SANTA CRUZ, CA--Astronomers studying ultra-deep imaging data from the Hubble Space Telescope have found what may be the most distant galaxy ever seen, about 13.2 billion light-years away. The study pushed the limits of Hubble's capabilities, extending its reach back to about 480 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just 4 percent of its current age. "We're getting back very close to the first galaxies, which we think formed around 200 to 300 million years after the Big Bang," said Garth Illingworth, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University ...

HOUSTON -- (Jan. 27, 2011) – In the forests of Borneo and Sumatra, orangutans – the "men of the forest" in the language of Malaysia–swing among the trees, an endangered primate population so similar and yet different from man – and from each other, according to a recently published genome analysis of the two populations of orangutans still existing in the world. The multi-national study led by scientists from Baylor College of Medicine (www.bcm.edu) and Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., define many of the similarities between the two populations – one in Sumatra ...

New molecular evidence reveals a new species of grey wolf living in Africa. Formerly confused with golden jackals, and thought to be an Egyptian subspecies of jackal, the new African wolf shows that members of the grey wolf lineage reached Africa about 3 million years ago, before they spread throughout the northern hemisphere. As long ago as 1880 the great evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley commented that Egyptian golden jackals – then as now regarded as a subspecies of the golden jackal – looked suspiciously like grey wolves. The same observation was made by several ...

Death by homicide, the victim is probably black. By cirrhosis, the decedent is likely Native American. These stereotypes have small but clear effects on the racial classifications used to calculate official vital statistics, according to a new study by sociologists at the University of Oregon and University of California, Irvine. When coroners, medical examiners or funeral directors across the United States fill out death certificates, it appears the racial classifications they make are influenced by the decedent's cause of death in ways that reflect long-running stereotypes ...

Researchers from the universities of Navarra and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria have demonstrated that the ingestion of trans-fats and saturated fats increase the risk of suffering depression, and that olive oil, on the other hand, protects against this mental illness. They have confirmed this after studying 12,059 SUN Project volunteers over the course of six years; the volunteers had their diet, lifestyle and ailments analyzed at the beginning of the project, over its course and at the end of the project. In this way the researchers confirmed that despite the fact that ...

LA JOLLA, CA – January 24, 2010 – Embargoed by the journal Neuron until January 26, 2010, noon, Eastern time – Connected highways of nerve cells carry information to and from different areas of the brain and the rest of the nervous system. Scientists are trying to draw a complete atlas of these connections—sometimes referred to as the "connectome"—to gain a better understanding of how the brain functions in health and disease. New research conducted at The Scripps Research Institute shows that this road atlas undergoes constant revisions as the brain of a young animal ...

Most nature lovers know that the more colourful a male fish, reptile, or bird, the more likely it is to attract a female and to have healthy offspring. Females, on the other hand, tend to be drably coloured, perhaps to avoid predators while carrying, incubating, and caring for young. Curiously, the female striped plateau lizard, which lives in the rocky slopes of Arizona's south-eastern mountains, is an exception to this rule in the animal world. Females are more colourful than males – displaying an orange patch on their throats during reproductive season – and the more ...

The mechanism that controls the internal 24-hour clock of all forms of life from human cells to algae has been identified by scientists. Not only does the research provide important insight into health-related problems linked to individuals with disrupted clocks – such as pilots and shift workers – it also indicates that the 24-hour circadian clock found in human cells is the same as that found in algae and dates back millions of years to early life on Earth. Two new studies out today in the journal Nature from the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh give insight ...

The direct ancestors of orang-utans were once widely distributed in south-east Asia but the two modern orang-utan species are confined to the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. Both species are endangered, largely as a consequence of destruction of their rainforest habitat. The orang-utans are the only great apes that spend most of their time in trees. Nevertheless, the species share a number of features with other apes: they are adept in their use of tools and live in complex social groups that show evidence of cultural learning. A wide-ranging international consortium ...

War-time stress may lead to an increased risk death by coronary heart disease in later life. Researchers writing in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Health Services Research surveyed a cohort of 55 year old Finnish WW2 veterans in 1980, and then carried out a follow-up study 28 years later. Dr Seppo Nikkari and his team from the University of Tampere in Finland conducted the study. He said "During the 28 year follow up , out of 412 deaths, 140 were due to coronary heart disease (CHD), making wounded veterans 1.7 times more likely to die from CHD than the comparison ...

DALLAS – Jan. 26, 2011 – Type 1 diabetes could be converted to an asymptomatic, non-insulin-dependent disorder by eliminating the actions of a specific hormone, new findings by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers suggest. These findings in mice show that insulin becomes completely superfluous and its absence does not cause diabetes or any other abnormality when the actions of glucagon are suppressed. Glucagon, a hormone produced by the pancreas, prevents low blood sugar levels in healthy individuals. It causes high blood sugar in people with type 1 diabetes. "We've ...

Northwestern University researchers have developed a new technique for rapidly prototyping nanoscale devices and structures that is so inexpensive the "print head" can be thrown away when done. Hard-tip, soft-spring lithography (HSL) rolls into one method the best of scanning-probe lithography -- high resolution -- and the best of polymer pen lithography -- low cost and easy implementation. HSL could be used in the areas of electronics (electronic circuits), medical diagnostics (gene chips and arrays of biomolecules) and pharmaceuticals (arrays for screening drug candidates), ...

Researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine have identified a therapy that may enhance memory and prevent the loss of long-term memory. The research is published in the January 27th issue of Nature. Led by Cristina Alberini, PhD, Professor of Neuroscience at Mount Sinai, the research team evaluated how a protein called insulin-like growth factor II (IGF-II), a gene expressed during brain development that declines with aging, impacts memory formation and retention. IGF-II is enriched in the adult brain in several areas, including the hippocampus and cortex, which ...

