A study published by the University of Reading's Centre for Agri Environmental Research suggests that honeybees may not be as important to pollination services in the UK than previously supposed. The research was published in the Journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment. "Pollination services are vital to agricultural productivity in the UK" says lead author Tom Breeze "as of 2007, 20% of the UK's cropland was covered by insect pollinated crops like oilseed rape and apples. For decades now we have assumed that honeybees have been providing the majority of pollination ...

Winning margins in the Tour de France can be tight – last year just 39 seconds separated the top two riders after more than 90 hours in the saddle. When every second counts, riders do everything possible to gain a competitive advantage – from using aerodynamic carbon fibre bikes to the very latest in sports nutrition. Now there could be a new, completely legal and rather surprising weapon in the armoury for riders aiming to shave vital seconds off their time – beetroot juice. Research by the University of Exeter, published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports ...

A musculoskeletal system so far unknown in the animal world was recently discovered in weevils. The hip of Trigonopterus oblongus does not consist of the usual hinges, but of joints based on a screw-and-nut system. This first biological screw thread is about half a millimeter in size and was studied in detail using synchrotron radiation. The discovery is reported by the current issue of the Science magazine. (DOI:10.1126/science.1204245) "Such a construction for animal leg movement is quite unusual, as large areas of skeletal parts move on top of each other. Supply ...

Canvas prints specialists PhotoInCanvas has implemented a superb new feature at the site which helps customers that just can't choose which image to use. If people have too many great shots of a similar theme to choose from, then the team at PhotoInCanvas can put all of them into a fantastic photo canvas. This feature may be perfect for individuals that have been to an event such as festival where an abundance of photographs are taken. PhotoInCanvas is urging customers to send them all in so they can group them together to create a stunning image. The PhotoInCanvas ...

On the 22 June 2011 Star Partner received their GPWA sponsorship. Having the Seal of Approval from the GPWA signifies that Star Partner is of a professional standard. GPWA has over 10,000 public and private registered members and is the only professional organisation of its kind. The GPWA Seal of Approval is awarded to gambling portal websites that meet certain standards and the GPWA code of conduct. Being part of the GPWA enables public and private members to be part of online forums with in-depth news and advice about new industry developments, online gaming law, ...

Discharged from the hospital within two days of a total hip replacement operation? It's possible, thanks to the new 'Fast Track' protocol that underwent testing in the U.S., in response to both patient requests for shorter hospital stays and economic realities of providing medical care. According to Dr. Lawrence Gulotta and colleagues, from Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, a carefully screened group of patients undergoing total hip replacement can be discharged from the hospital two days after surgery, without any increase in complications or adverse effects compared ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The Obama administration turned a bright spotlight on prescription painkiller abuse in April when the Office of National Drug Control Policy released a national action plan and a statement from Vice President Joe Biden. With a cover article in the July edition of the Journal of the American Dental Association (JADA), dentists focus that spotlight on themselves both as major sources of opioid drugs and as professionals with largely untapped power to recognize and reduce abuse. "Many dentists really haven't even perceived there to be ...

Recognized as an expert in the field of cosmetics and technology in dentistry, Dr. Lambert, Grand Rapids dentist, is pleased to offer patients ongoing valuable insight to dentistry with his practice newsletter, Smile Update. These updates were created to offer patients a way to remain up-to-date with not only the office, but current dental health issues as well, and can be accessed via the practice's website. The Smile Update, by Dr. Thomas Lambert, was created to improve patient's' dental health and awareness. Patients can visit the practice's website to access this ...

As our bodies first form, developing cells are a lot like children put on the school bus with their names and addresses pinned to their shirts. The notes identify one as a future heart cell, another as a liver cell, a third as a neuron. And that's what they each grow up to be. But once those cells reach adulthood, changes to those original marching orders caused by aging, disease and other stressors like smoking can precipitate a kind of identity crisis, researchers at the University of Michigan Health System have found. The cells start to forget things like which ...

Usher syndrome is the most common form of combined congenital deaf-blindness in humans and affects 1 in 6,000 of the population. It is a recessive inherited disease that is both clinically and genetically heterogeneous. In the most severe cases, patients are born deaf and begin to suffer from a degeneration of the retina in puberty, ultimately resulting in complete blindness. These patients experience major problems in their day-to-day life. While hearing loss can be compensated for with hearing aids and cochlea implants, it has not proven possible to develop a treatment ...

The world's largest database on plants' functional properties, or traits, has been pub-lished. Scientists compiled three million traits for 69,000 out of the world's ~300,000 plant species. The achievement rests on a worldwide collaboration of scientists from 106 re-search institutions. The initiative, known as TRY, is hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena (Germany). Jointly coordinated with the University of Leipzig (Germany), IMBIV-CONICET (Argentina), Macquarie University (Australia), CNRS and University of Paris-Sud (France), TRY promises to ...

Geoffroy Berthelot and Stephane Len, both researchers at the IRMES (Institut de Recherche bioMédicale et d'Epidemiologie du Sport at INSEP, Paris, France), have published their findings in Age, the official journal of the American Aging Association, describing the evolution of performances in elite athletes and chess grandmasters. This article is congruous with the epidemiological approaches developed by the laboratory, and suggests that changes in individual performance are linked to physiological laws structuring the living world. Physiological parameters that characterize ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- A new study co-authored by University of Florida researchers provides details on the first cookiecutter shark attack on a live human, a concern as warm summer waters attract more people to the ocean. The study currently online and appearing in the July print edition of Pacific Science warns that swimmers entering the cookiecutter's range of open ocean tropical waters may be considered prey. The sharks feed near the surface at night, meaning daytime swimmers are less likely to encounter them. The species is small, with adults reaching about 2 feet, ...

