This press release is available in German. They dominated the earth for 200 million years and numerous different species can still be found all over the world: mosses, horsetails and ferns. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, have now found out that bracken ferns (Pteridium aquilinum) do not release any volatiles when they are attacked − unlike many of the now dominant and evolutionary younger flowering plants. Such an emission of volatile compounds may attract the pest insects' enemies, such as ichneumon wasps or ...

Researchers at Aalto University have developed a simple method for reducing the amount of phosphorus in the wastewater of a pulp mill. The method is called simultaneous precipitation using iron sulphate. A separate treatment stage is not required, as the precipitation takes place simultaneously with the actual biological wastewater treatment. Iron sulphate is added to the wastewater prior to the biological wastewater treatment process, and the phosphorus dissolved into the water is precipitated with the biomass at the treatment plant. Finally, the phosphorus is removed ...

Trust rather than lust is at the heart of the attention to detail and finely made form of handaxes from around 1.7 million years ago, according to a University of York researcher. Dr Penny Spikins, from the Department of Archaeology, suggests a desire to prove their trustworthiness, rather than a need to demonstrate their physical fitness as a mate, was the driving force behind the fine crafting of handaxes by Homo erectus/ergaster in the Lower Palaeolithic period. Dr Spikins said: "We sometimes imagine that early humans were self-centred, and if emotional at all, that ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Each winter, wide swaths of the Arctic Ocean freeze to form sheets of sea ice that spread over millions of square miles. This ice acts as a massive sun visor for the Earth, reflecting solar radiation and shielding the planet from excessive warming. The Arctic ice cover reaches its peak each year in mid-March, before shrinking with warmer spring temperatures. But over the last three decades, this winter ice cap has shrunk: Its annual maximum reached record lows, according to satellite observations, in 2007 and again in 2011. Understanding the processes ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (November 21, 2012)—Moving 6,000 or more steps a day—no matter how—adds up to a healthier life for midlife women. That level of physical activity decreases the risk of diabetes and metabolic syndrome (a diabetes precursor and a risk for cardiovascular disease), showed a study published online this month in Menopause, the journal of the North American Menopause Society. Although other studies have shown the value of structured exercise in lowering health risks such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease, this study has shown that habitual physical ...

Infants seem to develop at an astoundingly rapid pace, learning new things and acquiring new skills every day. And research suggests that the abilities that infants demonstrate early on can shape the development of skills later in life, in childhood and beyond. Read about the latest research on infant development published in the November 2012 issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. How Do You Learn to Walk? Thousands of Steps and Dozens of Falls per Day How do babies learn to walk? In this study, psychological scientist ...

Short snippets of DNA found in human brain tissue provide new insight into human cognitive function and risk for developing certain neurological diseases, according to researchers from the Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. The findings are published in the November 20th issue of PLoS Biology. There are nearly 40 million positions in the human genome with DNA sequences that are different than those in non-human primates, making the task of learning which are important and which are inconsequential a challenge for scientists. ...

Chromosomes - long, linear DNA molecules – are capped at their ends with special DNA structures called telomeres and an assortment of proteins, which together act as a protective sheath. Telomeres are maintained through the interactions between an enzyme, telomerase, and several accessory proteins. Researchers at The Wistar Institute have defined the structure of one of these critical proteins in yeast. Understanding how telomeres keep chromosomes – and by extension, genomes – intact is an area of intense scientific focus in the fields of both aging and cancer. In aging, ...

PHILADELPHIA – A pathway called the "Unfolded Protein Response," or UPR, a cell's way of responding to unfolded and misfolded proteins, helps tumor cells escape programmed cell death during the development of lymphoma. Research, led by Lori Hart, Ph.D., research associate and Constantinos Koumenis, Ph.D., associate professor,and research division director in the Department of Radiation Oncology, both from the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, and Davide Ruggero, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Urology, University of California, San Francisco, ...

The environment has a more formidable opponent than carbon dioxide. Another greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, is 300 times more potent and also destroys the ozone layer each time it is released into the atmosphere through agricultural practices, sewage treatment and fossil fuel combustion. Luckily, nature has a larger army than previously thought combating this greenhouse gas—according to a study by Frank Loeffler, University of Tennessee, Knoxville–Oak Ridge National Laboratory Governor's Chair for Microbiology, and his colleagues. The findings are published in the ...

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists are helping peach growers make the most of dwindling water supplies in California's San Joaquin Valley. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientist James E. Ayars at the San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Sciences Center in Parlier, Calif., has found a way to reduce the amount of water given post-harvest to early-season peaches so that the reduction has a minimal effect on yield and fruit quality. ARS is USDA's principal intramural scientific research agency, and the research supports the USDA priority of promoting international ...

Forging dies must withstand a lot. They must be hard so that their surface does not get too worn out and is able to last through great changes in temperature and handle the impactful blows of the forge. However, the harder a material is, the more brittle it becomes - and forging dies are less able to handle the stress from the impact. For this reason, the manufacturers had to find a compromise between hardness and strength. One of the possibilities is to surround a semi-hard, strong material with a hard layer. The problem is that the layer rests on the softer material and ...

