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 ...

The number of Alzheimer's patients will continue to dramatically increase in the next several decades. Various teams of researchers worldwide are feverishly investigating precisely how the illness develops. A team of scientists under the guidance of the University of Bonn and University of Massachusetts (USA) and with the participation of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases have discovered a new signaling pathway in mice which is involved in the development of chronic inflammation which causes nerve cells in the brain to malfunction and die off. The results ...

DURHAM, NC -- Humpback whales are famed for their songs, most often heard in breeding season when males are competing to mate with females. In recent years, however, reports of whale songs occurring outside traditional breeding grounds have become more common. A new study may help explain why. Humpbacks sing for their supper -- or at least, they sing while they hunt for it. The research, published December 19 in PLoS ONE, uncovers the whales' little-understood acoustic behavior while foraging. It also reveals a previously unknown behavioral flexibility on their ...

Our eyes may be our window to the world, but how do we make sense of the thousands of images that flood our retinas each day? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the brain is wired to put in order all the categories of objects and actions that we see. They have created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings. The result – achieved through computational models of brain imaging data collected while the subjects watched hours of movie clips – is what researchers call "a continuous semantic space." Some relationships ...

Over the last half decade, it has become increasingly clear that the normal gastrointestinal (GI) bacteria play a variety of very important roles in the biology of human and animals. Now Vic Norris of the University of Rouen, France, and coauthors propose yet another role for GI bacteria: that they exert some control over their hosts' appetites. Their review was published online ahead of print in the Journal of Bacteriology. This hypothesis is based in large part on observations of the number of roles bacteria are already known to play in host biology, as well as their ...

AUSTIN, Texas — Raising the minimum wage to a living wage begins the cycle of lifting single mothers out of poverty, according to a policy report released by the Institute for Urban Policy Research & Analysis (IUPRA) at The University of Texas at Austin. The U.S. census shows more Americans — 46.2 million people — are living in poverty than ever before. And for African American and Hispanic women, a full-time minimum wage job isn't enough to break out of the poverty cycle. According to the report, working women of color make $0.64 and $0.56, respectively, for every dollar ...

The humble soybean could become an inexpensive new source of a widely used chemical for plastics, textiles, drugs, solvents and as a food additive. Succinic acid, traditionally drawn from petroleum, is one focus of research by Rice chemists George Bennett and Ka-Yiu San. In 2004, the Department of Energy named succinic acid one of 12 "platform" chemicals that could be produced from sugars by biological means and turned into high-value materials. Several years ago, Rice patented a process by Bennett and San for the bio-based production of succinic acid that employed ...

JUPITER, FL, December 19, 2012 – Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed the first synthetic compound that can reverse the effects of a serious metabolic condition known as fatty liver disease. True to its name, the disease involves an abnormal buildup of fat in the liver. The compound—known as SR9238—is the first to effectively suppress lipid or fat production in the liver, eliminating inflammation and reversing fat accumulation in animal models of fatty liver disease. The new compound also significantly lowered total ...

Continued high use of marijuana by the nation's eighth, 10th and 12th graders combined with a drop in perceptions of its potential harms was revealed in this year's Monitoring the Future survey, an annual survey of eighth, 10th, and 12th-graders conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan. The survey was carried out in classrooms around the country earlier this year, under a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health. The 2012 survey shows that 6.5 percent of high school seniors smoke marijuana daily, up ...

Since the early 1970s school shootings at American elementary, secondary and higher education institutions have been a painful reality for American society. After each incident – like the recent attack in Newtown, CT – there is voluminous dialogue about what can be done to prevent the next, such tragedy. But can anything realistically be done to prevent these horrific crimes? A new article¹ by Dr. Daniel J. Flannery at Case Western Reserve University, and colleagues, scheduled to appear in the January issue of Springer's Current Psychiatry Reports, attempts to parse out ...

The Bonn site of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and the University of Bonn are leading contributors. The complex named "NLRP3 inflammasome" is composed of several proteins and plays a key role in the immune system. It resembles a fire alarm sensor that triggers a chain reaction when activated. As a result, immune cells are mobilized and substances that foster inflammation are released. This process can be triggered by infections, which are subsequently suppressed by the immune response. However, in the case of Alzheimer's disease, the activation ...

The study, published in Psychiatric Services, highlights economic and psycho-social challenges faced by parents of adult children with disabilities, compared with parents of children without disabilities. When either parent becomes disabled, the study found, families' report lower financial well-being. This being especially true when an aging parent must contend with both the needs of an adult child with mental illness and a spouse who develops an age-related disability. Not surprisingly, parents are themselves susceptible to developing disabilities and chronic conditions ...

ANN ARBOR—A carbon-nanotube-coated lens that converts light to sound can focus high-pressure sound waves to finer points than ever before. The University of Michigan engineering researchers who developed the new therapeutic ultrasound approach say it could lead to an invisible knife for noninvasive surgery. Today's ultrasound technology enables far more than glimpses into the womb. Doctors routinely use focused sound waves to blast apart kidney stones and prostate tumors, for example. The tools work primarily by focusing sound waves tightly enough to generate heat, says ...

