Terrestrial species on low-lying islands and coastal regions are vulnerable to sea level rise due to climate-change, the most vulnerable species being endemics with limited ranges and rare species that are endangered already. That is the key message of a study by Florian Wetzel and colleagues of the Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology (KLIVV) of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna (Vetmeduni Vienna) and Walter Jetz of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, USA. The new study is the first of its kind in terms of geographic scope ...

IDRI (Infectious Disease Research Institute), a Seattle-based non-profit research organization that is a leading developer of adjuvants used in vaccines combating infectious disease, and Medicago Inc. (TSX: MDG; OTCQX: MDCGF), a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing highly effective and competitive vaccines based on proprietary manufacturing technologies and Virus-Like Particles (VLPs), today announced that they will be presenting positive interim Phase I clinical results for their H5N1 Avian Influenza VLP vaccine candidate "H5N1 vaccine" at the World Vaccine ...

Patients with prostate cancer and hereditary mutations in the BRCA2 gene have a worse prognosis and lower survival rates than do the rest of the patients with the disease. This is the main conclusion to come out of a study published this week in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, in which David Olmos, Head of the Prostate Cancer and Genitourinary Tumours Clinical Research Unit at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), has taken part in, along with Elena Castro, a member of the Unit, and British researchers at The Institute of Cancer Research and The Royal Marsden ...

Bremerhaven/Germany, 9 April 2013. Reliable information on the depth and floor structure of the Southern Ocean has so far been available for only few coastal regions of the Antarctic. An international team of scientists under the leadership of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, has for the first time succeeded in creating a digital map of the entire Antarctic seafloor. The International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean (IBCSO) for the first time shows the detailed topography of the seafloor for the entire area south of 60°S. ...

LEWISBURG, Pa. — Researchers have identified a new genus of bat after discovering a rare specimen in South Sudan. With wildlife personnel under the South Sudanese Ministry of Wildlife Conservation and Tourism, Bucknell Associate Professor of Biology DeeAnn Reeder and Fauna & Flora International (FFI) Programme Officer Adrian Garside were leading a team conducting field research and pursuing conservation efforts when Reeder spotted the animal in Bangangai Game Reserve. "My attention was immediately drawn to the bat's strikingly beautiful and distinct pattern of spots and ...

University of Cincinnati research at the ancient Maya site of Medicinal Trail in northwestern Belize is revealing how populations in more remote areas – the hinterland societies – built reservoirs to conserve water and turned to nature to purify their water supply. Jeffrey Brewer, a doctoral student in the University of Cincinnati's Department of Geography, will present his findings on April 11, at the Association of American Geographers' annual meeting in Los Angeles. Brewer's research, titled "Hinterland Hydrology: Mapping the Medicinal Trail Community, Northwest Belize," ...

The 'Mongolian Death Worm', called olgoi-khorkhoi by the local population is a legendary animal with an unconfirmed existence that has preoccupied the imagination of the inhabitants and travelers in the region. It is said to inhabit the southern Gobi Desert where it terrorizes travelers with its deadly abilities to project acid that, upon contact, turns anything it touches yellow and corroded. Two new sub-species of earthworms, Eisenia nordenskioldi mongol and E. n. onon, are reported from the same region. Although neither of them possesses the fatal characteristics of ...

New research from the University of Cincinnati shows how some things you do to make your lawn green might not be conducive to "going green." Amy Townsend-Small, a UC assistant professor of geology and geography, will present her research, "Carbon Sequestration and Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Urban Ecosystems," at the Association of American Geographers annual meeting to be held April 9-13 in Los Angeles. The interdisciplinary forum is attended by more than 7,000 scientists from around the world and features an array of geography-related presentations, workshops and field ...

University of Cincinnati student Shujie Wang has discovered that a good way to monitor the environmental health of Antarctica is to go with the flow – the ice flow, that is. It's an important parameter to track because as Antarctica's health goes, so goes the world's. "The ice sheet in Antarctica is the largest fresh water reservoir on Earth, and if it were totally melted, the sea level would rise by more than 60 meters. So it is quite important to measure the ice mass loss there," says Wang, a doctoral student in geography in UC's McMicken College of Arts & Sciences. Wang ...

The Neolithic mummy Ötzi (approximately 3300 BC) displays an astoundingly large number of oral diseases and dentition problems that are still widespread today. As Prof. Frank Rühli, head of the study, explains, Ötzi suffered from heavy dental abrasions, had several carious lesions – some severe – and had mechanical trauma to one of his front teeth which was probably due to an accident. Although research has been underway on this important mummy for over 20 years now, the teeth had scarcely been examined. Dentist Roger Seiler from the Centre for Evolutionary Medicine at ...

The first study of its kind to calculate the amount of nutrients entering and leaving the Arctic Ocean has been carried out by scientists based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. Their results, which are published this month in the Journal of Geophysical Research, show that there is a mismatch between what goes into the Arctic Ocean and what comes out. This is the first study to look at the transport of dissolved inorganic nutrients nitrate, phosphate and silicate together, all of which are essential for life in the ocean. The study combined measurements ...

Combining parallel data from separate satellites can be like trying to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. For the sandwich, you want rich and sweet flavors, blended into a smooth, creamy texture – and you want it all in one convenient package. That's similar to how you want the satellite data, and Bo Yang, a University of Cincinnati graduate student in geography, has a formula for crafting a deeply informative and easily utilized satellite sandwich. He'll present his research, "Spatiotemporal Cokriging Images Fusion of Multi-Sensor Land Surface Temperature over ...