The age-adjusted prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) varies considerably within the United States, from less than 4 percent of the population in Washington and Minnesota to more than 9 percent in Alabama and Kentucky. These state-level rates are among the COPD data available for the first time as part of the newly released 2011 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey. "COPD is a tremendous public health burden and a leading cause of death. It is a health condition that needs to be urgently addressed, particularly on a local level," ...

It was a special moment for Michael Panzner of the Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology IWS in Dresden, Germany and his partners: in the Dresden Hygiene Museum the scientists were examining a wall picture by Gerhard Richter that had been believed lost long ago. Shortly before leaving the German Democratic Republic the artist had left it behind as a journeyman's project. Then, in the 1960s, it was unceremoniously painted over. However, instead of being interested in the picture, Panzer was far more interested in the new detector which was being used for ...

HOUSTON – (Nov. 22, 2012) – Using a new technique called cryo-electron tomography, two research teams at Baylor College of Medicine (www.bcm.edu) have created a three-dimensional map that gives a better understanding of how the architecture of the rod sensory cilium (part of one type of photoreceptor in the eye) is changed by genetic mutation and how that affects its ability to transport proteins as part of the light-sensing process. Almost all mammalian cells have cilia. Some are motile and some are not. They play a central role in cellular operations, and when they ...

Academics at the Universities of Bristol, Yale and Calgary have shown that prehistoric birds had a much more primitive version of the wings we see today, with rigid layers of feathers acting as simple airfoils for gliding. Close examination of the earliest theropod dinosaurs suggests that feathers were initially developed for insulation, arranged in multiple layers to preserve heat, before their shape evolved for display and camouflage. As evolution changed the configuration of the feathers, their important role in the aerodynamics and mechanics of flight became more ...

ADELPHI, Md. – A new center that combines advanced computing resources at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) with clinical data and biomedical expertise at the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) could soon revolutionize the efficiency and effectiveness of health care in the state of Maryland and beyond. The Center for Health-related Informatics and Bioimaging (CHIB) announced today joins computer scientists, life scientists, engineers, physicists, biostatisticians and others at the College Park campus with imaging specialists, physicians, clinicians ...

By examining art printed from woodblocks spanning five centuries, Blair Hedges, a professor of biology at Penn State University, has identified the species responsible for making the ever-present wormholes in European printed art since the Renaissance. The hole-makers, two species of wood-boring beetles, are widely distributed today, but the "wormhole record," as Hedges calls it, reveals a different pattern in the past, where the two species met along a zone across central Europe like a battle line of two armies. The research, which is the first of its kind to use printed ...

In the 1960s and 1970s, classic social psychological studies were conducted that provided evidence that even normal, decent people can engage in acts of extreme cruelty when instructed to do so by others. However, in an essay published November 20 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, Professors Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher revisit these studies' conclusions and explain how awful acts involve not just obedience, but enthusiasm too—challenging the long-held belief that human beings are 'programmed' for conformity. This belief can be traced back to two landmark empirical ...

Animals, including humans, actively select the gut microbes that are the best partners and nurture them with nutritious secretions, suggests a new study led by Oxford University, and published November 20 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology. The Oxford team created an evolutionary computer model of interactions between gut microbes and the lining (the host epithelial cell layer) of the animal gut. The model shows that beneficial microbes that are slow-growing are rapidly lost, and need to be helped by host secretions, such as specific nutrients, that favour the beneficial ...

A new study published November 20 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology has identified hundreds of small regions of the genome that appear to be uniquely regulated in human neurons. These regulatory differences distinguish us from other primates, including monkeys and apes, and as neurons are at the core of our unique cognitive abilities, these features may ultimately hold the key to our intellectual prowess (and also to our potential vulnerability to a wide range of 'human-specific' diseases from autism to Alzheimer's). Exploring which features in the genome separate ...

DENVER, Nov. 20 — Patients with online access to their medical record, including secure email communication with clinicians, had an associated increase in use of some clinical services, according to new Kaiser Permanente research published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study examined health records of more than 500,000 Kaiser Permanente members in Colorado between May 2005 and June 2010. The researchers looked at office visits, telephone encounters, after-hours clinic visits, emergency department encounters, and hospitalizations ...

CHICAGO – Patients with online access to their medical records and secure e-mail communication with clinicians had increased use of clinical services, including office visits and telephone encounters, compared to patients who did not have online access, according to a study appearing in the November 21 issue of JAMA. "Using health information technology to foster efficient health care delivery is an important component of health care reform," according to background information in the article. "Prior studies suggest that providing patients with online access to health ...

CHICAGO – Although approved for use for treating traumatic brain injury (TBI) in nearly 60 countries, use of citicoline in a randomized trial that included more than 1,200 participants with TBI did not result in improvement in functional and cognitive status, according to a study appearing in the November 21 issue of JAMA. "Despite considerable advances in emergency and critical care management of TBI as well as decades of research on potential agents for neuroprotection or enhanced recovery, no effective pharmacotherapy has yet been identified," according to background ...

A rapid test for tuberculosis (TB) could help to reduce TB deaths, improve TB treatment, and also offer reasonably good value for money if introduced in southern Africa, an area that has high rates of HIV and a type of TB that is resistant to some drugs (multi-drug resistant TB), according to a study published in this week's PLOS Medicine. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently recommended the use of a new diagnostic test for TB (the Xpert MTB/RIF test), which can show a result within 2 hours, in people at high risk of multi-drug resistant TB and/or HIV-associated ...