New Haven, Conn. — A Yale-led scientific team has produced the most comprehensive family tree for birds to date, connecting all living bird species — nearly 10,000 in total — and revealing surprising new details about their evolutionary history and its geographic context. Analysis of the family tree shows when and where birds diversified — and that birds' diversification rate has increased over the last 50 million years, challenging the conventional wisdom of biodiversity experts. "It's the first time that we have — for such a large group of species and with such a ...

The world's first family tree linking all living bids and revealing when and where they evolved and diversified since dinosaurs walked the earth has been created by scientists from the University of Sheffield. Experts used the family tree to map out where the almost 10,000 species of birds live to show where the most diversification has taken place in the world. Researchers, from the University of Sheffield, Yale University, University of Tasmania and Simon Fraser University, say the creation of new species has speeded-up over the last 50 million years. Surprisingly, ...

Uncontrolled high blood pressure damages the brain's structure and function as early as young middle-age, and even the brains of middle-aged people who clinically would not be considered to have hypertension have evidence of silent structural brain damage, a study led by researchers at UC Davis has found. The investigation found accelerated brain aging among hypertensive and prehypertensive individuals in their 40s, including damage to the structural integrity of the brain's white matter and the volume of its gray matter, suggesting that vascular brain injury "develops ...

Like a movie star constantly retouching her makeup, the protoplanet Vesta is continually stirring its outermost layer and presenting a young face. New data from NASA's Dawn mission show that a common form of weathering that affects many airless bodies like Vesta in the inner solar system, including the moon, surprisingly doesn't age the protoplanet's outermost layer. The data also indicate that carbon-rich asteroids have been splattering dark material on Vesta's surface over a long span of the body's history. The findings are described in two papers published ...

Cambridge, Mass. - October 31, 2012 - Scientists have created new kinds of particles, 1/100th the diameter of a human hair, that spontaneously assemble themselves into structures resembling molecules made from atoms. These new particles come together, or "self-assemble," to form structures in patterns that were previously impossible to make and hold promise for manufacturing advanced optical materials and ceramics. The method, described in the latest issue of the journal Nature, was developed by a team of chemists, chemical engineers, and physicists at New York University ...

Using cutting-edge virtual reality technology, researchers have 'beamed' a person into a rat facility allowing the rat and human to interact with each other on the same scale. Published today in PLOS ONE, the research enables the rat to interact with a rat-sized robot controlled by a human participant in a different location. At the same time, the human participant (who is in a virtual environment) interacts with a human-sized avatar that is controlled by the movements of the distant rat. The authors hope the new technology will be used to study animal behaviour in ...

By decoding the genomes of more than 1,000 people whose homelands stretch from Africa and Asia to Europe and the Americas, scientists have compiled the largest and most detailed catalog yet of human genetic variation. The massive resource will help medical researchers find the genetic roots of rare and common diseases in populations worldwide. The 1000 Genomes Project involved some 200 scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and other institutions. Results detailing the DNA variations of individuals from 14 ethnic groups are published Oct. ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Oct. 31, 2012 -- It's no secret that obesity is a major problem in America. More than one-third of adults and one-sixth of children are obese and it is one of the leading causes of preventable death. The costs associated with obesity are estimated at $99 million annually, comparable to the economic toll of cigarette smoking. Despite all this, few U.S. medical schools are providing adequate, effective training on how to address weight issues in obese patients, according to researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. "Medical students are surrounded ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The surface of the giant asteroid Vesta is weathering in a way that appears to be completely different from any other asteroid yet visited, according to new data recorded by NASA's Dawn spacecraft. This new type of space weathering suggests that there's something about Vesta — perhaps its mineral composition or its position in the solar system — that makes its surface environment fundamentally different from other asteroids studied thus far. The new data are presented in a paper published Nov. 1, 2012, in the journal Nature. Space ...

Magnetically speaking, photons are the mavericks of the engineering world. Lacking electrical charge, they are free to run even in the most intense magnetic fields. But all that may soon change. In a paper published in Nature Photonics, an interdisciplinary team from Stanford University reports that it has created a device that tames the flow of photons with synthetic magnetism. The process breaks a key law of physics known as the time-reversal symmetry of light and could yield an entirely new class of devices that use light instead of electricity for applications ranging ...

PORTLAND, Ore. — Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University have discovered that blocking a certain enzyme in the brain can help repair the brain damage associated with multiple sclerosis and a range of other neurological disorders. The discovery could have major implications for multiple sclerosis, complications from premature birth and other disorders and diseases caused by demyelination – a process where the insulation-like sheath surrounding nerve cells in the brain becomes damaged or destroyed. Demyelination disrupts the ability of nerve cells to communicate ...

The 1000 Genomes Project today presents a map of normal human genetic variation – everything from tiny changes in the genetic code to major alterations in our chromosomes. In a DNA version of 'spot-the-difference', EMBL scientists and their colleagues studied the genomes of 1092 healthy people from Europe, the Americas and East Asia, systematically tracking what makes us different from each other. Their results, published in Nature, open new approaches for research on the genetic causes of disease. "The 1000 Genomes Project has achieved something truly exceptional in ...

