Voyages Jules Verne, the innovative specialist tour operator, has revealed the latest edition of its 'Word of Wonders' brochure. Offering a wide selection of tours across the globe for departures until April 2012, 'World of Wonders'' itineraries range from short breaks in Europe's cities, coast and countryside to escorted tours of Africa, the Middle East (including Jordan holidays, India, the Far East, South East Asia and the Americas. Among the new itineraries for 2011 is a seven night walking holiday in Nepal which will allow travellers to take in the landscapes ...

Cruise Amour has announced the launch of its expanded online information and advice section, designed to provide additional information on a range of areas including cabin types, dress codes and more, in order to make booking a holiday easier and less confusing for the customer. Historically customers who choose to book on-line do so without the benefit of a travel agent's experience and advice. In many cases knowledge is assumed and customers are expected to know which cruise lines and ships are comparable, how formal they are and how onboard facilities stack up. Cruise ...

In the U.S., even zoo gorillas need to switch to a heart-healthy diet. "A lot are dying of heart disease, we believe like humans," said Elena Hoellein Less, a PhD candidate in biology at Case Western Reserve University. In fact, heart disease is the number one killer of male Western lowland gorillas – the only species of gorillas in North American zoos. After Brooks, a 21-year-old gorilla, died of heart failure at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo in 2005, Less and other researchers here took a hard look at how the animals' lifestyle affects their health. Less now leads ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Siberia's Lake Baikal, the world's oldest, deepest, and largest freshwater lake, has provided scientists with insight into the ways that climate change affects water temperature, which in turn affects life in the lake. The study is published in the journal PLoS ONE today. "Lake Baikal has the greatest biodiversity of any lake in the world," explained co-author Stephanie Hampton, deputy director of UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis (NCEAS). "And, thanks to the dedication of three generations of a family of ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Asian Americans are widely viewed as "model minorities" on the basis of education, income and competence. But they are perceived as less ideal than Caucasian Americans when it comes to attaining leadership roles in U.S. businesses and board rooms, according to researchers at the University of California, Riverside. In a groundbreaking study, researchers found that "race trumps other salient characteristics, such as one's occupation, regarding perceptions of who is a good leader," said Thomas Sy, assistant professor of psychology at UC Riverside and ...

ST. PAUL, Minn. – People with multiple sclerosis (MS) may find it harder to learn, remember or process information on warmer days of the year, according to new research released today that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 63rd Annual Meeting in Honolulu April 9 to April 16, 2011. "Studies have linked warmer weather to increased disease activity and lesions in people with MS, but this is the first research to show a possible link between warm weather and cognition, or thinking skills, in people with the disease," said study author Victoria Leavitt, ...

New research from the University of Pennsylvania is beginning to crack the code of which strain of flu will be prevalent in a given year, with major implications for global public health preparedness. The findings will be published on February 17 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics. Joshua Plotkin and Sergey Kryazhimskiy, both at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted the research with colleagues at McMaster University and the Institute for Information Transmission Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Plotkin believes that his group's computational ...

The portion of the brain responsible for visual reading doesn't require vision at all, according to a new study published online on February 17 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. Brain imaging studies of blind people as they read words in Braille show activity in precisely the same part of the brain that lights up when sighted readers read. The findings challenge the textbook notion that the brain is divided up into regions that are specialized for processing information coming in via one sense or another, the researchers say. "The brain is not a sensory machine, ...

To protect the health of future generations, body keeps a careful watch on its precious and limited supply of eggs. That's done through a key quality control process in oocytes (the immature eggs), which ensures elimination of damaged cells before they reach maturity. In a new report in the February 18th Cell, a Cell Press publication, researchers have made progress in unraveling how a factor called p63 initiates the deathblow. In fact, p63 is a close relative of the infamous tumor suppressor p53, and both proteins recognize DNA damage. Because of this heritage it ...

Researchers have found an altogether unexpected connection between a hormone produced in bone and male fertility. The study in the February 18th issue of Cell, a Cell Press publication, shows that the skeletal hormone known as osteocalcin boosts testosterone production to support the survival of the germ cells that go on to become mature sperm. The findings in mice provide the first evidence that the skeleton controls reproduction through the production of hormones, according to Gerard Karsenty of Columbia University and his colleagues. Bone was once thought of as a ...

This release is available in French, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese and Chinese on EurekAlert! Chinese. Several American black bears, captured by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game after wandering a bit too close to human communities, have given researchers the opportunity to study hibernation in these large mammals like never before. Surprisingly, the new findings show that although black bears only reduce their body temperatures slightly during hibernation, their metabolic activity drops dramatically, slowing to about 25 percent of their normal, active rates. This ...

New Haven, Conn.—More than 50 years after the invention of the laser, scientists at Yale University have built the world's first anti-laser, in which incoming beams of light interfere with one another in such a way as to perfectly cancel each other out. The discovery could pave the way for a number of novel technologies with applications in everything from optical computing to radiology. Conventional lasers, which were first invented in 1960, use a so-called "gain medium," usually a semiconductor like gallium arsenide, to produce a focused beam of coherent light—light ...

