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66,530 articles from ScienceDaily

• TUESDAY 11. DECEMBER, 2007
• 12:43 Beetle Dung Helps Forests Recover From Fire

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  Beetle droppings -- known in the scientific world as frass -- are crucial to forests recovering from fire.Armed with a pair of tweezers and a handful of beetle droppings,researchers have discovered why bug-sized dung is so important to areas ravaged by fire.  

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• 12:43 Bird-flu Expert Calls For Changes In Early-warning System

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  The international science community is not doing enough to track the many avian influenza viruses that might cause the next pandemic, according to new research.  

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• 12:43 Chemicals Used As Fire Retardants Could Be Harmful, Researchers Say

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  Margarita Curras-Collazo's lab at the University of California-Riverside has done research that shows that polybrominated diphenyl ethers, chemicals used as fire retardants, disrupt mechanisms that are responsible for releasing hormones in the body. Moreover, her lab has shown that like polychlorinated biphenyls, whose manufacture in the US was discontinued in 1977, PBDEs alter calcium signaling in the brain.  

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• 12:43 Cooler, Faster, Cheaper: Researchers Advance Process To Manufacture Silicon Chips

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  The next generation of laptops, desk computers, cell phones and other semiconductor devices may get faster and more cost-effective with new research. "We've developed a new process and equipment that will lead to a significant reduction in heat generated by silicon chips or microprocessors while speeding up the rate at which information is sent," says one of the researchers.  

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• 12:43 For The Fruit Fly, Everything Changes After Sex

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  The females of many insect species change their behavior right after mating: mosquitoes look for a meal of fresh blood, and flies begin to lay eggs. Researchers at Austria's Research Institute of Molecular Pathology managed to identify the molecular switches that are responsible for these behavioral changes. This could open up new possibilities to control agricultural pests or disease carriers. Researchers in the journal Nature report on the discovery in its current online release.  

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• 12:43 Is There A Developmental Component To The Risk For Depression?

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  Psychiatrists remain divided as to how to define and classify the mood and anxiety disorders, the most common mental disorders. Authors of a new study explain that their findings support a proposed "fetal programming" model for depression and anxiety, which posits that prenatal stress may result in permanent maladaptive changes to the developing fetal brain.  

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• 12:43 Living Longer With Obesity Means Heavier Burden For Hospitals

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  Living longer with obesity can lead to both longer hospital stays and more avoidable trips to the hospital, according to two new studies from Purdue University.  

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• 12:43 Neurons In The Frontal Lobe May Be Responsible For Rational Decision-making

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  Scientists have found that when monkeys choose between different options, the value neurons assign to each option does not depend on the menu of choices. This phenomenon may explain a behavioral trait called preference transitivity, which is the hallmark of rational economic choice. The results may also elucidate our understanding of certain "choice deficits" such as eating disorders, compulsive gambling and other abnormal social behaviors.  

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• 12:43 Plasma Science Instrument Finds Surprises At Solar System's Edge

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  The Voyager 2 spacecraft's Plasma Science instrument, developed at MIT in the 1970s, has turned up surprising revelations about the boundary zone that marks the edge of the Sun's influence in space.  

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• 12:43 Psychiatrists: Least Religious But Most Interested In Patients' Religion

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  Although psychiatrists are among the least religious physicians, they seem to be the most interested in the religious and spiritual dimensions of their patients, according to survey data.  

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• 12:43 Researchers Can Read Thoughts To Decipher What A Person Is Actually Seeing

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  Following ground-breaking research showing that neurons in the human brain respond in an abstract manner to particular individuals or objects, researchers have now discovered that, from the firing of this type of neuron, they can tell what a person is actually seeing. The original research showed that one neuron fired to, for instance, Jennifer Aniston, another one to Halle Berry, another one to the Sydney Opera House, etc.  

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• 12:43 Smaller Storms Drop Larger Overall Rainfall In Hurricane Season

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  Researchers have found that when residents of the US southeastern states look skyward for rain to alleviate a long-term drought, they should be hoping for a tropical storm over a hurricane for more reasons than one. According to a new study using NASA satellite data, smaller tropical storms do more to alleviate droughts than hurricanes do over the course of a season by bringing greater cumulative rainfall.  

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• 12:43 Vaccine Improves Event-free Survival For Leukemia Patients

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  Patients whose immune system responded to a peptide vaccine for leukemia enjoyed a median remission that was more than three times longer than nonresponders, according to researchers.  

