Scientists have taken a step closer to solving one of life's mysteries – why family size generally falls as societies become richer. Evolutionary biologists have long puzzled over this because natural selection is expected to have selected for organisms that try to maximise their reproduction. But in industrialised societies around the world, increasing wealth coincides with people deliberately limiting their family size – the so-called 'demographic transition'. In a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, researchers from the London ...

Astronomers at the International Astronomical Union meeting announced the discovery of the first transiting circumbinary multi-planet system: two planets orbiting around a pair of stars. The discovery shows that planetary systems can form and survive even in the chaotic environment around a binary star. And such planets can exist in the habitable zone of their stars. "Each planet transits over the primary star, giving unambiguous evidence that the planets are real," said Jerome Orosz, Associate Professor of Astronomy at San Diego State University and lead author of the ...

Fort Davis, Texas — NASA's Kepler mission has found the first multi-planet solar system orbiting a binary star, characterized in large part by University of Texas at Austin astronomers using two telescopes at the university's McDonald Observatory in West Texas. The finding, which proves that whole planetary systems can form in a disk around a binary star, is published in the August 28 issue of the journal Science. "It's Tatooine, right?" said McDonald Observatory astronomer Michael Endl. "But this was not shown in Star Wars," he said, referring to the periodic changes ...

There are more than 400,000 species of beetles and only two species of the tuatara, a reptile cousin of snakes and lizards that lives in New Zealand. Crocodiles and alligators, while nearly 250 million years old, have diversified into only 23 species. Why evolution has produced "winners" — including mammals and many species of birds and fish — and "losers" is a major question in evolutionary biology. Scientists have often posited that because some animal and plant lineages are much older than others, they have had more time to produce new species (the dearth of crocodiles ...

Gravitational waves, much like the recently discovered Higgs boson, are notoriously difficult to observe. Scientists first detected these ripples in the fabric of space-time indirectly, using radio signals from a pulsar-neutron star binary system. The find, which required exquisitely accurate timing of the radio signals, garnered its discoverers a Nobel Prize. Now a team of astronomers has detected the same effect at optical wavelengths, in light from a pair of eclipsing white dwarf stars. "This result marks one of the cleanest and strongest detections of the effect of ...

VIDEO: An animation of satellite observations from August 26-28, 2012 shows Tropical Storm Isaac moving past the Florida Keys and into the Gulf of Mexico, nearing landfall in the U.S. Gulf... Click here for more information. NASA satellites have been providing valuable data to forecasters at the National Hurricane Center watching the development and progression of powerful Tropical Storm Isaac as it heads for landfall. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer ...

Eyewitness identification evidence is often persuasive in the courtroom and yet current eyewitness identification tests often fail to pick the culprit. Even worse, these tests sometimes result in wrongfully accusing innocent suspects. Now psychological scientists are proposing a radical alternative to the traditional police lineup that focuses on eyewitnesses' confidence judgments. In a new article forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Neil Brewer of Flinders University and colleagues report a new type of lineup ...

Tampa, FL (Aug. 28, 2012) -- A new study has found a gene that appears to make women happy, but it doesn't work for men. The finding may help explain why women are often happier than men, the research team said. Scientists at the University of South Florida (USF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute reported that the low activity form of the gene monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) is associated with higher self-reported happiness in women. No such association was found in men. The findings appear online ...

A popular marketing ploy with junk foods and other indulgent table fare can be an equally effective tool for promoting healthier eating in school cafeterias. "Nutritionists and school lunch planners can turn the tables on children's poor eating habits by adopting the same 'branding' tactic used by junk food marketers," said Brian Wansink, an expert on the subtle cues that affect people's eating habits and professor of marketing at the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University. Food marketers have associated particular foods with mascots, ...

URBANA, Ill. — Like a melody that keeps playing in your head even after the music stops, researchers at the University of Illinois's Beckman Institute have shown that the beat goes on when it comes to the human visual system. In an experiment designed to test their theory about a brain mechanism involved in visual processing, the researchers used periodic visual stimuli and electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings and found, one, that they could precisely time the brain's natural oscillations to future repetitions of the event, and, two, that the effect occurred even after ...

Break apart a couple worm-like chromosomes and they may reconnect with mismatched tips and tails – such is the case of the EML4-ALK fusion gene that creates 2-7 percent of lung cancers. Almost exactly a year ago, the FDA approved the drug crizotinib to treat these ALK+ lung cancer patients, who were likely never smokers. Informed doctors use the test called a FISH assay to check for the EML4-ALK fusion gene, and then if the test is positive, ALK+ patients benefit greatly from crizotinib. A recent University of Colorado Cancer Center case study published in the Journal ...

CHAMPAIGN, lll. — The rhythm of life is driven by the cycles of day and night, and most organisms carry in their cells a common, (roughly) 24-hour beat. In animals, this rhythm emerges from a tiny brain structure called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in the hypothalamus. Take it out of the brain and keep it alive in a lab dish and this "brain clock" will keep on ticking, ramping up or gearing down production of certain proteins at specific times of the day, day after day. A new study reveals that the brain clock itself is driven, in part, by metabolism, the production ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Numerous studies have shown the powerful effect that exercise can have on cancer care and recovery. For patients who have gone through breast or colon cancer treatment, regular exercise has been found to reduce recurrence of the disease by up to 50 percent. But many cancer patients are reluctant to exercise, and few discuss it with their oncologists, according to a Mayo Clinic study published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management. "As doctors, we often tell patients that exercise is important, but to this point, nobody had studied what patients ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---What if every U.S. worker got an automatic 10 percent pay raise at age 55? According to a new University of Michigan study, most people would work quite a bit longer to enjoy the extra income before they retired. By eliminating social security payroll taxes starting when workers are 55-years old, the study shows that take-home pay would jump by 10.6 percent and they would work 1.5 years longer on average, paying more income taxes and helping to reduce the Federal deficit. "People are living longer, healthier lives, and so far have opted to take most ...

