Science News
clock | December 11, 2008Acoustic Phenomena Explain Why Boats And Animals Collide:
Researchers at Florida Atlantic University have laid the groundwork for a sensory explanation for why manatees and other animals are hit repeatedly by boats. Last year, 73 manatees were killed by boats in Florida's bays and inland waterways. Marine authorities have responded to deaths from boat collisions by imposing low speed limits on boats.
No Place Like Home: New Theory For How Salmon, Sea Turtles Find Their Birthplace:
How marine animals find their way back to their birthplace to reproduce after migrating across thousands of miles…
clock | December 10, 2008There are 11 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Settling Decisions and Heterospecific Social Information Use in Shrikes:
Animals often settle near competitors, a behavior known as social attraction, which belies standard habitat selection theory. Two hypotheses…
clock | December 10, 2008Why Some Bird Species Lay Only One Egg:
Why do some species of birds lay only one egg in their nest, while others lay 10 or more? A global study of the wide variation among birds in this trait, known as the "clutch size," now provides biologists with some answers. The study, published in the current issue of the journal PLoS Biology, combined data on the clutch sizes of 5,290 species of birds with information on the biology and environment of each of these species.
Secret Ingredient For The Health Of Tropical Rainforests Discovered:
A team of researchers led by Princeton University scientists…
clock | December 9, 2008There are 9 new articles in PLoS ONE today and they are, like, totally awesome!
As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Why Do Dolphins Carry Sponges?:
Tool use is rare in wild animals, but of widespread interest because of its relationship to animal cognition, social learning and culture. Despite…
clock | December 8, 2008There are 14 new articles in PLoS ONE today, as well as new papers in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine.
As always, for PLoS ONE articles, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click.
Here are my own picks for the week- awesome papers! - you go and look for your own favourites:
The Worldwide Variation in Avian Clutch Size across Species and Space:
Why do some bird species lay only one egg in…
clock | December 8, 2008
How Shift Workers Can Improve Job Performance And Implement Realistic Sleep Schedule:
A new study in the journal Sleep shows that the use of light exposure therapy, dark sunglasses and a strict sleep schedule can help night-shift workers create a "compromise circadian phase position," which may result in increased performance and alertness during night shifts while still allowing adequate nighttime sleep on days off.
Body Clock Linked To Diabetes And High Blood Sugar In New Genome-wide Study:
Diabetes and high levels of blood sugar may be linked to abnormalities in a person's body clock and…
j7uy5 | December 8, 2008
Tapentadol
is a drug for pain. It was approved by the US FDA for the
treatment of moderate to severe pain. The
href="http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2008/NEW01916.html">FDA
news release was dated 24 November 2008, although the actual
approval was a few days earlier.
Tapentadol acts on μ-opioid receptors, making it similar to
morphine
and its ilk. Do we need another opioid agonist? And
if so,
why? Suspicions deepen because it was produced by the same
company that makes tramadol. Indeed, it is similar to
tramadol in
many ways. Tramadol is the active ingredient in
Ultram®, now…
clock | December 7, 2008Food Can Affect A Cell In The Same Way Hormones Do:
VIB researchers connected to the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven have discovered an important new mechanism with which cells can detect nutrients. This happens in the same way - and with the same effects - as when cells receive a message from a hormone. This finding can teach us more about how food affects our body; and, furthermore, it can form the basis for new candidate targets for medicines.
Climate Change Wiped Out Cave Bears 13 Millennia Earlier Than Thought:
Enormous cave bears, Ursus spelaeus, that once inhabited a large swathe of…
clock | December 7, 2008
Past Religious Diversity And Intolerance Have Profound Impact On Genetics Of Iberian People:
New research suggests that relatively recent events had a substantial impact on patterns of genetic diversity in the southwest region of Europe. The study, published on December 4th in the American Journal of Human Genetics, shows that geographical patterns of ancestry appear to have been influenced by religious conversions of both Jews and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula.
