Carotenoid pigments are the source of many of the animal kingdom's most vivid colours; flamingos' pink feathers come from eating carotenoid-containing shrimps and algae, and carotenoid colours can be seen among garden birds in blackbirds' orange beaks and blue tits' yellow breast feathers. These pigments play a crucial role in sexual signals. According to the study's lead author Dr Tom Pike of the University of Exeter: "Females typically use carotenoid colours to assess the quality of a potential mate, with more colourful males generally being regarded as the most attractive." This ...

A simple "how are you" delivered weekly through cell phone text messaging (SMS) increases the likelihood that Kenyans with HIV will stay healthy and follow their medication regimen, while reducing the spread of the disease, according to a new study led by a University of British Columbia researcher. Published online today in The Lancet, the study found that patients in Kenya who received weekly SMS “check-ins” were 12 per cent more likely than a control group to have an undetectable level of the HIV virus a year after starting antiretroviral (ART) treatment. Undetectable ...

(GLASGOW, 9 November 2010) – Results from a European Observational Study, which included 1,294 antiretroviral (ARV)-experienced patients presented today at the Tenth International Congress on Drug Therapy in HIV Infection (HIV10), demonstrated a low rate of discontinuation and sustained virologic suppression with REYATAZ® (atazanavir)/ritonavir-based regimens over a follow-up period of up to five years.1 The aim of this study was to investigate the long-term outcomes of REYATAZ/ritonavir-containing regimens in ARV-experienced patients in a real-life clinical setting. ...

In a study of more than 9,600 adolescent and young adult women in the Baltimore area, researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have found that fewer than 30 percent of those eligible to receive the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine to prevent cervical cancer actually chose to get it. And only about a third of those who began receiving the vaccine completed the three doses recommended for maximum protection. The research, which was led by J. Kathleen Tracy, Ph.D., an assistant professor of epidemiology, will be presented on Nov. 9, 2010, at a cancer ...

Washington, D.C. (November 9, 2010) -- Current medical techniques for monitoring the heart rate and other vital signs use electrodes attached to the body, which are impractical for patients who want to move around. Plasma physicist Atsushi Mase, a scientist at Kyushu University in Japan, and colleague Daisuke Nagae have developed a new technique to disconnect people from their electrodes by using microwaves. The work, which could lead to the development of non-invasive, real-time stress sensing in a variety of environments, is described in a recent issue of the journal ...

Washington, D.C. (November 9, 2010) -- A switch to wind energy will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions -- and reduce the global warming they cause. But there's a catch, says climate researcher Diandong Ren, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin in a paper appear in the AIP's Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy: rising temperatures decrease wind speeds, making for less power bang for the wind turbine buck. The prevailing winds in the "free" atmosphere about 1,000 meters above the ground are maintained by a temperature gradient that decreases ...

Washington, D.C. (November 9, 2010) -- Microscopically porous polymer membranes have numerous applications in microfluidics, where they can act as filters, masks for surface patterning, and even as components in 3D devices in which the perforations in stacked membranes are aligned to form networks of channels for the flow of fluids. In the AIP journal Biomicrofluidics, Hongkai Wu, a chemist at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and his colleagues describe a simple new method using just one photolithographic step to fabricate free-standing polymer membranes ...

Washington, D.C. (November 9, 2010) -- Researchers at the University of Maryland have proposed a scheme for detecting a concealed source of radioactive material without searching containers one by one. Detection of radioactive material concealed in shipping containers is important in the early prevention of "dirty" bomb construction. The concept, described in the Journal of Applied Physics, is based on the gamma-ray emission from the radioactive material that would pass through the shipping container walls and ionize the surrounding air. The facilitated breakdown of ...

Washington, D.C. (November 9, 2010) -- Walk into nearly any science museum worth its salt and you're likely to see a Foucault pendulum, a simple but impressive device for observing the Earth's rotation. Such pendulums have been around for more than 150 years, and little about how they work remains a mystery today. The only problem, according to Argentinean researcher Horacio Salva, is that the devices are generally large and unwieldy, making them impractical to install in places where space is at a premium. This limitation was something he and his colleagues at the Centro ...

At the current pace of research and development, global oil will run out 90 years before replacement technologies are ready, says a new University of California, Davis, study based on stock market expectations. The forecast was published online Monday (Nov. 8) in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. It is based on the theory that long-term investors are good predictors of whether and when new energy technologies will become commonplace. "Our results suggest it will take a long time before renewable replacement fuels can be self-sustaining, at least ...

A team of international researchers led by ancient DNA experts from the University of Adelaide has resolved the longstanding issue of the origins of the people who introduced farming to Europe some 8000 years ago. A detailed genetic study of one of the first farming communities in Europe, from central Germany, reveals marked similarities with populations living in the Ancient Near East (modern-day Turkey, Iraq and other countries) rather than those from Europe. Project leader Professor Alan Cooper, Director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) at the University ...

Astronomers at The University of Warwick and the University of Sheffield have helped discover an unusual star system which looks like, and may even once have behaved like, a game of snooker. The University of Warwick and Sheffield astronomers played a key role in an international team that used two decades of observations from many telescopes around the world. The UK astronomers helped discover this "snooker like" star system through observations and analysis of data from an astronomical camera known as ULTRACAM designed by the British researchers on the team. They ...

