Woe to the clueless predator trying to make a meal of the African crested rat, a rodent that applies poisonous plant toxin to sponge-like hairs on its flanks, a discovery recently made by Jonathan Kingdon and colleagues from the National Museums of Kenya, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and University of Oxford. In the only known instance of a mammal acquiring a lethal toxin from a plant for defense, the researchers have discovered where the African crested rat (or maned rat) gets its poison: the Acokanthera tree, the same source used by East African hunters for ...

High-calorie, high-sodium choices were on the menu when parents purchased lunch for their children at a San Diego fast-food restaurant. Why? Because both children and adults liked the food and the convenience. However, the study of data compiled by researchers in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego, appearing this week in the new journal, Childhood Obesity, showed that convenience resulted in lunchtime meals that accounted for between 36 and 51 percent of a child's daily caloric needs. In addition, 35 to 39 percent of calories came ...

NEW YORK (Aug. 2, 2011) -- HIV epidemics are emerging in several countries in the Middle East and North Africa among men who have sex with men, a term that encompasses gay, non-gay identified homosexual men, and transgendered and bisexual men. Though HIV infection levels were historically very low in the Middle East and North Africa, substantial levels of HIV transmission have been found, beginning in 2003, among men who have sex with men, a hidden and stigmatized population in this part of the world. These findings are published today in PLoS Medicine and represent the ...

When it comes to broadband speeds, U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs) largely deliver on their promises, says a report issued today by the Federal Communications Commission, but "throughput" is only one of several metrics listed in the report that affect network performance. ISPs should provide a broadband "nutrition label"—easy-to-understand information about service-limiting factors—and users need better ways of measuring the performance their ISPs are delivering, concludes a study from the Georgia Tech College of Computing. Out of some 2 billion Internet users ...

BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL, August 2, 2011– A multidisciplinary team at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has developed a new training method using a desktop webcam to improve ergonomic posture and reduce the risk of musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) among office workers using computers. According to an article in Applied Ergonomics in the forthcoming issue, a group of 60 workers received both office training and an automatic frequent-feedback system that displayed a webcam photo of a worker's current sitting posture alongside the correct posture photo taken during office training. ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY -- When an animal gets too hot or too cold, or feels pangs of hunger or thirst, it tends to relocate – to where it's cooler or hotter, or to the nearest place where food or water can be found. But what about vegetative life? What can a plant do under similar circumstances? Plants can't change the climate and they can't uproot themselves to move to a more favorable spot. Yet they do respond successfully to changes in environmental conditions in diverse ways, many of which involve modifications of the way they grow and develop. Plant biologists ...

Boulder, Colorado, USA - The August GSA TODAY science article is now online at http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/21/8/. The modification of Earth's surface by erosion is one of the most important geological processes in terms of its impact on society, as well as its influence on the geological record, but geologists have been lacking a well-determined compilation of pre-human rates of erosion. In a groundbreaking compilation of 1528 calculations of surface erosion rates from 80 study areas from all over the world, authors Eric Portenga and Paul Bierman of the ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — In the first nationwide study of stray-bullet shootings, Garen Wintemute, professor of emergency medicine and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis School of Medicine and Medical Center, quantifies mortality and injury among victims of these unexpected events. His research is published as a letter in the August 3 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "Stray-bullet shootings create fear and insecurity in many communities," said Wintemute. "People stay indoors, don't let their children play outside, and ...

In August of 2016, when NASA's Juno Mission begins sending back information about the atmosphere of the planet Jupiter, research done by Georgia Institute of Technology engineers using a 2,400-pound pressure vessel will help scientists understand what the data means. The Juno probe is scheduled to be launched August 5 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Because Jupiter has been largely unchanged since its formation at the birth of our solar system, scientists hope Juno will resolve unanswered questions not only about the massive planet, but also about how ...

PORTLAND, Ore. — A signaling system in the brain previously shown to regulate sleep is also responsible for inducing lethargy during illness, according to research conducted at Oregon Health & Science University Doernbecher Children's Hospital. This research is particularly meaningful because it implies that a new class of drugs developed to treat sleep disorders can reverse the inactivity and exhaustion brought on by acute illness. Although the sleep drugs were initially designed to treat narcolepsy, they have the potential to restore energy and motivation in patients ...

A new customised IT business management system developed by Queensland University of Technology (QUT) researchers and capable of improving the scheduling of resources and workflow in surgical theatres has been successfully demonstrated in a German hospital. Dr Chun Ouyang, from QUT's Business Process Management (BPM) group, said the system was built based on an automated workflow system known as YAWL, and allowed hospitals to more efficiently manage the co-ordination of expensive surgery-related resources. The project is being undertaken in partnership with German ...

WASHINGTON – The American Psychological Association plans to feature three public demonstrations of psychological science applications, including one that enables "seeing" with one's ears rather than eyes, at the organization's 119th Annual Convention here this week. The Science Showcase will be open to the public Aug. 5 and 6, near the entrance to the convention exhibits and registration area at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. "The science of psychology affects everyone's daily life in ways that most people don't realize," said Steven J. Breckler, ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new survey reveals that many people in the U.S. – in some cases a substantial majority – think that memory is more powerful, objective and reliable than it actually is. Their ideas are at odds with decades of scientific research. The results of the survey and a comparison to expert opinion appear in a paper in the journal PLoS ONE. (Before reading further, test your own ideas about memory.) "This is the first large-scale, nationally representative survey of the U.S. population to measure intuitive beliefs about how memory works," said University ...

