This press release is available in German. Researchers from Jena and Greifswald used GPS satellites for a long-term behavioral monitoring of land crab migration on Christmas Island. In cooperation with colleagues from the Zoological Institute at the University of Greifswald, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, used a GPS-based telemetric system to analyze movements of freely roaming robber crabs, which is the first large-scale study of any arthropod using GPS technology to monitor behavior. This analysis focussed on the ...

Astronomers have found evidence for a dying Sun-like star coming briefly back to life after casting its gassy shells out into space, mimicking the possible fate our own Solar System faces in a few billion years. This new picture of the planetary nebula Abell 30, located 5500 light-years from Earth, is a composite of visible images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and X-ray data from ESA's XMM-Newton and NASA's Chandra space telescopes. 'Planetary nebula' is the name given to the often-concentric shells of stellar material cast into space by dying stars. To astronomers ...

These images of the planetary nebula Abell 30, (a.k.a. A30), show one of the clearest views ever obtained of a special phase of evolution for these objects. The inset image on the right is a close-up view of A30 showing X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in purple and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) data showing optical emission from oxygen ions in orange. On the left is a larger view showing optical and X-ray data from the Kitt Peak National Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton, respectively. In this image the optical data show emission from oxygen (orange) and ...

The loss of sensitive species in streams begins to occur at the initial stages of urban development, according to a new study by the USGS. The study found that streams are more sensitive to development than previously understood. "We tend not to think of waterways as fragile organisms, and yet that is exactly what the results of this scientific investigation appear to be telling us," said USGS Director Marcia McNutt. "Streams are more than water, but rather communities of interdependent aquatic life, the most sensitive of which are easily disrupted by urbanization." Contaminants, ...

TORONTO, Ontario (13 November, 2012) - A study published this month by researchers at the University of Toronto and Toronto's Princess Margaret Hospital has shown that cells derived from the umbilical cord, "Human Umbilical Cord PeriVascular Cells" (HUCPVCs), are more effective in restoring heart function after an acute myocardial infarction (in common parlance, a heart attack) in a pre-clinical model than a similar cell population derived from bone marrow. At present, mesenchymal cells, known to release a series of factors that stimulate tissue repair, and control inflammation, ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — With a mate and a nest to protect, the male threespined stickleback is a fierce fish, chasing and biting other males until they go away. Now researchers are mapping the genetic underpinnings of the stickleback's aggressive behavior. Armed with tools that allow them to see which genes are activated or deactivated in response to social encounters, a team from the University of Illinois has identified broad patterns of gene activity that correspond to aggression in this fish. A paper describing their work appears in the Proceedings of the Royal Society: ...

PITTSBURGH—When principals go "all in" in terms of supporting school programs, teachers stand a better chance of successfully implementing change, according to new research published by the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Virginia (UVA). The researchers report in Prevention Science that if school principals lack enthusiasm or show little support, they are actually viewed as a hindrance by teachers, posing "major challenges" to the success of school programs like the Responsive Classroom®, an approach boasting social-emotional learning. Additionally, apprehensive ...

Although some scholars have suggested that the income gap between men and women is due to women's reluctance to negotiate salaries, a new study at the University of Chicago shows that given an invitation, women are just as willing as men to negotiate for more pay. Men, however, are more likely than women to ask for more money when there is no explicit statement in a job description that wages are negotiable, the study showed. "We find that simple manipulations of the contract environment can significantly shift the gender composition of the applicant pool," said UChicago ...

DENVER – Right now, the best known treatment for patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with anaplastic lymphoma kinase gene rearrangements (ALK) or epidermal growth factor receptor mutations (EGFR) is crizotinib or EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs), such as erlotinib, respectively. However, progression inevitably occurs. When it does, having no clear guidelines and/or indications, most patients are treated with chemotherapy. A new study published in the December 2012 issue of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer's (IASLC) ...

BOSTON – Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), are a newly emerging cellular therapy being tested in approximately 250 clinical trials worldwide to help repair damaged tissues, such as injured heart muscle following a heart attack. The problem is that when culture-expanded MSCs are injected into the circulation, they have trouble gaining access to the inflamed tissues—exactly where their help is needed. Now, research led by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) reveals new insights into how MSCs "traffic" from the ...

It's a popularly held belief that individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) gravitate toward STEM majors in college (science, technology, engineering mathematics). A new study, co-authored by Paul Shattuck, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, confirms that view yet finds that young adults with an ASD also have one of the lowest overall college enrollment rates. The study, "STEM Participation Among College Students with an Autism Spectrum Disorder," was published online Nov. 1 in the Journal of Autism and Developmental ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (Nov. 15, 2012) – Researchers in Taiwan have developed a "safe, feasible and robust co-culture system" supplied by human umbilical cord mensenchymal stem cells (HUCMSCs) to feed the sustained culture used for human embryonic stem cell (hESC) expansion prior to cell transplantation. The co-culture, said the researchers, "appears to eliminate the most feared characteristic of transplanted hESCs," which is their propensity to form tumors. The study, published in the current issue of CELL TRANSPLANTATION, is now freely available on-line at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cog/ct/. ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — They're soft, biocompatible, about 7 millimeters long – and, incredibly, able to walk by themselves. Miniature "bio-bots" developed at the University of Illinois are making tracks in synthetic biology. Designing non-electronic biological machines has been a riddle that scientists at the interface of biology and engineering have struggled to solve. The walking bio-bots demonstrate the Illinois team's ability to forward-engineer functional machines using only hydrogel, heart cells and a 3-D printer. With an altered design, the bio-bots could be customized ...

