RIVERSIDE, Calif. — California neighborhoods reeling from record foreclosures also experienced lower levels of voter turnout in the 2008 presidential election, according to researchers at the University of California, Riverside. Voters who lost their homes were not the only ones who appear to have been affected, sociologist Vanesa Estrada-Correa and political scientist Martin Johnson determined in a study believed to be the first to assess the effect of foreclosure on political participation. Voters who remained in neighborhoods impacted by foreclosure were less likely ...

Scientists have pinpointed a gene that enables rice plants to produce around 20% more grain by increasing uptake of phosphorus, an important, but limited, plant nutrient. The discovery unlocks the potential to improve the food security of rice farmers with the lowest value phosphorus-deficient land allowing them to grow more rice to add to global production, and earn more. The gene – called PSTOL1 which stands for Phosphorus Starvation Tolerance – helps rice grow a larger, better root system and thereby access more phosphorus. Farmers can apply phosphorus fertilizers ...

Research presented today at the International Astronomical Union General Assembly in Beijing has found the first group of galaxies that is just like ours, a rare sight in the local Universe. The Milky Way is a fairly typical galaxy on its own, but when paired with its close neighbours - the Magellanic Clouds - it is very rare, and could have been one of a kind, until a survey of our local Universe found another two examples just like us. Astronomer Dr Aaron Robotham, jointly from the University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy ...

Chimpanzees rarely get cancer, or a variety of other diseases that commonly arise in humans, but their genomic DNA sequence is nearly identical to ours. So, what's their secret? Researchers reporting in the September issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, a Cell Press journal, have found that differences in certain DNA modifications, called methylation, might play a role. The researchers discovered hundreds of genes that display different patterns of methylation between the two species. These different patterns of methylation lead to different levels of expression, ...

Rather than trying to kill bacteria outright with drugs, Université de Montréal researchers have discovered a way to disarm bacteria that may allow the body's own defense mechanisms to destroy them. "To understand this strategy one could imagine harmful bacteria being like Darth Vader, and the anti-virulence drug would take away his armor and lightsaber," explained Dr. Christian Baron, the study's lead author and Professor at the Department of Biochemistry. "A naked Darth Vader would be an easy target and similarly, pathogenic bacteria without their virulence factors would ...

PHILADELPHIA—It's widely accepted that molecular mechanisms mediating epigenetics include DNA methylation and histone modifications, but a team from Thomas Jefferson University has evidence to the contrary regarding the role of histone modifications. A study of Drosophila embryos from Jefferson's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology published ahead of print in Cell August 23 found that parental methylated histones are not transferred to daughter DNA. Rather, after DNA replication, new nucleosomes are assembled from newly synthesized unmodified histones. "Essentially, ...

People will reject an offer of water, even when they are severely thirsty, if they perceive the offer to be unfair, according to a new study funded by the Wellcome Trust. The findings have important implications for understanding how humans make decisions that must balance fairness and self-interest. It's been known for some time that when humans bargain for money they have a tendency to reject unfair offers, preferring to let both parties walk away with nothing rather than accept a low offer in the knowledge that their counterpart is taking home more cash. In contrast, ...

HOUSTON, Aug. 23, 2012 – Scientists at the University of Houston (UH) have discovered what may possibly be a key ingredient in the fight against Parkinson's disease. Affecting more than 500,000 people in the U.S., Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system marked by a loss of certain nerve cells in the brain, causing a lack of dopamine. These dopamine-producing neurons are in a section of the midbrain that regulates body control and movement. In a study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), ...

The discovery of a 'switch' that modifies a gene known to be essential for normal heart development could explain variations in the severity of birth defects in children with DiGeorge syndrome. Researchers from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute made the discovery while investigating foetal development in an animal model of DiGeorge syndrome. DiGeorge syndrome affects approximately one in 4000 babies. Dr Anne Voss and Dr Tim Thomas led the study, with colleagues from the institute's Development and Cancer division, published today in the journal Developmental Cell. Dr ...

Sodium chloride, better known as salt, is vital for the organism, and the kidneys play a crucial role in the regulation of sodium balance. However, the underlying mechanisms of sodium balance are not yet completely understood. Researchers of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the University of Kiel have now deciphered the function of a gene in the kidney and have thus gained new insights into this complex regulation process (PNAS Early Edition, doi/10.1073/pnas.1203834109)*. In humans, the kidneys ...

They are one of the most destructive forces of nature on Earth, but now environmental scientists are working to tame the hurricane. In a paper, published in Atmospheric Science Letters, the authors propose using cloud seeding to decrease sea surface temperatures where hurricanes form. Theoretically, the team claims the technique could reduce hurricane intensity by a category. The team focused on the relationship between sea surface temperature and the energy associated with the destructive potential of hurricanes. Rather than seeding storm clouds or hurricanes directly, ...

Vancouver, BC – August 23, 2012 – Vancouver-based clinician and researcher Dr. Andrei Krassioukov is packing for the upcoming Paralympic games in London. Rather than packing sports equipment, he has a suitcase full of advanced scientific equipment funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation that he will use to monitor the cardiovascular function of athletes with spinal cord injuries. Up to 90% of people with injuries between that cervical and high thoracic vertebrae suffer from a condition that limits their ability to regulate heart rate and blood pressure. For top-level ...