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• 12:43 Vaccine Shows Promise In Preventing Mono

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  A new study suggests that a vaccine targeting Epstein-Barr virus may prevent infectious mononucleosis, commonly known as "mono" or "glandular fever." EBV is a member of the herpes virus family and one of the most common viruses in humans, with nearly all adults in developed countries such as the United States having been infected.  

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• 12:43 Waterborne Carbon Increases Threat Of Environmental Mercury

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  Mercury is a potent neurotoxin and a worrisome environmental contaminant, but the severity of its threat appears to depend on what else is in the water. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that the presence of dissolved organic material increases the biological risk of aqueous mercury and may even serve as an environmental mercury source.  

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• 12:43 Discovery Opens New Window To Understanding Chronic Myeloid Leukemia

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  Oregon Health & Science University Cancer Institute researchers have opened a new window into the roots of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). "We are looking under the surface of CML to understand better where the cancer is coming from. We have discovered abnormal cells in the early stem cell population in some CML patients, which don't belong to the CML clone. These are abnormal cells that are not part of the CML clone," said Thomas Bumm, M.D., OHSU Cancer Institute member.  

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• 12:43 Far Flung Food: Europe's Distant Diets

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  Across the European Union, food is traveling more, and not always in ways that make sense. Consider the chocolate covered waffle: Last year, Britain both imported 14,000 tons, and exported 15,000 tons. And it is not just waffles that are traveling further, as Europeans are eating -- and importing -- more food from outside the EU than ever before.  

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• 12:43 In Search For Water On Mars, Clues From Antarctica

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  Scientists have gathered more evidence that suggests flowing water on Mars -- by comparing images of the red planet to an otherworldly landscape on Earth. In recent years, scientists have examined images of several sites on Mars where water appears to have flowed to the surface and left behind a trail of sediment. Those sites closely resemble places where water flows today in the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica , the new study has found.  

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• 12:43 Mediterranean Diet And Physical Activity Each Associated With Lower Death Rate Over 5 Years

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  Eating a Mediterranean diet and following national recommendations for physical activity are each associated with a reduced risk of death over a five-year period, according to two reports in the Dec. 10/24 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Both studies use data from the National Institutes of Health-AARP Diet and Health Study, which began when questionnaires were returned from 566,407 AARP members age 50 to 71 in six states between 1995 and 1996.  

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• 12:43 New Smartpen And Paper To Help Teach Blind College Students

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  Subjects like physics, calculus and biology are challenging for most students, but imagine tackling these topics without being able to see the graphs and figures used to teach them. A new smartpen and paper technology that works with touch and records classroom audio aims to bring these subjects to life for blind students.  

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• 12:43 Physicians Seek To Improve The Quality Of Sleep In ICU

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  The sleep patterns of patients in the intensive care unit are so superficial that they barely spend any time in the restorative stages of sleep that aid in healing, UT Southwestern Medical Center physicians have found.  

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• 12:43 Researcher Discovers What Fuels Certain Cancer Mutation

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  An Oregon Health & Science University Cancer Institute researcher has discovered that a particular hormone is responsible for driving a cancer enzyme to cause an often deadly red blood cell cancer. Researchers working with the cancer mutation in the JAK2 enzyme have found that the enzyme is dependent on the hormone TNF-alpha to grow and cause a red blood cell cancer called polycythemia vera, said principal investigator Thomas Bumm, M.D., Ph.D., OHSU Cancer Institute member.  

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• 12:43 Scientists Strike Blow In Superbugs Struggle

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  Scientists have pioneered new ways of tweaking the molecular structure of antibiotics -- an innovation that could be crucial in the fight against powerful superbugs. They have paved the way for the development of new types of antibiotics capable of fighting increasingly resistant bacteria.  

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• 12:43 World's Protected Areas Threatened By Climate Change, New Study Shows

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  Climate change will affect national parks, forest reserves and other protected areas around the world, in some cases altering conditions so severely that the resulting environments will be virtually new to the planet, according to a study presented at the UN climate change talks in Bali, Indonesia.  

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• 11:00 Alarming Rise In Substance Abuse Among Somali Combatants

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  An alarming rise in drug-related problems amongst militia in southern and central Somalia, which has not been under the control of any type of government for more than a decade, is reported in a study published this week in the open access journal PLoS Medicine.  

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