Women who read negative news remember it better than men do, and have stronger stress responses in subsequent stress tests, according to new research published Oct 10 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Sonia Lupien and colleagues from the University of Montreal, Canada. The researchers exposed groups of men and women to a succession of headlines drawn from recent newspaper articles. One group viewed only 'neutral' news, while the other group was shown news perceived as 'negative'. After reading the news, participants performed a standard psychological stress test. ...

A collection of fossil animals discovered off the coast of Florida suggests that present day deep-sea fauna like sea urchins, starfish and sea cucumbers may have evolved earlier than previously believed and survived periods of mass extinctions similar to those that wiped out the dinosaurs. The full results are published Oct. 10 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Ben Thuy and colleagues from the University of Göttingen, Germany. Previously, researchers believed that these present-day animals evolved in the relatively recent past, following at least two periods of mass ...

Single fatherhood is a challenge many arachnids undertake, guarding eggs laid by females despite the costs to their own health and mating benefits, but the news may not be all bad for these dads. New research now shows that, in one species of spiders, males exclusively responsible for guarding eggs actually enjoy survival benefits rather than suffer losses to health or mating privileges. The study, published Oct. 10 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Gustavo Santos Requena and colleagues from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, evaluates the costs and benefits ...

Body hair in mammals is typically thought to have evolved to keep us warm in colder prehistoric times, but a new study suggests that it may do the opposite, at least in elephants. Epidermal hair may have evolved to help the animals keep cool in the hot regions they live in, according to new research published Oct 10 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Conor Myhrvold and colleagues at Princeton University. Though the idea that low surface densities of hair can help dissipate heat is a popular concept in engineering, the biological and evolutionary significance of sparse ...

Many parents are dissatisfied with communication regarding adverse drug reactions experienced by their child, and the implications of such reactions for the child's future use of medicines, according to a new study published Oct. 10 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Bridget Young from the University of Liverpool, UK and colleagues. The researchers interviewed parents of 44 children who had a suspected adverse drug reaction for their study. They found that the majority of parents in their study were dissatisfied with the clarity and timing of communications from ...

AUDIO: This is a mouse song. Click here for more information. Scientists have found the first evidence that the ability to learn vocalizations, a capacity so far believed to be restricted to a handful of bird and mammal species like humans and dolphins, is shared by another species: mice. The new research, published Oct. 10 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Erich Jarvis and Gustavo Arriaga at Duke University and colleagues, shows for the first time that mice share certain ...

Bad news articles in the media increase women's sensitivity to stressful situations, but do not have a similar effect on men, according to a study undertaken by University of Montreal researchers at the Centre for Studies on Human Stress of Louis-H. Lafontaine Hospital. The findings were published today in PLOS One. The women who participated in the study also had a clearer recollection of the information they had learned. "It's difficult to avoid the news, considering the multitude of news sources out there, said lead author Marie-France Marin. "And what if all that news ...

The remarkably well-preserved fossil of an extinct arthropod shows that anatomically complex brains evolved earlier than previously thought and have changed little over the course of evolution. According to University of Arizona neurobiologist Nicholas Strausfeld, who co-authored the study describing the specimen, the fossil is the earliest known to show a brain. The discovery will be published in the Oct. 11 issue of the journal Nature. Embedded in mudstones deposited during the Cambrian period 520 million years ago in what today is the Yunnan Province in China, the ...

Researchers have published the first highly detailed description of how neurotensin, a neuropeptide hormone which modulates nerve cell activity in the brain, interacts with its receptor. Their results suggest that neuropeptide hormones use a novel binding mechanism to activate a class of receptors called G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs). "The knowledge of how the peptide binds to its receptor should help scientists design better drugs," said Dr. Reinhard Grisshammer, a scientist at the NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and an ...

The well-documented presence of excessive levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere is causing global temperatures to rise and glaciers and ice caps to melt. New research, published today, 11 October, in IOP Publishing's Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, has shown that CO2 molecules may be having a more direct impact on the ice that covers our planet. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute for Technology have shown that the material strength and fracture toughness of ice are decreased significantly under increasing concentrations of CO2 molecules, ...

Who we call and how long we speak to them changes with the weather, according to new research by experts at Newcastle University. Analysing the call patterns of 1.3 million mobile phone users, the team found that in 'uncomfortable' weather – such as very hot, humid, wet or cold weather – call length increased but the number of people we made contact with went down. Apparently "isolating" ourselves during more unpleasant weather, research lead Dr Santi Phithakkitnukoon said the data showed that we were also more likely to contact our close friends and family than our wider ...

A team using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the most powerful millimetre/submillimetre telescope in the world, has discovered a surprising spiral structure in the gas around the red giant star R Sculptoris [1][2][3]. This means that there is probably a previously unseen companion star orbiting the star [4]. The astronomers were also surprised to find that far more material than expected had been ejected by the red giant. "We've seen shells around this kind of star before, but this is the first time we've ever seen a spiral of material coming ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Guys who imitate Luciano Pavarotti or Justin Bieber to get the girls aren't alone. Male mice may do a similar trick, matching the pitch of other males' ultrasonic serenades. The mice also have certain brain features, somewhat similar to humans and song-learning birds, which they may use to change their sounds, according to a new study. "We are claiming that mice have limited versions of the brain and behavior traits for vocal learning that are found in humans for learning speech and in birds for learning song," said Duke neurobiologist Erich Jarvis, who ...