CORAL GABLES, FL (August 28, 2012) -- As Hurricane Isaac nears the Gulf Coast, one may wonder what the impact of natural disasters are on children. Who is most at risk for persistent stress reactions? How can such youth be identified and assisted in the aftermath of a destructive storm? Dr. Annette M. La Greca, a professor of psychology and pediatrics at the University of Miami, and her colleagues, have been studying children's disaster reactions following Hurricanes Andrew (1992), Charley (2004) and Ike (2008). Recent findings from Hurricane Ike shed light on these questions ...

CORAL GABLES, FL (August 28, 2012)—Parents of young children hope for a successful kindergarten experience that will set their youngsters on the right path of their educational journey. Some worry about their kids not adapting to the school environment, particularly when the children are talkative and overactive. Yet, a new study by the University of Miami (UM) shows that overly shy preschool children are at greater academic risk than their chatty and boisterous peers. The study is one of the first to follow the social and academic progress of children throughout the preschool ...

Pretend play can be fun for preschool children, but a new University of Virginia study, published in a recent online edition of the journal Psychological Bulletin, finds that it is not as crucial to a child's development as currently believed. Pretend play is any play a child engages in, alone, with playmates, or with adults, that involves uses of the imagination to create a fantasy world or situation, such as making toy cars go "vrrooooom" or making dolls talk. Based on a number of key studies over four decades, pretend play is widely considered by psychologists – and ...

University of Rochester Medical Center scientists believe they are the first to identify genes that underlie the growth of primitive leukemia stem cells, and then to use the new genetic signature to identify currently available drugs that selectively target the rogue cells. Although it is too early to attach significance to the drug candidates, two possible matches popped up: A drug in development for breast cancer (not approved by the Food and Drug Administration), and another experimental agent that, coincidentally, had been identified earlier by a URMC laboratory as ...

This press release is available in Spanish.(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Hispanic children often have undiagnosed developmental delays and large numbers of both Hispanic and non-Hispanic children who first were thought to have developmental delay actually had autism, researchers affiliated with the UC Davis MIND Institute have found. The study, one of the largest to date to compare development in Hispanic and non-Hispanic children, is published in the journal Autism. The results lead the study authors to recommend increased public health efforts to improve awareness, especially ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (August 28, 2012) –The adult human circulatory system contains between 20 and 30 trillion red blood cells (RBCs), the precise size and number of which can vary from person to person. Some people may have fewer, but larger RBCs, while others may have a larger number of smaller RBCs. Although these differences in size and number may seem inconsequential, they raise an important question: Just what controls these characteristics of RBCs? This question is particularly relevant for the roughly one-quarter of the population that suffers from anemia, which ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - If experts thought they knew anything about individual investors, it was this: their emotions lead them to sell winning stocks too soon and hold on to losers too long. But new research casts doubt on this widely held theory that individual investors' decisions are driven mainly by their feelings toward losses and gains. In an innovative study, researchers found evidence that individual investors' decisions are primarily motivated by their beliefs about a stock's future. "The story is not about whether an investor hates losing or loves gains – it's not ...

UPTON,NY -- The evolution of digital electronics is a story of miniaturization - each generation of circuitry requires less space and energy to perform the same tasks. But even as high-speed processors move into handheld smart phones, current data storage technology has a functional limit: magnetically stored digital information becomes unstable when too tightly packed. The answer to maintaining the breath-taking pace of our ongoing computer revolution may be the denser, faster, and smarter technology of spintronics. Spintronic devices use electron spin, a subtle quantum ...

Pity the male of the marine whelk, Solenosteira macrospira. He does all the work of raising the young, from egg-laying to hatching — even though few of the baby snails are his own. The surprising new finding by researchers at the University of California, Davis, puts S. macrospira in a small club of reproductive outliers characterized by male-only child care. Throw in extensive promiscuity and sibling cannibalism, and the species has one of the most extreme life histories in the animal kingdom. The family secrets of the snail, which lives in tidal mudflats off Baja ...

On July 8, 2011 the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched for the very last time. On that historic day, as the world watched its last ascent up into orbit and commentators discussed the program's contributions to space flight and scientific research over 20 years, the shuttle helped spawn one last experiment. As the shuttle reached a height of about 70 miles over the east coast of the U.S., it released – as it always did shortly after launch – 350 tons of water vapor exhaust. As the plume of vapor spread and floated on air currents high in Earth's atmosphere, it crossed through ...

NASA and NOAA satellites continue to provide detailed information on Hurricane Isaac as the storm bears down on the U.S. Gulf coast. NASA's TRMM and Terra satellites captured imagery, and NOAA's GOES-13 satellite provided animations of Isaac's march toward the coast today, Aug. 28. Residents along the northern Gulf coast are bracing for the arrival of Isaac, which was recently upgraded to a hurricane by the National Hurricane Center as of 1:00 p.m. CDT. At that time, the center of Isaac was located about 55 miles (~85 km) south-southeast of the Mississippi and was moving ...