That feeling of being in, and owning, your own body is a fundamental human experience. But where does it originate and how does it come to be? Now, Professor Olaf Blanke, a neurologist with the Brain Mind Institute at EPFL and the Department of Neurology at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, announces an important step in decoding the phenomenon. By combining techniques from cognitive science with those of Virtual Reality (VR) and brain imaging, he and his team are narrowing in on the first experimental, data-driven approach to understanding self-consciousness. In ...

You may have heard of virtual keyboards controlled by thought, brain-powered wheelchairs, and neuro-prosthetic limbs. But powering these machines can be downright tiring, a fact that prevents the technology from being of much use to people with disabilities, among others. Professor José del R. Millán and his team at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have a solution: engineer the system so that it learns about its user, allows for periods of rest, and even multitasking. In a typical brain-computer interface (BCI) set-up, users can send ...

NEW YORK (February 17, 2011) – Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have discovered that the skeleton acts as a regulator of fertility in male mice through a hormone released by bone, known as osteocalcin. The research, led by Gerard Karsenty, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Department of Genetics and Development at Columbia University Medical Center, is slated to appear online on February 17 in Cell, ahead of the journal's print edition, scheduled for March 4. Until now, interactions between bone and the reproductive system have focused only on the influence ...

Scientific advice on the consequences of specific policy options confronting government decision makers is key to managing global biodiversity change. That's the view of leading scientists anxiously anticipating the first meeting of a new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)-like mechanism for biodiversity at which its workings and work program will be defined. Writing in the journal Science, the scientists say the new mechanism, called the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), should adopt a modified working approach ...

The most popular model used by geneticists for the last 35 years to detect the footprints of human evolution may overlook more common subtle changes, a new international study finds. Classic selective sweeps, when a beneficial genetic mutation quickly spreads through the human population, are thought to have been the primary driver of human evolution. But a new computational analysis, published in the February 18, 2011 issue of Science, reveals that such events may have been rare, with little influence on the history of our species. By examining the sequences of nearly ...

VIDEO: Glen Lehman discusses his research. Click here for more information. WASHINGTON (February 17) –Todd Kuiken, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Center for Bionic Medicine and Director of Amputee Services at The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC), designated the "#1 Rehabilitation Hospital in America" by U.S. News & World Report since 1991, will present the latest in Targeted Muscle Reinnervation (TMR), a bionic limb technology, during the opening press briefing and ...

INDIANAPOLIS – Unrealistic expectations about genomic medicine have created a "bubble" that needs deflating before it puts the field's long term benefits at risk, four policy experts write in the current issue of the journal Science. Ten years after the deciphering of the human genetic code was accompanied by over-hyped promises of medical breakthroughs, it may be time to reevaluate funding priorities to better understand how to change behaviors and reap the health benefits that would result. In addition, the authors say, scientists need to foster more realistic understanding ...

Fairbanks, ALASKA—Black bears show surprisingly large and previously unobserved decreases in their metabolism during and after hibernation according to a paper by scientists at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and published in the 18 February issue of the journal Science. "In general, an animal's metabolism slows to about half for each 10 degree (Celsius) drop in body temperature. Black bears' metabolism slowed by 75 percent, but their core body temperature decreased by only five to six degrees," said Øivind Tøien, IAB research scientist ...

Star formation is one of the most important processes in shaping the Universe; it plays a pivotal role in the evolution of galaxies and it is also in the earliest stages of star formation that planetary systems first appear. Yet there is still much that astronomers don't understand, such as how do the properties of stellar nurseries vary according to the composition and density of the gas present, and what triggers star formation in the first place? The driving force behind star formation is particularly unclear for a type of galaxy called a flocculent spiral, such as ...

A corrective strategy used by astronomers to sharpen images of celestial bodies can now help scientists see with more depth and clarity into the living brain of a mouse. Eric Betzig, a group leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus, will present his team's latest work using adaptive optics for biology at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. during a press conference on Thursday, Feb., 17, and a panel discussion on Friday, Feb. 18. A key problem in microscopy is that when ...

Plants have for the first time been cloned as seeds. The research by aUC Davis plant scientists and their international collaborators, published Feb. 18 in the journal Science, is a major step towards making hybrid crop plants that can retain favorable traits from generation to generation. Most successful crop varieties are hybrids, said Simon Chan, assistant professor of plant biology at UC Davis and an author of the paper. But when hybrids go through sexual reproduction, their traits, such as fruit size or frost resistance, get scrambled and may be lost. "We're ...

Scientists have identified the gene that allows the Rubella virus to block cell death and reverse engineered a mutant gene that slows the virus's spread. Tom Hobman and a team of researchers at the University of Alberta's Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry believed that RNA viruses were able to spread by blocking the pathways in cells that lead to cell suicide, and isolated the responsible gene in Rubella, also known as German measles. They then created a mutant version of this gene that made the virus spread more slowly. These results are reported in PLoS Pathogens. The ...

MADISON — Most people cross borders such as doorways or state lines without thinking much about it. Yet not all borders are places of limbo intended only for crossing. Some borders, like those between two materials that are brought together, are dynamic places where special things can happen. For an electron moving from one material toward the other, this space is where it can join other electrons, which together can create current, magnetism or even light. A multi-institutional team has made fundamental discoveries at the border regions, called interfaces, between ...