For monarch butterflies, redder wings are correlated with better flight performance, according to research published July 25 in the open access journal PLoS ONE. Previous work has shown that monarch coloring is intended to warn their predators about their bitter taste and toxicity, and that migratory butterflies are darker colored than non-migratory ones, suggesting an association between darker color and increased fitness. The current work, led by Andrew Davis of the University of Georgia, provides further evidence for this association. The researchers tested 121 captive ...

Birds in the crow family can figure out how to extract a treat from a half-empty glass surprisingly well, and young children show similar patterns of behavior until they reach about eight years old, at which point their performance surpasses that of the birds. The full report is published July 25 in the open access journal PLoS ONE. In the current study, led by Nicola Clayton of the University of Cambridge, researchers used a version of the riddle commonly referred to as "Aesop's fable" to test associative learning and problem-solving ability. In previous work, the ...

STONY BROOK and NEW YORK, NY– Research that used mitochondrial DNA-based testing to compare the extent of fraudulent labeling of black caviar purchased before and after international protection shows conservation benefits. A team of scientists from the Institute for Conservation Science at Stony Brook University and the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) repeated a market survey of commercially available caviar in the New York City area that was conducted before the protection was put in place, and the results showed ...

While some published research has hinted at the connection between the sickle cell trait and sudden cardiac death among young, athletic African-American males, which was initially observed in black military recruits 25 years ago, a new study with the first sizeable patient series definitively confirms this risk for these individuals during competitive sports. The sickle cell trait, for which all U.S. African Americans are tested at birth, affects approximately 8 percent of the population. The Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation maintains a 32-year-old forensic database, ...

Scientists have discovered a thriving population of Mediterranean earthworms in an urban farm in Dublin, Ireland. The findings by University College Dublin scientists published in the journal Biology Letters on 25 July 2012 suggest that rising soil temperatures due to climate change may be extending the geographical habitat range of the earthworm Prosellodrilus amplisetosus. "Soil decomposer species including earthworms are frequently introduced into non-native soils by human activities like the transportation of nursery plants or live fish bait," says Dr Olaf Schmidt ...

Boston, MA ─ A new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) finds that expanding Medicaid to low-income adults leads to widespread gains in coverage, access to care, and—most importantly—improved health and reduced mortality. It is the first published study to look specifically at the effect of recent state Medicaid expansions on mortality among low-income adults, and the findings suggest that expanding coverage to the uninsured may save lives. "The recent Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act ruled that states could decide whether or not they ...

A team of University of California, Berkeley, scientists in collaboration with researchers at the University of Munich and University of Washington in Seattle has discovered a chemical that temporarily restores some vision to blind mice, and is working on an improved compound that may someday allow people with degenerative blindness to see again. The approach could eventually help those with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that is the most common inherited form of blindness, as well as age-related macular degeneration, the most common cause of acquired blindness ...

HACKENSACK, N.J. (July 25, 2012) — Researchers from John Theurer Cancer Center at HackensackUMC, one of the nation's 50 best hospitals for cancer, played leading roles in three separate multi-center studies with the new proteasome inhibitor carfilzomib published in Blood, a major peer-reviewed scientific journal. Carfilzomib is a novel, highly selective proteasome inhibitor, a type of medication that blocks the actions of certain proteins (proteasomes) that cancer cells need to survive and multiply. Carfilzomib is also known by its branded name Kyprolis™. On July ...

Adding computed tomography (CT) scans to standard screening procedures may help emergency room staff more rapidly determine which patients complaining of chest pain are having a heart attack or may soon have a heart attack, and which patients can be safely discharged, according to a study funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health. Researchers in the study focused on a condition known as acute coronary syndrome, which includes heart attacks and unstable angina (chest pain), a condition that often progresses ...

Newport, R.I., July 25, 2012 - Migraine can be a disabling neurological disorder, often aggravated by accompanying nausea. Stimulation of the acupoint PC6 Neiguan, an approach to controlling nausea adopted by traditional Chinese medicine, has never been documented by published clinical studies in medical literature for the control of migraine-related nausea, until now. Published in the May 2012 Neurological Sciences (journal of the Italian Neurological Society)*, "Acupressure in the control of migraine-associated nausea" is a clinical trial demonstrating that continuous ...

In a quest to make safer and more effective vaccines, scientists at the Biodesign InstituteÒ at Arizona State University have turned to a promising field called DNA nanotechnology to make an entirely new class of synthetic vaccines. In a study published in the journal Nano Letters, Biodesign immunologist Yung Chang joined forces with her colleagues, including DNA nanotechnology innovator Hao Yan, to develop the first vaccine complex that could be delivered safely and effectively by piggybacking onto self-assembled, three-dimensional DNA nanostructures. "When Hao treated ...

Cognition psychologists at the Ruhr-Universität together with colleagues from the University Hospital Bergmannsheil (Prof. Dr. Martin Tegenthoff) have discovered why stressed persons are more likely to lapse back into habits than to behave goal-directed. The team of PD Dr. Lars Schwabe and Prof. Dr. Oliver Wolf from the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience have mimicked a stress situation in the body using drugs. They then examined the brain activity using functional MRI scanning. The researchers have now reported in the Journal of Neuroscience that the interaction of the ...