VIDEO: People who live to 95 or older are no more virtuous than the rest of us in terms of their diet, exercise routine or smoking and drinking habits, according to... Click here for more information. August 3, 2011 — (Bronx, NY) — People who live to 95 or older are no more virtuous than the rest of us in terms of their diet, exercise routine or smoking and drinking habits, according to researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. Their findings, ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- A new tick-borne bacterium infecting humans with ehrlichiosis has been discovered in Wisconsin and Minnesota. It was identified as a new strain of bacteria through DNA testing conducted at Mayo Clinic. The findings appear in the Aug. 4 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. Doctors at Mayo Clinic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin, and state and local health departments say the new species from the Ehrlichia genus can cause a feverish illness in humans. The new bacterium, ...

A comparison clinical study of two aplastic anemia treatments found that ATGAM, currently the only licensed aplastic anemia drug in the United States, improved blood cell counts and survival significantly more than did Thymoglobulin, a similar but reportedly more potent treatment. The research was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), a part of the National Institutes of Health; the study participants were treated and then followed at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The study will appear in the August 4 New England Journal of ...

BC Children's Hospital and University of British Columbia (UBC) researchers have found that two existing screening tests are accurate in diagnosing development delays in children and could be incorporated in a busy family practice setting with relative ease. Parents can complete the Ages and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ) or the Parents' Evaluation of Developmental Status (PEDS) at home or in the family physician's office, with the physician scoring the tests and providing results in a matter of minutes. "Only 30 per cent of children with developmental delays are identified ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A new urine test can help aid early detection of and treatment decisions about prostate cancer, a study from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology finds. The test supplements an elevated prostate specific antigen, or PSA, screening result, and could help some men delay or avoid a needle biopsy while pointing out men at highest risk for clinically significant prostate cancer. The test looks for a genetic anomaly that occurs in about half of all prostate cancers, an instance of two ...

SALT LAKE CITY, Aug. 3, 2011 – University of Utah scientists used chemical isotopes in ancient soil to measure prehistoric tree cover – in effect, shade – and found that grassy, tree-dotted savannas prevailed at most East African sites where human ancestors and their ape relatives evolved during the past 6 million years. "We've been able to quantify how much shade was available in the geological past," says geochemist Thure Cerling, senior author of a study of the new method in the Thursday, Aug. 4, 2011 issue of the journal Nature. "And it shows there have been open ...

Scientists have known for years that when vampire bats tear through an animal's skin with their razor-sharp teeth, their noses guide them to the best spots – where a precise bite will strike a vein and spill forth nourishing blood. But nobody knew exactly how bats knew where to bite. By investigating wild vampire bats in South America, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas in Caracas, Venezuela have discovered their secret: a sensitive, heat-detecting molecule covering nerve endings on their ...

Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. – Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and five other institutions have used an unconventional approach to cancer drug discovery to identify a new potential treatment for acute myeloid leukemia (AML). As reported in Nature online on August 3, the scientists have pinpointed a protein called Brd4 as a novel drug target for AML, an aggressive blood cancer that is currently incurable in 70% of patients. Using a drug compound that inhibits the activity of Brd4, the scientists were able to suppress the disease in experimental models. "The ...

A new study shows for the first time that natural killer (NK) cells, which are part of the body's first-line defence against infection, can contribute to the immune response against HIV. In an article in the August 4 issue of Nature, a research team based at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard reports that the HIV strains infecting individuals with particular receptor molecules on their NK cells had variant forms of key viral proteins, implying that the virus had mutated to avoid NK cell activity. "This study suggests for the first time that NK cells can impose ...

This result comes just one year after the start of the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea programme (VVV) [1], one of the six public surveys on the new telescope. The results will appear in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. "This discovery highlights the potential of VISTA and the VVV survey for finding star clusters, especially those hiding in dusty star-forming regions in the Milky Way's disc. VVV goes much deeper than other surveys," says Jura Borissova, lead author of the study. The majority of stars with more than half of the mass of our Sun form in groups, ...

Bremerhaven, 1 August 2011. For the first time researchers have examined on a global scale how calcified algae in their natural habitat react to increasing acidification due to higher marine uptake of carbon dioxide. In the current issue of the magazine Nature they explain that Coccolithophores, a certain group of algae, form thinner calcite skeletons when the pH value in the ocean drops. In marine ecosystems, changes in the degree of calcification are much more pronounced than presumed to date based on laboratory tests. These changes have an impact on the global carbon ...

SANTA CRUZ, CA--The mountainous region on the far side of the moon, known as the lunar farside highlands, may be the solid remains of a collision with a smaller companion moon, according to a new study by planetary scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The striking differences between the near and far sides of the moon have been a longstanding puzzle. The near side is relatively low and flat, while the topography of the far side is high and mountainous, with a much thicker crust. The new study, published in the August 4 issue of Nature, builds on the ...