverse countries underinvest in measures to improve their environmental performance, according to new research by an academic at the University of East Anglia (UEA). Dr Elissaios Papyrakis also found that religious diversity has a more detrimental impact on environmental performance than ethnic differences. These social differences, if they cannot be overcome, may lower collective action and reduce public spending on environmental protection and performance. The study, Environmental Performance in Socially Fragmented Countries, is published ...

[Dying to be famous: retrospective cohort study of rock and pop star mortality and its association with adverse childhood experiences doi 10.1136/bmjopen-2012-002089] Successful solo rock/pop stars are around twice as likely to die early as those in equally famous bands, indicates research published in the online journal BMJ Open. And those who died of drug and alcohol problems were more likely to have had a difficult or abusive childhood than those dying of other causes, the findings showed. The authors included 1489 North American and European rock and pop stars ...

[Family meals can help children reach their 5 A Day: a cross-sectional survey of children's dietary intake from London primary schools Online First doi 10.1136/jech-2012-201604] Regular family meals round a table boosts kids' fruit and vegetable intake, and make it easier for them to reach the recommended five portions a day, indicates research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. The World Health Organization recommends a daily intake of five 80g portions of fruit and vegetables to promote good health and stave off serious disease and ...

[Snakebite enquiries to the UK National Poisons Information Service: 2004-2010 doi 10.1136/emermed-2012-201587] Snakebite injuries account for around two phone queries every week to the UK National Poisons Information Service, indicates an audit published online in Emergency Medicine Journal. Changes in data recording mean that these figures are probably an underestimate of the true numbers of snakebite injuries in the UK, suggest the authors. They audited telephone enquiries made to the Cardiff, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Newcastle units of the UK National Poisons ...

(Embargoed) CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Results of a clinical trial that began in 2001 show that a gene therapy cocktail conveyed into the brain by a molecular special delivery vehicle may help extend the lives of children with Canavan disease, a rare and fatal neurodegenerative disorder. A report of the trial appears in the Dec. 19, 2012 online edition of the journal Science Translational Medicine. The form of gene therapy was created and developed at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. The work was spearheaded by R. Jude Samulski, PhD, a study senior author, ...

Dinosaurs were not only the largest animals to roam the Earth - they also had a greater number of larger species compared to all other back-boned animals - scientists suggest in a new paper published in the journal PLOS ONE today. The researchers, from Queen Mary, University of London, compared the size of the femur bone of 329 different dinosaur species from fossil records. The length and weight of the femur bone is a recognised method in palaeontology for estimating a dinosaur's body mass. They found that dinosaurs follow the opposite pattern of body size distribution ...

Boston – Results from eleven independent ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) research studies are giving hope to the ALS community – showing for the first time that the disease may be treatable by targeting new mechanisms revealed by neural stem cell-based studies. A decade of research conducted at multiple institutions, shows that when neural stem cells were transplanted into multi-levels of the spinal cord of a mouse model with familial ALS, disease onset and progression slowed, motor and breathing function improved and treated mice survived three to four times longer than untreated ...

A new study by Douglas Mental Health University Institute researchers shows altered body rhythms of the hormone melatonin in Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) women with insomnia. This finding may help explain some of the sleep disruptions experienced by women with PMDD, also known as premenstrual syndrome. PMDD is a mood disorder which appears in the week preceding menses, and affects about 3-8% of women. PMDD sufferers can experience depression, tension, and irritability of sufficient intensity to interfere with daily activities and relationships. Disturbed sleep ...

HOUSTON -- (Dec. 19, 2012) -- A new report in the journal Nature unveils three of the first genomes from a vast, understudied swath of the animal kingdom that includes as many as one-quarter of Earth's marine species. By publishing the genomes of a leech, an ocean-dwelling worm and a kind of sea snail creature called a limpet, scientists from Rice University, the University of California-Berkeley and the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute (JGI) have more than doubled the number of genomes from a diverse group of animals called lophotrochozoans (pronounced: LOH-foh-troh-coh-zoh-uhns). Lophotrochozoans ...

An international team of scientists, including PhD student Stephan Lautenschlager and Dr Emily Rayfield of the University of Bristol, found that the senses of smell, hearing and balance were well developed in therizinosaurs and might have affected or benefited from an enlarged forebrain. These findings came as a surprise to the researchers as exceptional sensory abilities would be expected from predatory and not necessarily from plant-eating animals. Therizinosaurs are an unusual group of theropod dinosaurs which lived between 145 and 66 million years ago. Members ...