A recent study in the Journal of the American College of Radiology suggests that self-referral in medical imaging may be a significant contributing factor in diagnostic imaging growth. Self-referred imaging is identified as physicians (or non-physicians) who are not radiologists directing their patients to their own on-site imaging services or the referral of patients to outside facilities in which the referring physicians have financial interest. In the current political and economic climate, there is a desire to reduce health care costs; diagnostic imaging expenditure ...

Under certain conditions, private and commercial propeller planes and jet aircraft may induce odd-shaped holes or canals into clouds as they fly through them. These holes and canals have long fascinated the public and now new research shows they may affect precipitation in and around airports with frequent cloud cover in the wintertime. Here is how: Planes may produce ice particles by freezing cloud droplets that cool as they flow around the tips of propellers, over wings or over jet aircraft, and thereby unintentionally seed clouds. These seeding ice particles attract ...

Studies by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists have confirmed that the presence of Escherichia coli pathogens in surface waters could result from the pathogen's ability to survive for months in underwater sediments. Most E. coli strains don't cause illness, but they are indicator organisms used by water quality managers to estimate fecal contamination. These findings, which can help pinpoint potential sources of water contamination, support the USDA priorities of promoting sustainable agriculture and food safety. Soil scientist Yakov Pachepsky works ...

Professor Bill Keevil, Head of the Microbiology Group and Director of the Environmental Healthcare Unit at the University of Southampton, has presented research into the mechanism by which copper exerts its antimicrobial effect on antibiotic-resistant organisms at the World Health Organization's first International Conference on Prevention and Infection Control (ICPIC). 'New Insights into the Antimicrobial Mechanisms of Copper Touch Surfaces' observes the survival of pathogens on conventional hospital touch surfaces contributes to increasing incidence and spread of antibiotic ...

If a person were to climb a towering redwood and take a sample from the top and bottom of the tree, a comparison would show that the DNA are different. Christopher A. Cullis, chair of biology at Case Western Reserve University, explains that this is the basis of his controversial research findings. Cullis, who has spent over 40 years studying mutations within plants, most recently flax (Linum usitatissimum), has found that the environment not only weeds out harmful and useless mutations through natural selection, but actually influences helpful mutations. Cullis published ...

College Park, Md. (July 1, 2011) -- Ever since an ordinary office inkjet printer had its ink cartridges swapped out for a cargo of cells about 10 years ago and sprayed out cell-packed droplets to create living tissue, scientists and engineers have never looked at office equipment in quite the same way. They dream of using a specialized bio-inkjet printer to grow new body parts for organ transplants or tissues for making regenerative medicine repairs to ailing bodies. Both these new therapies begin with a carefully printed mass of embryonic stem cells. And now there's progress ...

DALLAS – July 1, 2011 – Surgery and all its implications can be scary, especially so for pediatric patients and their parents who dread sometimes disfiguring scars. Now a UT Southwestern Medical Center urologist has developed a new "hidden" minimally invasive procedure that makes scarring virtually invisible yet is just as effective as more common surgical methods. "Currently used incisions, even with minimally invasive surgery, leave the child with up to three scars that are visible any time the abdomen is exposed. The new technique of hidden incision endoscopic surgery ...

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers have discovered the first of an entirely new class of antiangiogenesis drugs – agents that interfere with the development of blood vessels. In a report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences/Early Edition, the investigators describe how a compound derived from a South American tree was able, through a novel mechanism, to interfere with blood vessel formation in animal models of normal development, wound healing and tumor growth. "Most of the FDA-approved antiangiogenesis drugs inhibit the pathway controlled ...

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) researchers have filled an important gap in the study of tunicate evolution by genetically sequencing 40 new specimens of thaliaceans, gelatinous, free-swimming types of tunicates. Their study was featured on the cover of the June issue of the Journal of Plankton Research. Tunicates are a phylum of animals closely related to vertebrates, with a firm, rubbery outer covering called a tunic, from which the name derives. "Thaliaceans have been poorly represented in previous studies of tunicate evolution," said Annette Govindarajan ...

DETROIT – Wayne State University researchers believe medical practitioners can help reduce the number of breast cancer deaths among low-income African-American women by more effectively educating their patients about the importance of mammography screening. In a study published this month in the Journal of Cancer Education, Rosalie Young, Ph.D., associate professor; Kendra Schwartz, M.D., M.S.P.H., interim chair; and Jason Booza, Ph. D., assistant professor, all from the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health Sciences in WSU's School of Medicine, examined clinical, ...

Patients with a form of pulmonary fibrosis often do not get referred to a tertiary care center quickly. Delayed access is associated with a higher death rate. Better methods of early detection would shorten time from first symptoms to referral. (NEW YORK, NY, July 1, 2011) – Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF)―scarring and thickening of the lungs from unknown causes―is the predominant condition leading to lung transplantation nationwide. Columbia University Medical Center researchers confirmed that delayed access to a tertiary care center for IPF is associated ...

Washington, D.C., June 30, 2011 –A citywide study published online in today's issue of Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association demonstrates racial disparities in the use of clot-busting drugs to treat acute ischemic stroke, the most common type of stroke. According to the study's results, significantly fewer black patients receive the drug tPA than whites because of delays in seeking emergency care and the presence of medical conditions that exclude them from receiving the treatment. On the other hand, racial bias in doctors' treatment decisions do not appear ...