Practicing a little Zen before class can lead to better grades, according to a new experimental study by George Mason University professor Robert Youmans and University of Illinois doctoral student Jared Ramsburg. The pair of researchers conducted three classroom experiments at a California university to see if meditation might help students focus better and retain information. A random selection of students followed basic meditation instructions before a lecture, and the students who meditated before the lecture scored better on a quiz that followed than students who ...

ALEXANDRIA, Va.—April 9, 2013—A new national public opinion poll commissioned by Research!America shows only 18% of respondents believe chronic pain is a major health problem, even though a majority of Americans (63%) say they know someone who experienced pain so severe that they sought prescription medicines to treat it. Chronic pain conditions affect about 100 million U.S. adults at a cost of approximately $600 billion annually in direct medical treatment costs and lost productivity. Most Americans are concerned about the misuse of pain medication to treat chronic ...

Consumers from less individualistic cultures are more likely to judge the quality of a product by its price, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "Culture influences the tendency to use the price of a product to judge its quality. Although price-quality judgments are made by consumers across cultures, less individualistic consumers (Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Chinese) rely more on price to judge quality than do individualists (Americans, British, French, Canadians, Australians)," write authors Ashok K. Lalwani (Indiana University) and Sharon ...

April 9, 2013 ANN ARBOR, Mich. — One-quarter of women who should take hormone-blocking therapies as part of their breast cancer treatment either do not start or do not complete the five-year course, according to a new study led by University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers. Five years of daily tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors -- two types of endocrine therapy that are taken as a pill -- is recommended for many women whose breast cancer expresses the hormones estrogen or progesterone. The drugs have been shown to reduce cancer recurrence and increase ...

This press release is available in German. In the search for new antibiotics, researchers are taking an unusual approach: They are developing peptides, short chains of protein building blocks that effectively inhibit a key enzyme of bacterial metabolism. Now, scientists at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS) in Saarbrücken, a branch of the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI), have published their findings and the implications for potential medical application in the scientific journal ACS Chemical Biology. The road from gene ...

In a competitive context, consumers are willing to pay significantly more to win when other bidders are unknown, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "The tendency to assume that other consumers are similar to us is reversed when we're in a competitive, as opposed to cooperative, situation. This alters our aggressiveness toward others and the prices we are willing to bid in auctions," write authors David A. Norton (University of Connecticut), Cait Lamberton (University of Pittsburgh), and Rebecca Walker Naylor (Ohio State University). Consumers ...

Certain physical acts of completion provide consumers with a sense of closure that makes them happier with their purchases, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "Choice closure, the psychological process through which consumers perceive a decision as complete and stop reassessing their choice, can increase satisfaction with decisions involving many alternatives. Subtle physical acts that symbolize closure can trigger choice closure and increase satisfaction," write authors Yangjie Gu, Simona Botti, and David Faro (all London Business School). After ...

Financial pressure and workplace stress lead some American men to take on home improvement projects, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "Depending on their social class, men tend to use DIY home improvement to envision themselves as either suburban craftsmen or family handymen," write authors Risto Moisio (California State University, Long Beach), Eric J. Arnould (University of Bath), and James Gentry (University of Nebraska, Lincoln). Consumer research has tended to focus on demonstrating how masculine identity is constructed away from home ...

Setting a mouse free to roam might alarm most people, but not so for nuclear imaging researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Johns Hopkins Medical School and the University of Maryland who have developed a new imaging system for mouse brain studies. Scientists use dynamic imaging of mice to follow changes in brain chemistry caused by the progression of disease or the application of a drug as an effective research tool for developing better ways to diagnose disease and formulate better ...

As demand for computing and communication capacity surges, the global communication infrastructure struggles to keep pace, since the light signals transmitted through fiber-optic lines must still be processed electronically, creating a bottleneck in telecommunications networks. While the idea of developing an optical transistor to get around this problem is alluring to scientists and engineers, it has also remained an elusive vision, despite years of experiments with various approaches. Now, McGill University researchers have taken a significant, early step toward this ...

The intrauterine environment plays an important role in the health of the offspring. Now, experts from the University of Navarra affirm that the mother's stress, due to socio-economic or psycho-social causes, is associated with the development of pathologies related with obesity. "The growing prevalence of obesity cannot be solely attributed to genetic factors or poor nutrition, but also to lifestyle and adverse environmental factors," as explained to SINC by Javier Campión, lead researcher of this new study. "The said environmental factors could have a bearing on epigenetic ...

Sellers mostly focus on the desirability of a product when setting prices. Buyers, however, focus evenly on the product itself and what's entailed in using it, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "Sellers tend to focus on aspects of a product that are related to its desirability. Buyers, in contrast, focus both on its desirability and the feasibility of using and consuming the product. This difference in focus leads buyers and sellers to set different prices for the same product," write authors Caglar Irmak (University of South Carolina), Cheryl ...

These results incentivise the development of targeted therapies enabling improved neurone production to alleviate cognitive decline in the elderly and reduce the cerebral lesions caused by radiotherapy. The research is published in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine. New neurones are formed regularly in the adult brain in order to guarantee that all our cognitive capacities are maintained. This neurogenesis may be adversely affected in various situations and especially: in the course of ageing, after radiotherapy treatment of a brain tumour. (The irradiation ...