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have produced hydrogen, H2, a renewable energy source, from water using an inexpensive catalyst under industrially relevant conditions (using pH neutral water, surrounded by atmospheric oxygen, O2, and at room temperature). Lead author of the research, Dr Erwin Reisner, an EPSRC research fellow and head of the Christian Doppler Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, said: "A H2 evolution catalyst which is active under elevated O2 levels is crucial if we are to develop an industrial water splitting process - a chemical reaction ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- The discovery of graphene, a material just one atom thick and possessing exceptional strength and other novel properties, started an avalanche of research around its use for everything from electronics to optics to structural materials. But new research suggests that was just the beginning: A whole family of two-dimensional materials may open up even broader possibilities for applications that could change many aspects of modern life. The latest "new" material, molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) — which has actually been used for decades, but not in its 2-D ...

ARLINGTON, Va.—The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is demonstrating the next phase of an augmented-reality project Aug. 23 in Princeton, N.J., that will change the way warfighters view operational environments—literally. ONR has completed the first year of a multi-year augmented-reality effort, developing a system that allow trainees to view simulated images superimposed on real-world landscapes. One example of augmented reality technology can be seen in sports broadcasts, which use it to highlight first-down lines on football fields and animate hockey pucks to help TV ...

Spacetime may be less like beer and more like sipping whiskey. Or so an intergalactic photo finish may suggest. Physicist Robert Nemiroff of Michigan Technological University reached this heady conclusion after studying the tracings of three photons of differing wavelengths that were recorded by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in May 2009. The photons originated about 7 billion light years away from Earth in one of three pulses from a gamma-ray burst. They arrived at the orbiting telescope just one millisecond apart, in a virtual tie. Gamma-ray bursts are ...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 23—Shortly after the Hubble Space Telescope went into orbit in 1990 it was discovered that the craft had blurred vision. Fortunately, Space Shuttle astronauts were able to remedy the problem a few years later with supplemental optics. Now, a team of Italian researchers has performed a similar sight-correcting feat for a microscope imaging technique designed to explore a universe seemingly as vast as Hubble's but at the opposite end of the size spectrum—the neural pathways of the brain. "Our system combines the best feature of one microscopy technique—high-speed, ...

Researchers from Rice University today unveiled a new multi-antenna technology that could help wireless providers keep pace with the voracious demands of data-hungry smartphones and tablets. The technology aims to dramatically increase network capacity by allowing cell towers to simultaneously beam signals to more than a dozen customers on the same frequency. Details about the new technology, dubbed Argos, were presented today at the Association for Computing Machinery's MobiCom 2012 wireless research conference in Istanbul. Argos is under development by researchers from ...

A study led by investigators from Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC), Nashville, Tenn., finds that black men with prostate cancer receive lower quality surgical care than white men. The racial differences persist even when controlling for factors such as the year of surgery, age, comorbidities and insurance status. Daniel Barocas, M.D., MPH, assistant professor of Urologic Surgery, is first author of the study published in the Aug. 17 issue of the Journal of Urology. Investigators from VICC, the Tennessee Valley Veterans Administration Geriatric Research, Education ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers have created a new type of biosensor that can detect minute concentrations of glucose in saliva, tears and urine and might be manufactured at low cost because it does not require many processing steps to produce. "It's an inherently non-invasive way to estimate glucose content in the body," said Jonathan Claussen, a former Purdue doctoral student and now a research scientist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. "Because it can detect glucose in the saliva and tears, it's a platform that might eventually help to eliminate or reduce ...

Researchers from The Wistar Institute and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) have teamed to publish the first annotated atlas of the Epstein-Barr virus genome, creating the most comprehensive study of how the viral genome interacts with its human host during a latent infection. Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), which is thought to be responsible for one percent of all human cancers, establishes a latent infection in nearly 100 percent of infected adult humans. The atlas is designed to guide researchers toward new means of creating therapies against EBV-latent infection ...

Goldilocks was on to something when she preferred everything "just right." Harvard Medical School researchers have found that when it comes to the length of mitochondria, the power-producing organelles, applying the fairy tale's mantra is crucial to the health of a cell. More specifically, abnormalities in mitochondrial length promote the development of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. "There had been a fair amount of interest in mitochondria in Alzheimer's and tau-related diseases, but causality was unknown," said Brian DuBoff, first author of the study ...

Boost for Efforts to Prevent Microbial Stowaways on Interplanetary Spacecraft Efforts to expunge micro-organisms from spacecraft assembly cleanrooms, and the spacecraft themselves, inadvertently select for the organisms that are often the most fit to survive long journeys in space. This has the risk of thwarting the goal of avoiding contaminating other celestial bodies, as well as samples brought back to earth, according to Myron La Duc of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, and his collaborators. Their research is published in the ...

Data from the 1970s and 1980s show that people affected by cancer survived significantly longer in West Germany than cancer patients behind the Iron Curtain. Looking at a diagnosis period from 1984 to 1985 in the former German Democratic Republic, 28 percent of colorectal cancer patients, 46 percent of prostate cancer patients, and 52 percent of breast cancer patients survived the first five years after diagnosis. By contrast, 5-year survival rates for people in West Germany affected by these types of cancer were 44 percent, 68 percent, and 68 percent in the years from ...

VIDEO: An animation of satellite observations from Aug. 20-23, 2012, shows Tropical Storm Isaac moving through the eastern Caribbean Sea. This visualization was created by the NASA GOES Project at NASA's... Click here for more information. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite captured rainfall data from Tropical Storm Isaac as it continues moving through the Caribbean Sea. After a quiet July, the Atlantic has seen a sharp increase in tropical activity. ...