Exceptionally warm spring weather in 2010 and 2012 resulted in the earliest flowering times known in 161 years of recorded history at two sites in the eastern US, according to research published January 16 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Elizabeth Ellwood of Boston University and colleagues. Many plants need a long winter break to undergo physiological changes that make them bloom in the spring. According to several previous studies, this blooming is occurring earlier than before due to warmer springs caused by climate change. The consequences of such early flowering ...

A new fossil discovered in Tunisia represents the oldest known ancestor of modern-day sea cows, supporting the African origins of these marine mammals. The find is described in research published January 16 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Julien Benoit and colleagues from the University of Science and Technology in Montpellier, France. Some fossils of sea cow ancestors have been found in Jamaica, but the Tunisian fossil is more primitive and pre-dates these, revealing an older ancestor for sea cows that emerged at the same time as other modern mammals. Unlike ...

The latest study by Professor Bob Elwood and Barry Magee from Queen's School of Biological Sciences looked at the reactions of common shore crabs to small electrical shocks, and their behaviour after experiencing those shocks. The research has been published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. Professor Elwood's previous research showed that prawns and hermit crabs respond in a way consistent with pain. This latest study provides further evidence of this. Professor Elwood said: "The experiment was carefully designed to distinguish between pain and a reflex phenomenon ...

Despite being one of the most genetically analysed groups, the origin of European Jews has remained obscure. However, a new study published online today (Thursday) in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution by Dr Eran Elhaik, a geneticist at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, argues that the European Jewish genome is a mosaic of Caucasus, European, and Semitic ancestries, setting to rest previous contradictory reports of Jewish ancestry. Elhaik's findings strongly support the Khazarian Hypothesis, as opposed to the Rhineland Hypothesis, of European Jewish origins. ...

A new model from Queen Mary, University of London could be a useful security tool in tracking people in large, busy venues such as airport terminals and shopping centres. The research fuses information gathered from multiple Close-Circuit Television (CCTV) network cameras and geographical maps for the first time, and could be useful in locating people in blind-spots where the CCTV cannot see, known as invisible areas. Co-author Professor Andrea Cavallaro and director of Queen Mary's Centre for Intelligent Sensing, based in the School of Electronic Engineering and ...

CHICAGO – Lung cancer mortality appears to be higher in black persons and highest in blacks living in the most segregated counties in the United States, regardless of socioeconomic status, according to a report published in the January issue of JAMA Surgery, a JAMA Network publication. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States and blacks are disproportionately affected with the highest incidence and mortality rates. Awori J. Hayanga, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of Washington, Seattle, and colleagues examined the relationship between race ...

CHICAGO – Performance of smartphone applications in assessing melanoma risk is highly variable and 3 of 4 applications incorrectly classified 30 percent or more of melanomas as unconcerning, according to a report published Online First by JAMA Dermatology, a JAMA Network publication. To measure the performance of smartphone applications that evaluate photographs of skin lesions and provide the user with feedback about the likelihood of malignancy, Joel A. Wolf, B.A., and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, tested the sensitivity, specificity, and ...

Medical researchers at the University of Alberta tested the DNA of more than 300 women in Alberta and discovered a 'genetic marker' method to help accurately profile which women were more apt to have their breast cancer return years later. Sambasivarao Damaraju, a professor with the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, and at the Cross Cancer Institute just published his team's findings in the peer-reviewed journal, PLoS One. Using a simple blood test, Damaraju and his team, which included his PhD student Yadav Sapkota, scanned the entire human genome of 369 women who had ...

Contact: Bridget DeSimone bdesimone@burnesscommunications.com 301-280-5735 Preeti Singh psingh@burnesscommunications.com 301-280-5722 The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene New study finds malaria, typhoid -- not Ebola -- biggest health threat for travelers to tropics DEERFIELD, IL. (January 16, 2013)—Feeling feverish after a visit to the tropics? It may not just be a bout with this year's flu. If you're a Western traveler, malaria and typhoid fever should top the list of diseases to discuss with your doctor when you return, especially following ...

Contact: Nick Miller nicholas.miller@cchmc.org 513-803-6035 Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center Contact: Jason Bardi jason.bardi@ucsf.edu 415-502-4608 University of California, San Francisco Light exposure during pregnancy key to normal eye development CINCINNATI – New research in Nature concludes the eye – which depends on light to see – also needs light to develop normally during pregnancy. Scientists say the unexpected finding offers a new basic understanding of fetal eye development and ocular diseases caused by vascular disorders – ...

The red fire ants live in two different types of colonies: some colonies strictly have a single queen while other colonies contain hundreds of queens. Publishing in the journal Nature (Wednesday 16 January 2013), scientists have discovered that this difference in social organisation is determined by a chromosome that carries one of two variants of a 'supergene' containing more than 600 genes. The two variants, B and b, differ in structure but have evolved similarly to the X and Y chromosomes that determine the sex of humans. If the worker fire ants in a colony carry ...

Record warm temperatures in 2010 and 2012 resulted in the earliest spring flowering in the eastern United States in more than 150 years, researchers at Harvard University, Boston University and the University of Wisconsin have found. "We're seeing plants that are now flowering on average over three weeks earlier than when they were first observed – and some species are flowering as much as six weeks earlier," said Charles Davis, a Harvard Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the study's senior author. "Spring is arriving much earlier today than it has ...