Researchers report for the first time the seroprevalence of three strains of avian influenza viruses in pigs in southern China, but not the H5N1 avian influenza virus. Their research, published online ahead of print in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, has implications for efforts to protect the public health from pandemics. Influenza A virus is responsible both for pandemics that have killed millions worldwide, and for the much less severe annual outbreaks of influenza. Because pigs can be infected with both human and avian influenza viruses, they are thought to ...

WORCESTER, MA – Promising new research provides evidence that ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, may be treatable using neural stem cells. A consortium of researchers at multiple institutions, including the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital, have shown that neural stem cells, when transplanted into the spinal cord of a mouse model with familial ALS, slow disease onset and progression while improving motor function, breathing and survival time ...

(December 19, 2012) Look out the window and you're likely to see the dispersal of seeds—dandelion tufts in the wind, a squirrel burying an acorn, a robin flying off with a dogwood fruit. You might even have a burr "velcroed" to your sock. Sarah Sumoski, a recent graduate of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, has now published a study of seed dispersal in a less-familiar environment—the eelgrass beds of Chesapeake Bay. The study—the first to show that marine animals can disperse eelgrass seeds—appears as the featured article in today's issue of Marine Ecology Progress ...

Cyclone Evan is now far south of Fiji and wind shear and cooler sea surface temperatures have been taking their toll on the storm and weakening it. Infrared data from NASA's Aqua satellite has shown a quick decline in the storm's structure over one day. A time series of infrared images from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite showed changes in intense thunderstorms within Cyclone Evan between Dec. 18 and Dec. 19. Over a time period of 36 hours, Evan weakened from Cyclone strength to Tropical Storm strength. In an ...

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite found an unusually tall towering thunderstorm in Cyclone Evan. According to Owen Kelley of the TRMM satellite team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md, the most startling feature of the December 16 overflight of Tropical Cyclone Evan was the extremely tall storm-cell in the north side of the eyewall. At the time TRMM passed overhead and captured an image of the storm, Evan was about to rake across the northern coast of the islands of Fiji. The updrafts in this tower extended high enough ...

Johns Hopkins scientists have created stunning images of the branching patterns of individual sensory nerve cells. Their report, published online in the journal eLife on Dec. 18, details the arrangement of these branches in skin from the backs of mice. The branching patterns define ten distinct groups that, the researchers say, likely correspond to differences in what the nerves do and could hold clues for pain management and other areas of neurological study. Each type of nerve cell that the team studied was connected at one end to the spinal cord through a thin, wire-like ...

Shrinking Arctic sea ice grabbed the world's attention again earlier this year with a new record low minimum. Growing economic activity in the Arctic, such as fishing, mineral exploration and shipping, is emphasizing the need for accurate predictions of how much of the Arctic will be covered by sea ice. Every June, an international research group known as the Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH) publishes a summary of the expected September Arctic sea ice minimum known as the Sea Ice Outlook. The initial reports and monthly updates aim to give the scientific community ...

New Orleans, LA –Research led by Dr. Udai Pandey, Assistant Professor of Genetics at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans, has found that the ability of a protein made by a gene called FUS to bind to RNA is essential to the development of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). This discovery identifies a possible therapeutic target for the fatal neurological disease. The research will be available online in the Advanced Access section of the journal Human Molecular Genetics website, posted by December 21, 2012. It will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal. ...

Making small easy changes to our eating habits on a consistent basis - 25 days or more per month - can lead to sustainable weight loss, according to research by Professor Brian Wansink in Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab. The challenge is to figure out which changes work for specific individuals and how to stick with changes long enough to make them second nature. To explore this issue, Cornell researchers launched the National Mindless Eating Challenge (NMEC), an online healthy eating and weight loss program that focused on simple eating behavior changes, instead ...

Amsterdam, NL, December 19, 2012 – As many as 50 percent of all human protein-coding genes are regulated by microRNA (miRNA) molecules. While some miRNAs impact onset and progression of cancer, others can actually suppress the development of malignant tumors and are useful in cancer therapy. They can also serve as potential biomarkers for early cancer detection. In a new issue of Cancer Biomarkers, investigators report on non-coding miRNAs as appealing biomarkers for malignancy. "MiRNA-based therapies are attractive partly due to the fact that these molecules can target ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have conducted a study showing that many skills and practices that could help scientists make use of technological and computational opportunities are only marginally being taught in California's formal graduate programs in the environmental sciences. The researchers found, too, that graduate students in the state were, in general, not engaged in data management practices. Of the students surveyed who had already completed their graduate degree, only 29.3 percent had made their research data products ...

He loves her, he loves her not. A new study led by Joshua Hart, assistant professor of psychology, suggests that men's insecurities about relationships and conflicted views of women as romantic partners and rivals could lead some to adopt sexist attitudes about women. The study was recently published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, a peer-reviewed journal. Hart and his co-authors, Jacqueline Hung '11, a former student of Hart's, and psychology professors Peter Glick of Lawrence University and Rachel Dinero of Cazenovia College, surveyed more than 400 ...