Having a stroke or mini stroke has a much more profound effect on women than men when it comes to their quality of life, according to research published in the August issue of the Journal of Clinical Nursing. Swedish researchers at Danderyd Hospital, Stockholm, asked all patients attending an out-patient clinic over a 16-month period to complete the Nottingham Health Profile, a generic quality of life survey used to measure subjective physical, emotional and social aspects of health. A total of 496 patients agreed to take part – 379 were stroke patients and 117 had ...

Many of the world's tropical protected areas are struggling to sustain their biodiversity, according to a study by more than 200 scientists from around the world. But the study published in Nature includes research focusing on a reserve in Tanzania by University of York scientists that indicates that long-term engagement with conservation has positive results Dr Andy Marshall, of the Environment Department at York and Director of Conservation Science at Flamingo Land, compared the data he collected in the Udzungwa mountains with data collected more than 20 years previously ...

Cambridge scientists have used an age-old fable to help illustrate how we think differently to other animals. Lucy Cheke, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge's Department of Experimental Psychology expanded Aesop's fable into three tasks of varying complexity and compared the performance of Eurasian Jays with local school children. The task that set the children apart from the Jays involved a mechanism which was counter-intuitive as it was hidden under an opaque surface. Neither the birds nor the children were able to learn how the mechanism worked, but the ...

To win a second term in office, President Obama needs to persuade voters that he is still one of them – and recapture some of the charisma that help propel him to the top four years ago. However, this is clearly a challenge given the economic difficulties facing many Americans. Writing in Scientific American Mind, Professors Alex Haslam of the University of Exeter and Stephen Reicher of St Andrews describe how presenting themselves as 'one of us' is central to leaders being seen as a charismatic. Rather than being an inherent personal quality, they identify charisma ...

This press release is available in Spanish. VIDEO: Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid have recently published a report which analyzes the impact of the economic crisis on gambling and the social perception of games of... Click here for more information. Scientists from the Institute of Policy and Governance (whose initials in Spanish are IPOLGOB) at the UC3M have ...

This press release is available in German. Embarrassing personal photos and videos circulating in the Internet: researchers at Bielefeld University have discovered that young people who fall victim to cyberbullying or cyber harassment suffer most when fellow pupils make them objects of ridicule by distributing photographic material. According to an online survey published on Thursday 19 July, about half of the victims feel very stressed or severely stressed by this type of behaviour. 1,881 schoolchildren living in Germany took part in the survey conducted by the ...

Researchers from IMIM (Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute) have deciphered the function executed by a protein called β-catenin in generating blood tissue stem cells. These cells, also called haematopoietic, are used as a source for transplants that form part of the therapies to fight different types of leukaemia. The results obtained will open the doors to produce these stem cells in the laboratory and, thus, improve the quality and quantity of these surgical procedures. This will let patients with no compatible donors be able to benefit from this discovery ...

Washington, D.C.— Comets and asteroids preserve the building blocks of our Solar System and should help explain its origin. But there are unsolved puzzles. For example, how did icy comets obtain particles that formed at high temperatures, and how did these refractory particles acquire rims with different compositions? Carnegie's theoretical astrophysicist Alan Boss and cosmochemist Conel Alexander* are the first to model the trajectories of such particles in the unstable disk of gas and dust that formed the Solar System. They found that these refractory particles could ...

Washington, D.C.—Using new, highly efficient techniques, Carnegie and Colombian scientists have developed accurate high-resolution maps of the carbon stocks locked in tropical vegetation for 40% of the Colombian Amazon (165,000 square kilometers/64,000 square miles), an area about four times the size of Switzerland. Until now, the inability to accurately quantify carbon stocks at high spatial resolution over large areas has hindered the United Nations' Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program, which is aimed at creating financial value ...

Local weather patterns temporarily influence people's beliefs about evidence for global warming, according to research by political scientists at New York University and Temple University. Their study, which appears in the Journal of Politics, found that those living in places experiencing warmer-than-normal temperatures at the time they were surveyed were significantly more likely than others to say there is evidence for global warming. "Global climate change is one of the most important public policy challenges of our time, but it is a complex issue with which Americans ...

Researchers from the University of Southampton have devised a novel method for forming virtual power plants to provide renewable energy production in the UK. In the last decade, small and distributed energy resources (DERs), like wind farms and solar panels, have begun to appear in greater numbers in the electricity supply network (Grid). To ensure that energy demand is met without interruptions, the Grid requires power suppliers to provide an estimate of their production and the confidence in meeting that estimate. Depending on the confidence placed on the estimates, ...

TORONTO, July 25, 2012 – A new study by York University researchers finds that songbirds follow a strict annual schedule when migrating to their breeding grounds – with some birds departing on precisely the same date each year. The study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, is the first to track the migration routes and timing of individual songbirds over multiple years. Researchers outfitted wood thrushes with tiny geolocator "backpacks," recording data on their movements. Spring departure dates of birds heading from the tropics to North American breeding grounds were ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. — Young people who watch more sexual content from movies also tend to engage in more sexual behavior and begin sexual activity at an earlier age, according to a University of Missouri researcher's study. "We can't say that watching sexual content in movies is directly responsible for adolescents' sexual behavior," said Ross O'Hara, currently a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Missouri, who conducted the research with other psychological scientists while at Dartmouth College. "However, there is a correlation between the two. Sensation seeking, or ...