Kyoto, Japan -- As if borrowing from a scene in a science fiction movie, researchers at Kyoto University have successfully developed a kind of tractor beam that can be used to manipulate the network of the molecules. In a paper soon to be published in Physical Review Letters, the team has demonstrated a technique using terahertz pulses that could have broad applications in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Terahertz waves, an area of specialty for the Koichiro Tanaka lab at Kyoto University's Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS), exist in ...

A recommendation letter could be the chute in a woman's career ladder, according to ongoing research at Rice University. The comprehensive study shows that qualities mentioned in recommendation letters for women differ sharply from those for men, and those differences may be costing women jobs and promotions in academia and medicine. Funded by the National Science Foundation, Rice University professors Michelle Hebl and Randi Martin and graduate student Juan Madera, now an assistant professor at the University of Houston, reviewed 624 letters of recommendation for 194 ...

Membrane-associated receptors, channels and transporters are among the most important drug targets for the pharmaceutical industry. The search for new drugs resembles looking for a needle in a haystack. Therefore new analytical techniques are required which facilitate the simultaneous screening of a large library of compounds across a variety of membrane proteins. However, this class of methods is still at the early stages of development. The group of Prof. Dr. Robert Tampé, in collaboration with the Walter Schottky Institute at Technical University Munich, has now presented ...

Quantum computers should be much easier to build than previously thought, because they can still work with a large number of faulty or even missing components, according to a study published today in Physical Review Letters. This surprising discovery brings scientists one step closer to designing and building real-life quantum computing systems – devices that could have enormous potential across a wide range of fields, from drug design, electronics, and even code-breaking. Scientists have long been fascinated with building computers that work at a quantum level – so small ...

VIDEO: This is a computer model of the growth of a snapdragon flower, produced by the groups of Professor Andrew Bangham of the University of East Anglia and Professor Enrico Coen... Click here for more information. "How do hearts, wings or flowers get their shape?" asks Professor Enrico Coen from the John Innes Centre. " Unlike man-made things like mobile phones or cars, there is no external hand or machine guiding the formation of these biological structures; they ...

This release is available in German. Hormones, growth factors and several proteins ensure that development occurs in the right way, at the right time. The components that cause breast development in mammals, for example, were thought to be largely known. However, as a team of scientists from Göttingen, Frankfurt and Hanover have now discovered, in the case of breast development, hormones and proteins do not account for the full story. The scientists have shown that tiny ribonucleic acid molecules play a key role in this process. The mammary glands of mice lacking the ...

Researchers suspect that a protein superstructure called amyloid beta is responsible for much of the neural damage of Alzheimer's disease. A new study at the University of California, San Diego, shows that amyloid beta disrupts one of the brain's anti-oxidant proteins and demonstrates a way to protect that protein, and perhaps others, from amyloid's harmful effects. "Amyloid seems to cause damage to cells," said chemistry professor Jerry Yang. "We have reported in a very detailed way one potential interaction of how amyloid can cause disease, and we found a way to ...

VIDEO: University of Chicago psychologist Susan Levine has found that early exposure to mathematics words prepares students for success later in school. Click here for more information. The amount of time parents spend talking about numbers has a much bigger impact on how young children learn mathematics than was previously known, researchers at the University of Chicago have found. For example, children whose parents talked more about numbers were much more likely to ...

Whales exhibit skin damage consistent with acute sunburn in humans, and it seems to be getting worse over time, reveals research published this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Scientists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), Queen Mary, University of London and CICIMAR, studied blue whales, fin whales and sperm whales in the Gulf of California to determine the effect of rising levels of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) on their health. For a number of years scientists have observed blisters on the skin of whales. Now, using high-quality photos to give ...

Swiss researchers studying the projected effects of climate change on alpine plant species have discovered that mountain ranges may represent a 'safer' place to live during changing climate conditions. The research, published in the Journal of Biogeography, finds that the habitat diversity of mountain ranges offer species 'refuge habitats' which may be important for conservation. The research, led by Daniel Scherrer and Christian Körner from the University of Basel, Switzerland, was carried out over two seasons in the Swiss Central Alps at 2500m. The authors used a high ...

KINGSTON, R.I. – November 9, 2010 – The heat radiating off roadways has long been a factor in explaining why city temperatures are often considerably warmer than nearby suburban or rural areas. Now a team of engineering researchers from the University of Rhode Island is examining methods of harvesting that solar energy to melt ice, power streetlights, illuminate signs, heat buildings and potentially use it for many other purposes. "We have mile after mile of asphalt pavement around the country, and in the summer it absorbs a great deal of heat, warming the roads up to ...

Whether cognitive differences exist between modern humans and Neanderthals is the subject of contentious disputes in anthropology and archaeology. Because the brain size range of modern humans and Neanderthals overlap, many researchers previously assumed that the cognitive capabilities of these two species were similar. Among humans, however, the internal organization of the brain is more important for cognitive abilities than its absolute size is. The brain's internal organization depends on the tempo and mode of brain development. Based on detailed measurements of internal ...

Philadelphia – Nov. 9, 2010 – New research shows a gene-based test for lung cancer risk can help identify which smokers are most likely to benefit from CT screening for lung cancer, according to results of a study presented today at the American Association of Cancer Research's Ninth Annual Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research. In studies that included 1,216 lung cancer cases and 1,200 controls gathered from smokers and ex-smokers in three countries, the Respiragene™ gene-based predisposition test accurately identified a subgroup of very high risk smokers ...