URBANA -- Steve Moose, an associate professor of maize functional genomics at the University of Illinois and his graduate student Wes Barber think they may have discovered a new source of heterosis, or hybrid vigor, in maize. They have been looking at small RNAs (sRNAs), a class of double-stranded RNA molecules that are 20 to 25 nucleotides in length. "Hybrid vigor" refers to the increased vigor or general health, resistance to disease, and other superior qualities arising from the crossbreeding of genetically different plants. "We've always known that there's a genetic ...

Athens, Ga. – Weedy plants, many introduced to the U.S. for sale through plant nurseries, are responsible for extensive environmental damage and economic costs. Although legislation restricts the introduction of certain species, the procedures used to select species for inclusion on the restricted list are haphazard and out of date. To meet the need for more systematic weed risk analysis, researchers at the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology and the University of California, Davis have developed a "cost-sensitive" model to determine when importing a given plant ...

CHICAGO --- Today's senior citizens are reporting fewer visual impairment problems than their counterparts from a generation ago, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study. Improved techniques for cataract surgery and a reduction in the prevalence of macular degeneration may be the driving forces behind this change, the researchers said. "From 1984 until 2010, the decrease in visual impairment in those 65 and older was highly statistically significant," said Angelo P. Tanna, M.D., first author of the study. "There was little change in visual impairments in adults ...

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, will hold a seminar early in the morning on July 4 to announce the latest results from ATLAS and CMS, two major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that are searching for the Higgs boson. Both experimental teams are working down to the wire to finish analyzing their data, and to determine exactly what can be said about what they've found. "We do not yet know what will be shown on July 4th," says Ian Hinchliffe, a theoretical physicist in the Physics Division at the U.S. ...

For the first time comparable migration data is available for almost every country of the world. To date, records were incompatible between nations and especially by gender and age, nonexistent. Emilio Zagheni from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany, for the first time provides a rich migration database by compiling the global flow of millions of e-mails. "Where estimates of demographic flows exist, they are often outdated and largely inconsistent," says MPIDR researcher Emilio Zagheni. Official records are difficult to use for ...

Researchers at the Hollings Marine Laboratory (HML) and four partner organizations have measured for the first time concentrations of 13 perfluoroalkyl compounds (PFCs) in five different endangered species of sea turtles. While PFC toxicology studies have not yet been conducted on turtles, the levels of the compounds seen in all five species approach the amounts known to cause adverse health effects in other animals. PFCs are man-made compounds that have many uses including stain-resistant coatings, fire-fighting foams and emulsifiers in plastics manufacturing. They have ...

In yet another Olympian feat of measurement, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently calibrated a tape that will be used to measure out the distance of this summer's Olympic marathon—a distance of 26 miles 385 yards—to 1 part in 1,000. Measurement is a vital aspect of the Olympic Games. Officials measure the height of jumps, the speed of races, and the mass of weights to determine who wins a medal and who goes home. The marathon is no different. Because of the difficulties in measuring out the distance, the International Association ...

Gold is not necessarily precious—at least not as a coating on atomic force microscope (AFM) probes. JILA researchers found that removing an AFM probe's gold coating—until now considered helpful—greatly improved force measurements performed in a liquid, the medium favored for biophysical studies such as stretching DNA or unfolding proteins. As described in Nano Letters,* stripping the gold from the diving-board-shaped probe, or cantilever, with a brief chemical bath improved the precision and stability of force measurements about 10-fold. The advance is expected to quickly ...

Civic leaders, arts organizations, donors and government officials can better plan new or expanded arts facilities by first focusing on the arts organizations' missions and assessing demand for the projects, according to a new study from the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago. The study, "Set in Stone," looks at a major building boom of museums, performing arts centers and theaters in the United States from 1994 to 2008. It is the first scientifically prepared study of its kind and was requested both by cultural leaders and major foundations that had, ...

(Garrison, NY) A potentially powerful strategy for studying the significance of human genetic variants is to recruit people identified by previous genetic research as having particular variants. But that strategy poses ethical challenges to informed consent, as well as potential risks to the people recruited, and it is unlikely that there is a "one-size-fits-all" solution, concludes an article in IRB: Ethics & Human Research. The advantage of "recruitment by genotype" is that it eliminates the time-consuming, expensive process of screening new populations to find subjects ...

A 100 kilometre-wide crater has been found in Greenland, the result of a massive asteroid or comet impact a billion years before any other known collision on Earth. The spectacular craters on the Moon formed from impacts with asteroids and comets between 3 and 4 billion years ago. The early Earth, with its far greater gravitational mass, must have experienced even more collisions at this time – but the evidence has been eroded away or covered by younger rocks. The previously oldest known crater on Earth formed 2 billion years ago and the chances of finding an even older ...

Irvine, Calif., June 28, 2012 — An international consortium of Huntington's disease experts, including several from the Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center at UC Irvine, has generated a human model of the deadly inherited disorder directly from the skin cells of affected patients. The re-created neurons, which live in a petri dish, will help researchers better understand what disables and kills brain cells in people with HD and let them gauge the effects of potential drug therapies on cells that are otherwise locked deep in the brain. UCI scientists were part ...