PHOENIX, Ariz. — Oct. 10, 2012 — Whole genome sequencing — spelling out all 3 billion letters in the human genome — "is an obvious and powerful method for advancing our understanding of pancreatic cancer," according to a new study from TGen, Mayo Clinic and Scottsdale Healthcare published today. The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) demonstrated that the use of WGS "represents a compelling solution to obtaining detailed molecular information on tumor biopsies in order to provide guidance for therapeutic selection," concluded the study published by the journal ...

PORTLAND, Ore. – Physician-scientists at Oregon Health & Science University Doernbecher Children's Hospital have demonstrated for the first time that banked human neural stem cells — HuCNS-SCs, a proprietary product of StemCells Inc. — can survive and make functional myelin in mice with severe symptoms of myelin loss. Myelin is the critical fatty insulation, or sheath, surrounding new nerve fibers and is essential for normal brain function. This is a very important finding in terms of advancing stem cell therapy to patients, the investigators report, because in most ...

Writing in Nature, Nobel Prize-winner Professor Kostya Novoselov and an international team of authors has produced a 'Graphene Roadmap' which for the first time sets out what the world's thinnest, strongest and most conductive material can truly achieve. The paper details how graphene, isolated for the first time at The University of Manchester by Professor Novoselov and colleague Professor Andre Geim in 2004, has the potential to revolutionise diverse applications from smartphones and ultrafast broadband to anticancer drugs and computer chips. One key area is touchscreen ...

A workshop sponsored by NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) has produced a set of consensus recommendations to improve the design and reporting of animal studies. By making animal studies easier to replicate and interpret, the workshop recommendations are expected to help funnel promising therapies to patients. Biomedical research involving animals has led to life-saving drugs for heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, HIV-AIDS, and many other conditions, but positive results from animal studies are sometimes difficult to translate ...

A Phase I clinical trial led by investigators from the University of California, San Francisco and sponsored by Stem Cells Inc., showed that neural stem cells successfully engrafted into the brains of patients and appear to have produced myelin. The study, published in the Oct. 10, 2012 issue of Science Translational Medicine, also demonstrated that the neural stem cells were safe in the patients' brains one year post transplant. The results of the investigation, designed to test safety and preliminary efficacy, are encouraging, said principal investigator David H. ...

An Australian research team has discovered how specialised immune cells recognise products of vitamin B synthesis that are unique to bacteria and yeast, triggering the body to fight infection. The finding opens up potential targets to improve treatments or to develop a vaccine for tuberculosis. The study, jointly led by the University of Melbourne and Monash University and published today in the journal Nature, has revealed for the first time that the highly abundant mucosal associated invariant T cells (MAIT cells), recognise products of vitamin B synthesis from ...

Researchers from the University of Southampton are designing incentives for collection and verification of information to make crowdsourcing more reliable. Crowdsourcing is a process of outsourcing tasks to the public, rather than to employees or contractors. In recent years, crowdsourcing has provided an unprecedented ability to accomplish tasks that require the involvement of a large number of people, often across wide-spread geographies, expertise, or interests. The world's largest encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, is an example of a task that can only be achieved through ...

Testosterone is considered THE male hormone, standing for aggression and posturing. Researchers around Prof. Dr. Armin Falk, an economist from the University of Bonn, have now been able to demonstrate that this sex hormone surprisingly also fosters social behavior. In play situations, subjects who had received testosterone clearly lied less frequently than individuals who had only received a placebo. The results have just been published in the Public Library of Science's international online journal "PLoS ONE." The hormone testosterone stands for typically male attributes ...

Melanoma is so dangerous because it tends to metastasize early on. New treatment approaches utilize, among other things, the ability of the immune defense to search out and destroy malignant cells. Yet this strategy is often only temporarily effective. A research team under the direction of Bonn University has discovered why this is the case: In the inflammatory reaction caused by the treatment, the tumor cells temporarily alter their external characteristics and thus become invisible to defense cells. This knowledge forms an important foundation for the improvement of ...

NEW YORK, October 11, 2012 – Researchers at NYU School of Medicine have discovered the protein product of a little-known gene may one day prove useful in identifying and monitoring the development of mesothelioma in early stages, when aggressive treatment can have an impact on the progression of disease and patient prognosis. "This gene produces a protein, fibulin-3, that is present in levels four to five times higher in the plasma of patients with mesothelioma compared to levels in asbestos-exposed patients or patients with several other conditions that cause tumors ...

Catalysts are substances that speed up the rates of chemical reactions without themselves being chemically changed. Industrial catalysts come in two main types - heterogeneous, in which the catalyst is in a different phase from the reactants; and homogeneous, in which catalyst and the reactants are in the same phase. Heterogeneous catalysts are valued for their sustainability because they can be recycled. Homogeneous catalysts are valued for their product selectivity as their properties can be easily tuned through relatively simple chemistry. Researchers with the U.S. ...

NEW YORK - October 10, 2012 - Thanks to blogs, online forums, and product review sites, companies and marketers now have access to a seemingly endless array of data on consumers' opinions and experiences. In principle, businesses should be able to use this information to gain a better understanding of the general market and of their own and their competitors' customers. Yet this wealth of consumer-generated content can be both a blessing and a curse. A new approach, described in a study by Oded Netzer, the Philip H. Geier Jr. Associate Professor at Columbia Business School, ...