AUSTIN, Texas — Since the age of dinosaurs, most species of day-active mammals have retained the imprint of nocturnal life in their eye structures. Humans and other anthropoid primates, such as monkeys and apes, are the only groups that deviate from this pattern, according to a new study from The University of Texas at Austin and Midwestern University. The findings, published in a forthcoming issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B, are the first to provide a large-scale body of evidence for the "nocturnal bottleneck theory," which suggests that mammalian sensory ...

URBANA –Many young Jamaican immigrants are succeeding in the United States precisely because they remain strongly tied to Jamaican culture, said University of Illinois professor Gail M. Ferguson. "Although many of these youths have forged a unique tricultural identity that draws from their Jamaican culture, African-American culture, and mainstream European American culture, the important factor in their academic and behavioral success is retaining strong ties to their Jamaican background," she said. To learn how Jamaican immigrant teens were adjusting to life in their ...

Proteins are able to self-assemble into a wide range of highly ordered structures that feature a diverse array of properties. Through biomimicry - technological innovation inspired by nature – humans hope to emulate proteins and produce our own version of self-assembling molecules. A key to accomplishing this is understanding how protein-folding – a process critical to the form and function of a protein – is extended from individual proteins to complex assemblies. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) ...

VIDEO: This animation of satellite imagery shows the life of Hurricane Sandy from its development in the Caribbean Sea on Oct. 21, through its track up the US East coast and... Click here for more information. Hurricane Sandy is giving up the ghost on Halloween over Penn. As the storm weakened to a remnant low pressure area the NASA GOES Project released an animation of NOAA's GOES-13 satellite imagery covering Hurricane Sandy's entire life. The GOES-13 satellite is managed ...

As Hurricane Sandy made a historic landfall on the New Jersey coast during the night of Oct. 29, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on NASA/NOAA's Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite captured this night-time view of the storm. This image provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison is a composite of several satellite passes over North America taken 16 to18 hours before Sandy's landfall. The storm was captured by a special "day-night band," which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering ...

The mineral properties of the aerosol particles and the wavelength distribution of incident light combine to determine whether a dust particle reflects radiation and cools the local atmosphere, absorbs radiation and warms the local atmosphere, or both. While scientists have a good handle on dust's primary effect of reflecting and cooling at the visible wavelengths, the smaller influence of absorbing and warming at the longer infrared wavelengths has remained more of an uncertainty – and most climate models either underestimate it or do not include it at all. When the ...

Interventions designed to improve core deficits in children with autism spectrum disorders are supported by varying levels of evidence, highlighting the need for well-designed studies to better evaluate the interventions, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Researchers found that when they evaluated the past research on a wide variety of interventions aimed at improving core deficits in social/communication, language, behavior and adaptive skills, the evidence of efficacy ranged from moderate to insufficient. The findings are published in the November edition of ...

(Boston) - In the United States, the cost paid for statins (drugs to lower cholesterol) in people under the age of 65 who have private insurance continues to exceed comparable costs paid by the government in the United Kingdom (U.K.) by more than three fold. These results from Boston University's Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program, are a follow up of an ongoing comparison of prescription drug costs between the U.S. and U.K. The initial results reported on relative drug costs in 2005. The current updated results for 2009 appear this week in the journal Pharmacotherapy. ...

People who undergo repeated surgeries to remove glioblastomas — the most aggressive and deadliest type of brain tumors — may survive longer than those who have just a one-time operation, new Johns Hopkins research suggests. Glioblastoma, the brain cancer that killed Sen. Edward Kennedy, inevitably returns after tumor-removal surgery, chemotherapy, and/or radiation. The median survival time after diagnosis is only 14 months. With recurrence a near certainty, experts say, many have questioned the value of performing second, third or even fourth operations, especially given ...

Results of a Johns Hopkins study suggest that individuals with schizophrenia are significantly more likely to live longer if they take their antipsychotic drugs on schedule, avoid extremely high doses and also regularly see a mental health professional. Psychiatrists have long known that people with schizophrenia who stick to a drug regimen have fewer of the debilitating delusions and hallucinations that are hallmarks of this illness. But there have been concerns about whether some of the known side effects of the medications — increased risk of cardiovascular disease ...

Understanding Workplace Sexual Harassment No one should ever be subjected to a situation where they feel unsafe at work. Sexual harassment can have huge negative effects not only on individual workers, but on the workplace as a whole. Understanding what sexual harassment is can go a long way toward making a workplace safer. Many employees don't take action to stop sexual harassment because they aren't fully aware of their rights. In other cases, a supervisor or coworker perpetrating the harassment may not even be aware that their conduct is both harmful and illegal. What ...

EEOC: Workplace Discrimination Claims Hit Record High in 2011 The American workforce is getting more diverse, and that's a good thing. However, some employers have been slower than others to adapt to these changing demographics. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fact that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported a record-high number of workplace discrimination complaints last year. All told, the EEOC received almost 100,000 complaints in 2011. The largest increase came from religious discrimination complaints, which were up 9.5 percent from ...

New Law Reduces Penalties for Marijuana Possession in Maryland Maryland's drug laws are some of the toughest on the east coast. Currently, a person convicted of possessing less than 10 grams of marijuana can face up to a year in jail and a $1000 fine. In comparison, in nearby states the penalty for possessing similar amounts of marijuana is limited to 30 days in jail and a maximum $500 fine. A recently passed bill aims to relax the strict penalties for Maryland residents convicted of possessing only a small amount of marijuana. Supporters of the bill say it will help ...