Athens, Ga. – Invasive species such as kudzu, privet and garlic mustard can devastate ecosystems, and, until now, scientists had little reason to believe that native plants could mount a successful defense. A new University of Georgia study shows that some native clearweed plants have evolved resistance to invasive garlic mustard plants—and that the invasive plants appear to be waging a counterattack. The study, published in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is thought to provide the first evidence of coevolution between ...

An international team of astronomers have discovered evidence that our Milky Way had an encounter with a small galaxy or massive dark matter structure perhaps as recently as 100 million years ago, and as a result of that encounter it is still ringing like a bell. The discovery is based on observations of 300,000 nearby Milky Way stars by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Stars in the disk of the Milky Way move up and down at a speed of about 20-30 kilometers per second while orbiting the center of the galaxy at a brisk 220 kilometers per second. The positions and motions ...

We've all heard that eating fish is good for our brains and memory. But what is it about DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid found in fish, that makes our memory sharper? Medical researchers at the University of Alberta discovered a possible explanation and just published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism. Principal investigator Yves Sauve and his team discovered lab models fed a high-DHA diet had 30 per cent higher levels of DHA in the memory section of the brain, known as the hippocampus, when compared to animal models ...

KANSAS CITY, MO—Molecular geneticists call big boss proteins that switch on broad developmental or metabolic programs "master regulators," as in master regulators of muscle development or fat metabolism. One such factor, the Activating Transcription Factor 6α (ATF6α) protein, takes charge following a cellular crisis known as endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress, which is triggered by the accumulation of misfolded and aggregated proteins. Molecularly, the ER stress pathway is always poised for action. Inactive ATF6α is normally embedded in cellular membranes, ...

Expectant mothers who dealt with the strain of a hurricane or major tropical storm passing nearby during their pregnancy had children who were at elevated risk for abnormal health conditions at birth, according to a study led by a Princeton University researcher that offers new insights into the effects of stress on pregnancy. The study used birth records from Texas and meteorological information to identify children born in the state between 1996 and 2008 whose mothers were in the path of a major tropical storm or hurricane during pregnancy. The children's health at ...

VIDEO: Uri Shumlak, UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics, describes the equipment that can produce extreme ultraviolet light to make smaller microchips. Click here for more information. A University of Washington lab has been working for more than a decade on fusion energy, harnessing the energy-generating mechanism of the sun. But in one of the twists of scientific discovery, on the way the researchers found a potential solution to a looming problem in the electronics ...

Genetic engineers and genomics researchers should welcome the news from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) where an international team of scientists has discovered a new and possibly more effective means of editing genomes. This discovery holds potentially big implications for advanced biofuels and therapeutic drugs, as genetically modified microorganisms, such as bacteria and fungi, are expected to play a key role in the green chemistry production of these and other valuable chemical products. Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist with Berkeley Lab's Physical ...

Whether it is a phobia like a fear of flying, public speaking or spiders, or a diagnosis such as obsessive compulsive disorder, new research finds patients suffering from anxiety disorders showed the most improvement when treated with cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) in conjunction with a "transdiagnostic" approach – a model that allows therapists to apply one set of principles across anxiety disorders. The combination was more effective than CBT combined with other types of anxiety disorder treatments, like relaxation training according to Peter Norton, associate ...

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (06/28/2012) — University of Minnesota engineering researchers are leading an international team that has made a major breakthrough in developing a catalyst used during chemical reactions in the production of gasoline, plastics, biofuels, pharmaceuticals, and other chemicals. The discovery could lead to major efficiencies and cost-savings in these multibillion-dollar industries. The research is to be published in the June 29, 2012 issue of the leading scientific journal Science. "The impact of this new discovery is enormous," said the team's lead ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Scientists could take greater strides toward crop improvement if there were wider adoption of advanced techniques used to understand the mechanisms that allow plants to adapt to their environments, current and former Purdue University researchers say. In a perspective for the journal Science, Brian Dilkes, a Purdue assistant professor of genetics, and Ivan Baxter, a research computational biologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service, argue that today's technology could allow scientists to match physiological and ...

Researchers using three different telescopes -- NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton in space, and the Parkes radio telescope in Australia -- may have found the fastest moving pulsar ever seen. The evidence for this potentially record-breaking speed comes, in part, from the features highlighted in this composite image. X-ray observations from Chandra (green) and XMM-Newton (purple) have been combined with infrared data from the 2MASS project and optical data from the Digitized Sky Survey (colored red, green and blue, but appearing in the image as white). The ...

An international team of astronomers using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made an unparalleled observation, detecting significant changes in the atmosphere of a planet located beyond our solar system. The scientists conclude the atmospheric variations occurred in response to a powerful eruption on the planet's host star, an event observed by NASA's Swift satellite. "The multiwavelength coverage by Hubble and Swift has given us an unprecedented view of the interaction between a flare on an active star and the atmosphere of a giant planet," said lead researcher ...

Scientists convening at the largest-ever meeting of tropical biologists congratulated Brazil for its global leadership on environment and science, but warned that recent developments could jeopardize that position, undermining progress on reducing deforestation, protecting indigenous lands, and safeguarding ecosystems outside the Amazon rainforest. Forgoing the Rio+20 Earth Summit, some 1200 tropical biologists and conservationists met in Bonito, Brazil at the 49th annual meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) to present and discuss topics ...