PITTSBURGH, Jan. 16, 2013 – Smartphone applications that claim to evaluate a user's photographs of skin lesions for the likelihood of cancer instead returned highly variable and often inaccurate feedback, according to a study led by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The findings, published in JAMA Dermatology and available online today, suggest that relying on these "apps" instead of consulting with a physician may delay the diagnosis of melanoma and timely, life-saving treatment. "Smartphone usage is rapidly increasing, and the applications ...

Norwegian pregnant women who received a vaccine against the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus showed no increased risk of pregnancy loss, while pregnant women who experienced influenza during pregnancy had an increased risk of miscarriages and still births, a study has found. The study suggests that influenza infection may increase the risk of fetal loss. Scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) published their findings online Jan. 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine. The research was conducted following the ...

SAN ANTONIO, Texas, U.S.A. (Jan. 16, 2013) — Patients who are started on antiretroviral therapy for HIV-1 infection within four months of estimated infection date — and who have higher counts of CD4+ T-cells at the initiation of therapy — demonstrate a stronger recovery of CD4+ T-cell counts than patients in whom therapy is started later, a new study shows. The report, to be published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, is co-authored by physicians of UT Medicine San Antonio and the University of California, San Diego and drew data from 468 patients followed ...

A 48-week course of antiretroviral medication taken in the early stages of HIV infection slows the damage to the immune system and delays the need for long term treatment, according to research published today in the New England Journal of Medicine (1). However, the delay was only marginally longer than the time already spent on treatment. The study, the largest clinical trial ever undertaken looking at treating people with recent HIV infection, also suggests that the treatment lowers the amount of virus in the blood for up to sixty weeks after it is stopped, which potentially ...

Boston – In an airplane crisis—an engine failure, a fire—pilots pull out a checklist to help with their decision-making. But in an operating room crisis—massive bleeding, a patient's heart stops—surgical teams don't. Given the complexity of judgment and circumstances, standard practice is for teams to use memory alone. In a new study published in the January 17 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, however, researchers at Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health system innovation at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard School of Public Health, have found that ...

MADISON – Using the meticulous phenological records of two iconic American naturalists, Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold, scientists have demonstrated that native plants in the eastern United States are flowering as much as a month earlier in response to a warming climate. The new study is important because it gives scientists a peek inside the black box of ecological change in response to a warming world. In addition, the work may also help predict effects on important agricultural crops, which depend on flowering to produce fruit. The new study was published online ...

Would women rather "pop the question?" Apparently not. With marriage proposals in the air around the new year, researchers at UC Santa Cruz report that both women and men tend to hold traditional views when it comes to marriage proposals. Young adults were asked about their personal preferences for marriage traditions. Overwhelmingly, both men and women said they would want the man in a relationship to propose marriage. A substantial majority of women also responded that they would want to take their husband's last name. In fact, not one of 136 men surveyed believed ...

Marginal lands ­– those unsuited for food crops – can serve as prime real estate for meeting the nation's alternative energy production goals. In the current issue of Nature, a team of researchers led by Michigan State University shows that marginal lands represent a huge untapped resource to grow mixed species cellulosic biomass, plants grown specifically for fuel production, which could annually produce up to 5.5 billion gallons of ethanol in the Midwest alone. "Understanding the environmental impact of widespread biofuel production is a major unanswered question ...

Understanding the human brain is one of the greatest scientific quests of all time, but the available methods have been very limited until recently. The development of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) — a tool used to gauge real-time brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow — opened up an exciting new landscape for exploration. Now, twenty years after the first fMRI study was published, a group of distinguished psychological scientists reflect on the contributions fMRI has made to our understanding of human thought. Their reflections are published ...

MANHATTAN, Kan. -- A Kansas State University-led study has uncovered new information that helps scientists better understand the complex workings of cells in the innate immune system. The findings may also lead to new avenues in disease control and prevention. Philip Hardwidge, associate professor of diagnostic medicine and pathobiology, was the study's principal investigator. He and colleagues looked at the relationship between a bacterial protein and the innate immune system -- a system of defensive cells that responds rapidly to an infection in a nonspecific manner. Among ...

GREENBELT, Md. -- Engineers working on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope met another milestone recently with they completed performance testing on the observatory's aft-optics subsystem at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp's facilities in Boulder, Colo. Ball is the principal subcontractor to Northrop Grumman for the optical technology and lightweight mirror system. "Completing Aft Optics System performance testing is significant because it means all of the telescope's mirror systems are ready for integration and testing," said Lee Feinberg, NASA Optical Telescope Element ...

Tropical Storm Emang continues to move through open waters in the Southern Indian Ocean and NASA's TRMM satellite noticed one area of heavy rainfall near the center. On Jan. 16 at 0702 UTC (2:02 a.m. EST) NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite passed over Emang, and captured rainfall rates. TRMM identified that moderate rain was falling throughout most of the tropical cyclone, and heavy rainfall was occurring near the storm's center. TRMM estimated the heavy rain falling at a rate of 2 inches (50 mm) per hour. On Jan. 16 at 0900 UTC (4 a.m. EST), ...

Melanomas that develop in the eye often are fatal. Now, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report they have identified a mutated gene in melanoma tumors of the eye that appears to predict a good outcome. The research is published in the advance online edition of Nature Genetics. "We found mutations in a gene called SF3B1," says senior author Anne Bowcock, PhD, professor of genetics. "The good news is that these mutations develop in a distinct subtype of melanomas in the eye that are unlikely to spread and become deadly." Eye tumors ...