The recent storms that have battered settlements on the east coast of America may have been much more frequent in the region 450 million years ago, according to scientists. New research pinpointing the positions of the Equator and the landmasses of the USA, Canada and Greenland, during the Ordovician Period 450 million years ago, indicates that the equator ran down the western side of North America with a hurricane belt to the east. The hurricane belt would have affected an area covering modern day New York State, New Jersey and most of the eastern seaboard of the ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (Nov. 15, 2012) – Two studies published in the current issue of Cell Transplantation (21:7), now freely available on-line at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cog/ct/, investigate the role of oxygen in cell transplantation. In a study carried out at Baylor University, researchers concerned about the poor efficacy of islet cell transplantation during pancreas preservation and islet isolation have found that low temperatures can prevent hypoxia (low oxygen) that can damage islet cells. In a second study, Brazilian researchers found that neural cells ...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico are comparing supercomputer simulations of blast waves on the brain with clinical studies of veterans suffering from mild traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) to help improve helmet designs. Paul Taylor and John Ludwigsen of Sandia's Terminal Ballistics Technology Department and Corey Ford, a neurologist at UNM's Health Sciences Center, are in the final year of a four-year study of mild TBI funded by the Office of Naval Research. The team hopes to identify threshold levels of ...

Livermore, Calif. -- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have used the Stack Trace Analysis Tool (STAT), a highly scalable, lightweight tool to debug a program running more than one million MPI processes on the IBM Blue Gene/Q (BGQ)-based Sequoia supercomputer. The debugging tool is a significant milestone in LLNL's multi-year collaboration with the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison and the University of New Mexico (UNM) to ensure supercomputers run more efficiently. Playing a significant role in scaling up the Sequoia supercomputer, STAT, ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Frontline employees will commit to improving their organization if they perceive a high degree of autonomy in their jobs and trust their leaders, says research from University of Illinois business professors. According to a soon-to-be-published study by Gopesh Anand and Dilip Chhajed, professors of business administration at Illinois, a flexible work environment plays a significant role in increasing employee commitment to continuous improvement initiatives. "Continuous improvement initiatives are typically bundled with employee empowerment techniques," ...

Heart failure is a relatively common complication in older women with breast cancer, but the risk is even higher in those patients treated with adjuvant trastuzumab (Herceptin©), Yale School of Medicine researchers report in the current issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The researchers conducted this study because older women who are at higher risk of decreased heart function, were often excluded from randomized clinical trials of trastuzumab, which is used to treat breast tumors that over-express human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER-2). ...

Your emotions can certainly impact your decisions, but you might be surprised by the extent to which your emotions affect your pocketbook. New research from psychological scientist Jennifer Lerner of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and colleagues Yi Le and Elke U. Weber of Columbia University explores how impatience brought on by sadness can in turn produce substantial financial loss. The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Using data collected at the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory and the ...

Research out of the University of Cincinnati seeks to measure economic and political policy impacts that unions associated with criminal justice systems – such as police, correctional officers and dispatchers unions – have in their respective states. That research, titled "Measuring the Effect of Public-Sector Unionization on Criminal Justice Public Policy" by UC criminal justice doctoral students Derek Cohen and Jay Kennedy, will be presented at the American Society of Criminology conference on Nov. 17. It's a research effort that stems from and seeks to shed light ...

Richmond, Va. (November 13, 2012) – In laboratory experiments, scientists have eliminated metastasis, the spread of cancer from the original tumor to other parts of the body, in melanoma by inhibiting a protein known as melanoma differentiation associated gene-9 (mda-9)/syntenin. More than 1 million cases of skin cancer are diagnosed each year in the U.S., and melanoma is the deadliest form. With further research, the approach used by the scientists could lead to targeted therapies that stop metastasis in melanoma and potentially a broad range of additional cancers. The ...

VIDEO: On Nov. 13, 2012, a narrow corridor in the southern hemisphere experienced a total solar eclipse. The corridor lay mostly over the ocean but also cut across the northern tip... Click here for more information. On Nov. 13, 2012, a narrow corridor in the southern hemisphere experienced a total solar eclipse. The corridor lay mostly over the ocean but also cut across the northern tip of Australia where both professional and amateur astronomers gathered to watch. During ...

The twenty-fifth tropical depression of the western North Pacific Ocean season formed today and is already affecting southern Vietnam. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Depression 25W and captured a visible image of the storm that showed its northern quadrant raining over the country. When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over newborn Tropical Depression 25W (TD25W) on Nov. 14 at 0638 UTC (1:38 a.m. EDT), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument captured a visible image of the storm. At the time of the image, the strongest thunderstorms ...

Sometimes simplicity is best. Two Northwestern University researchers have discovered a remarkably easy way to make nanofluidic devices: using paper and scissors. And they can cut a device into any shape and size they want, adding to the method's versatility. Nanofluidic devices are attractive because their thin channels can transport ions -- and with them a higher than normal electric current -- making the devices promising for use in batteries and new systems for water purification, harvesting energy and DNA sorting. The "paper-and-scissors" method one day could ...