The world's biodiversity is currently in rapid decline, with human-mediated global change being a principal cause. Europe is no exception, and the Natura 2000 network provides an important conservation tool for biodiversity on a European level. It forms a network of natural and semi-natural sites within the region with high heritage values due to the exceptional flora and fauna they contain. The goal of the Natura 2000 network is to maintain the biological diversity of environments, while taking into account economic, social, cultural and regional logic of sustainable development. ...

This press release is available in French. Montreal, April 18, 2013 – Acquiring self-esteem is an important part of a teenager's development. The way in which adolescents regard themselves can be instrumental in determining their achievement and social functioning. New research from Concordia University shows that the way in which adolescents think about themselves varies across cultural context. To compare how teenagers assess their self-worth, William M. Bukowski, a psychology professor and director of the Centre for Research in Human Development, examined responses ...

New York, NY (April 18, 2013) — An excess of the brain neurotransmitter glutamate may cause a transition to psychosis in people who are at risk for schizophrenia, reports a study from investigators at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) published in the current issue of Neuron. The findings suggest 1) a potential diagnostic tool for identifying those at risk for schizophrenia and 2) a possible glutamate-limiting treatment strategy to prevent or slow progression of schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders. "Previous studies of schizophrenia have shown that ...

Twitter can easily teach people about social movements such as Occupy Wall Street and even entice them to participate, according to a new study by a Michigan State University education researcher. The social networking site – which lets users read, send and group together 140-character messages known as tweets – can actually be a better source of information than traditional news sources and online search engines, Benjamin Gleason reports in the journal American Behavioral Scientist. "Reading on Twitter about a particular topic will expose learners to multiple perspectives ...

Evidence indicates that the accumulation of amyloid-beta proteins, which form the plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, is critical for the development of Alzheimer's disease, which impacts 5.4 million Americans. And not just the quantity, but also the quality of amyloid-beta peptides is crucial for Alzheimer's initiation. The disease is triggered by an imbalance in two different amyloid species — in Alzheimer's patients, there is a reduction in a relative level of healthy amyloid-beta 40 compared to 42. Now Dr. Inna Slutsky of Tel Aviv University's Sackler ...

In the Kimberley region of Western Australia, there are two distinct seasons: a wet season between December and March and a dry season between May and October. Reversals in the direction of prevailing winds are the driving force behind the seasonal shift. If there are going to be bush fires in the area's tropical savannas, the best time is early in the dry season, when vegetation has dried enough to burn but is still wet enough that fires won't grow out of control. In April and May, fires usually burn themselves out within a few days. The worst time for fire is late in ...

Blazars are the brightest of active galactic nuclei, and many emit very high-energy gamma rays. New observations of the blazar known as PKS 1424+240 show that it is the most distant known source of very high-energy gamma rays, but its emission spectrum now appears highly unusual in light of the new data. A team led by physicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, used data from the Hubble Space Telescope to set a lower limit for the blazar's redshift (z ≥ 0.6035), which corresponds to a distance of at least 7.4 billion light-years. Over such a great distance, ...

According to a study published in the Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, a baseline adherence to a Mediterranean diet (MeDiet) is associated with a lower risk of hyperuricemia, defined as a serum uric acid (SUA) concentration higher than 7mg/dl in men and higher than 6mg/dl in women. Hyperuricemia has been associated with metabolic syndrome, hypertension, type 2 diabetes mellitus, chronic kidney disease, gout, and cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. The MeDiet is characterized by a high consumption of fruits, vegetables, legumes, ...

STANFORD, Calif. — When a baby is in the breech position at the end of pregnancy, obstetricians can sometimes turn the baby head-down to enable a safer vaginal birth. In the past, women were not given anesthesia during the turning procedure, which requires the physician to push on the woman's abdomen while monitoring the baby with ultrasound. But a new study from the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital shows anesthesia is cost-effective because it increases the likelihood the procedure will work. The turning procedure, called ...

EUGENE, Ore. -- (April 18, 2013) -- Using spinning disk microscopy on barely day-old zebra fish embryos, University of Oregon scientists have gained a new window on how synapse-building components move to worksites in the central nervous system. What researchers captured in these see-through embryos -- in what may be one of the first views of early glutamate-driven synapse formation in a living vertebrate -- were orderly movements of protein-carrying packets along axons to a specific site where a synapse would be formed. The discovery, in research funded by the National ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study concludes that problems with antibiotic resistance faced by outpatients may be as bad as those in hospitalized patients, and that more studies of outpatients are needed – both to protect their health and to avoid inappropriate or unnecessary drug use. Antibiotic resistance is a huge and growing problem in both hospital and outpatient settings. Failure to select an effective antibiotic, without appropriate consideration for this resistance, can increase the risk of continued illness or death. While 126 million prescriptions a year for antimicrobial ...

Researchers of the hereditary cancer research group at the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO) conducted a functional and structural study of seven missense variants of the BRCA1 gene concluding that three of these variants are pathogenic, linked to the risk of suffering breast or ovarian cancer. The study has been published in the journal PLoS One The classification of these three variants will improve genetic counseling of patients and families who have these mutations and will serve to personalize the treatment. Mutations ...