Researchers have discovered that a drug used to treat dialysis catheter malfunction in kidney dialysis patients may now also help prevent both malfunction as well as infections. Dr. Brenda Hemmelgarn from the University of Calgary Faculty of Medicine and her colleague Dr. Nairne Scott-Douglas, both members of the Libin Cardiovascular Institute of Alberta, undertook a randomized trial at 11 sites across Canada. 115 hemodialysis patients were administered the usual catheter locking solution of heparin after every dialysis session, while 110 patients received rt-PA once ...

Cancer researchers at Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH) have discovered that targeting an enzyme called Uroporphyrinogen Decarboxylase (UROD) can sensitize diseased tissue to radiation and chemotherapy, which could mean fewer side effects for individuals with head and neck cancer. The findings, published online today in Science Translational Medicine (http://stm.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.3001922) are significant because they suggest that targeting UROD – identified for the first time as a key player in human cancers – can selectively boost the effects ...

January 26, 2011 – In a study published online today in Genome Research (www.genome.org), in coordination with the publication of the orangutan genome sequence, scientists have presented the surprising finding that although orangutans and humans are more distantly related, some regions of our genomes are more alike than those of our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. The fossil record helped to establish evolutionary relationships and estimate divergence times of the primate branch leading to humans, but not until the advent of genome sequencing technology has it ...

WASHINGTON – Hands-on safety training for workers in highly hazardous jobs is most effective at improving safe work behavior, according to psychologists who analyzed close to 40 years of research. However, less engaging training can be just as effective in preparing workers to avoid accidents when jobs are less dangerous. More interactive types of safety training may help employees become more aware of the threats they face on the job and avoid making deadly mistakes, according to the findings in the January issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology, which is published ...

To combat last year's Deepwater Horizon oil spill, nearly 800,000 gallons of chemical dispersant were injected directly into the oil and gas flow coming out of the wellhead nearly one mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, as scientists begin to assess how well the strategy worked at breaking up oil droplets, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) chemist Elizabeth B. Kujawinski and her colleagues report that a major component of the dispersant itself was contained within an oil-gas-laden plume in the deep ocean and had still not degraded some three months after it ...

Misaligned research, medical challenges and harsh economics are thwarting efforts to slow the destructive course of Alzheimer's disease in the United States, according to a trio of nationally regarded Alzheimer's researchers writing a "Perspective" in Thursday's (Jan. 27) issue of the journal Neuron. The foremost obstacle is that the most promising preventive strategies are being tested in patients firmly in the grip of Alzheimer's disease — the ones least likely to be helped. The approach would be similar to testing statins — drugs widely used to prevent heart disease ...

Boulder, CO, USA - LITHOSPHERE articles published in the February issue cover present-day movements and past deformation in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua; the tectonics of the northern Owens Valley in California, USA; the paleoseismology of the eastern North Anatolian fault at Yaylabeli, Turkey; exhumation in the southeastern Canadian Cordillera; and the diverse tectonic history of Tunisia. Keywords: Gulf of Fonseca, Central America; Owens Valley, California; North Anatolian fault, Yaylabeli, Turkey, Canadian Cordillera, Canadian Shield, Tunisia. Highlights ...

A new study into Staphylococcus aureus, the bacterium which is responsible for severe chronic infections worldwide, reveals how bacteria have developed a strategy of hiding within host cells to escape the immune system as well as many antibacterial treatments. The research, published by EMBO Molecular Medicine, demonstrates how 'phenotype switching' enables bacteria to adapt to their environmental conditions, lie dormant inside host cells and become a reservoir for relapsing infections. Staphylococcus aureus is a major human pathogen which can be carried by up to 70% ...

Some animals produce more offspring than others do. Hormones like prolactin and corticosterone can exercise a crucial influence on the behaviour of birds in the breeding season and therefore on their reproductive success. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell and their colleagues at the universities of Princeton and Edinburgh have now demonstrated that hormone levels not only play a key role during the breeding season, but already dictate, long in advance, how many eggs a breeding pair will lay, when they will lay them and how often. An ...

Plants producing flower pollen must not leave anything to chance. The model plant thale cress (Arabidopsis), for instance, uses three signalling pathways in concert with partially overlapping functions. The yield becomes the greatest when all three processes are active; however, two are sufficient to form an acceptable quantity of flower pollen. In a new study, Peter Huijser and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne offer fascinating insights into the rich range of proteins that are used by seed plants to develop stamens and form ...

As many as ten to 20 per cent of nurses and nursing students may have substance abuse and addiction problems, but the key to tackling this difficult issue - and protecting public safety - is support and treatment, not punishment. That is the key message in a paper in the February issue of the Journal of Clinical Nursing. Researchers have recommended six key points that could be built into alternative-to-dismissal (ATD) strategies after reviewing the latest research and professional guidance from countries such as the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK. They ...

The temperature of water situated in the subtropical Atlantic experienced a drop of 0.15ºC between 1998 and 2006. This has been revealed by a study led by the IEO (Spanish Oceanography Institute) which suggests that circulation caused by wind could be responsible for this "unusual" behaviour. Whilst the water temperature in this area, situated along the 24.5º north parallel, from the African coast to the Caribbean, rose by 0.27ºC between 1957 and 1998, researchers have recorded a drop of 0.15ºC in the same area between 1998 and 2006. "In the ocean there are very ...