Hydrogen sulfide, the pungent stuff often referred to as sewer gas, is a deadly substance implicated in several mass extinctions, including one at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago that wiped out more than three-quarters of all species on Earth. But in low doses, hydrogen sulfide could greatly enhance plant growth, leading to a sharp increase in global food supplies and plentiful stock for biofuel production, new University of Washington research shows. "We found some very interesting things, including that at the very lowest levels plant health ...

Popular media perspectives on traumatic brain injuries (TBI) in sports like ice hockey has changed over time and may influence people's attitudes towards these injuries, according to research published April 17 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Michael Cusimano and colleagues from St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto, Canada. The authors compared articles published in the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Toronto Star and Vancouver Sun from 1998-2000 and 2009-2011. They found the Canadian newspapers discussed aggression in ice hockey equally during both these time periods, ...

Adults who resolve and recover from conflict are known to be happier in their romantic relationships but the same does not hold true for teen romances, according to research published April 17 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Thao Ha and colleagues from the Behavioural Science Institute of Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands. The authors observed 14-16-year olds in romantic relationships dealing with conflicts over issues such as cheating, experiencing jealousy and parental rules about dating three times over a period of several years. Statistical analysis ...

A new text-mining algorithm can help identify the most relevant scientific research for a public database that reveals the effects of environmental chemicals on human health, according to research published April 17 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Allan Peter Davis, Thomas Wiegers and colleagues from North Carolina State University. The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD), managed in part by the lead authors, is a manually curated, public database that correlates environmental chemicals with their effects on genes and human health. Thousands of new research ...

New York, NY—April 17, 2013—Columbia Engineering researchers, led by Dimitris Anastassiou, Charles Batchelor Professor in Electrical Engineering and member of the Columbia Initiative in Systems Biology, have developed a new computational model that is highly predictive of breast cancer survival. The team, who won the Sage Bionetworks / DREAM Breast Cancer Prognosis Challenge for this work, published their results -- "Development of a Prognostic Model for Breast Cancer Survival in an Open Challenge Environment" -- in the April 17 issue of Science Translational Medicine. In ...

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - A team of Australian engineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has demonstrated a quantum bit based on the nucleus of a single atom in silicon, promising dramatic improvements for data processing in ultra-powerful quantum computers of the future. Quantum bits, or qubits, are the building blocks of quantum computers, which will offer enormous advantages for searching expansive databases, cracking modern encryption, and modelling atomic-scale systems such as biological molecules and drugs. The world-first result, to be published in Nature ...

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences in Japan report today that they have identified a compound that could be used as a new treatment to prevent relapse in acute myeloid leukemia patients. In a study published in Science Translational Medicine, they show that this compound reduces the risk of relapse in a mouse model of the human disease. They report that this compound could be most active in patients that carry a mutation lowering their chances of recovery. Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is an acute type of blood cancer that starts in the ...

A key building block in the Schmallenberg virus could be targeted by anti-viral drugs, according to a new study led from the University of Leeds. The disease, which causes birth defects and stillbirths in sheep, goats and cattle, was first discovered in Germany in late 2011 and has already spread to more than 5,000 farms across Europe, and 1,500 farms in the UK alone. There is currently no way of treating infected animals, but a study published in Nucleic Acids Research reports that the Schmallenberg virus nucleocapsid protein, which protects its genetic material, could ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Close family members of people with Alzheimer's disease are more than twice as likely as those without a family history to develop silent buildup of brain plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease, according to researchers at Duke Medicine. The study, published online in the journal PLOS ONE on April 17, 2013, confirms earlier findings on a known genetic variation that increases one's risk for Alzheimer's, and raises new questions about other genetic factors involved in the disease that have yet to be identified. An estimated 25 million people worldwide ...

An international team of researchers has decoded the genome of a creature whose evolutionary history is both enigmatic and illuminating: the African coelacanth. A sea-cave dwelling, five-foot long fish with limb-like fins, the coelacanth was once thought to be extinct. A living coelacanth was discovered off the African coast in 1938, and since then, questions about these ancient-looking fish – popularly known as "living fossils" – have loomed large. Coelacanths today closely resemble the fossilized skeletons of their more than 300-million-year-old ancestors. Its genome ...

The European Commission needs to make some key innovations in its science funding programme if Europe is to enjoy the full benefits of the €70 billion to be spent on science research as part of the Horizon 2020 programme kicking off in 2014, according to an academic paper published by SAGE in the Journal of Health Services Research & Policy today. The Commission has already taken important steps to reduce administration costs and stimulate the participation of small business in research, but there are still significant gaps, say the authors of Europe's 'Horizon 2020' ...

While studying rats' ability to navigate familiar territory, Johns Hopkins scientists found that one particular brain structure uses remembered spatial information to imagine routes the rats then follow. Their discovery has implications for understanding why damage to that structure, called the hippocampus, disrupts specific types of memory and learning in people with Alzheimer's disease and age-related cognitive decline. And because these mental trajectories guide the rats' behavior, the research model the scientists developed may be useful in future studies on higher-level ...

Chevy Chase, MD—Reminding primary care doctors to test at-risk patients for osteoporosis can prevent fractures and reduce health care costs, according to a recent study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). Osteoporosis is a condition that is common, costly and undertreated. Low trauma fractures in older individuals are a "red flag" for osteoporosis, but those at risk often are not treated for the condition. Rates of osteoporosis testing and treatment are typically less than 20 percent in the first ...