Genetic Ancestry Of African-Americans Reveals New Insights About Gene Expression:
The amount of proteins produced in cells--a…
clock | December 6, 2008Why The 'Perfect' Body Isn't Always Perfect: How Hormones Interact With Waist-to-hip Ratios In Women:
Having an imperfect body may come with some substantial benefits for some women, according to a new article in the December issue of Current Anthropology. The hormones that make women physically stronger, more competitive and better able to deal with stress also tend to redistribute fat from the hips to the waist, according to Elizabeth Cashdan, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. So in societies and situations where women are under pressure to procure resources, they may be less…
clock | December 5, 2008There are 9 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
BK Channels Regulate Spontaneous Action Potential Rhythmicity in the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus:
Circadian (~24 hr) rhythms are generated by the central pacemaker localized to the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the…
clock | December 5, 2008For almost 20 years, The Quagga Project has been working on recreating this extinct species of zebra:
The Quagga Project was officially launched in South Africa in 1987,
with Reinhold Rau at its helm. It has the aim of recreating quagga by
selective breeding from plains zebra; ultimately returning quagga to the
wild. What makes this project so innovative and revolutionary is that
this is a simple, selective breeding programme over generations. There
is no genetic manipulation, and no cloning. It's the only project of its
kind in the world.
"The important thing is that we're not creating a new…
clock | December 5, 2008Up To 10% Of Children Start School Suffering From Sleep Disturbances:
Up to 10% of children starting school suffer from sleep disturbances and these may lead to poor performance or behavioral difficulties. In the current edition of Deutsches Ãrzteblatt International, the child and adolescent psychiatrist Gerd Lehmkuhl and his colleagues present the results of a study from Cologne, Germany.
Rolling 'Sea Grape' Rocks The Fossil Record:
A submarine expedition that went looking for visually flashy sea creatures instead found a drab, mud-covered blob that may turn out to be truly spectacular…
clock | December 4, 2008There are 12 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Ecological Niche of the 2003 West Nile Virus Epidemic in the Northern Great Plains of the United States:
The incidence of West Nile virus (WNv) has remained high in the northern Great Plains compared to the rest of…
clock | December 4, 2008New Giant Toothless Pterosaur Species Discovered:
A researcher at the University of Portsmouth has identified a new species of pterosaur, the largest of its kind to ever be found. It represents an entirely new genus of these flying reptiles that ruled the skies 115 million years ago.
Antioxidants Are Unlikely To Prevent Aging, Study Suggests:
Diets and beauty products which claim to have anti-oxidant properties are unlikely to prevent aging, according to research funded by the Wellcome Trust. Researchers at the Institute of Healthy aging at UCL (University College London) say this is because…
clock | December 3, 2008There are 14 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Large Differences in Aging Phenotype between Strains of the Short-Lived Annual Fish Nothobranchius furzeri:
A laboratory inbred strain of the annual fish Nothobranchius furzeri shows exceptionally short life…
clock | December 3, 2008Molecular Partnership Controls Daily Rhythms, Body Metabolism:
A research team led by Mitchell Lazar, MD, PhD, Director of the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, has discovered a key molecular partnership that coordinates body rhythms and metabolism. Lazar and his colleagues, including the study's first author, Penn Veterinary Medicine doctoral student Theresa Alenghat, studied a protein called NCoR that modulates the body's responses to metabolic hormones. They engineered a mutation into mice that prevents NCoR from working…
clock | December 2, 2008There are 10 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping:
The concept of an individual swapping his or her body with that of another person has captured the imagination of writers and artists for decades. Although this…
clock | December 2, 2008Melatonin May Save Eyesight In Inflammatory Disease, Study Suggests:
Current research suggests that melatonin therapy may help treat uveitis, a common inflammatory eye disease. People with uveitis develop sudden redness and pain in their eyes, and their vision rapidly deteriorates. Untreated, uveitis can lead to permanent vision loss, accounting for an estimated 10-15% of cases of blindness in the US. Uveitis has a wide variety of causes, including eye injury, cancer, infection, and autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. There is currently no optimal…
clock | December 1, 2008Let's see what is new in PLoS Medicine, PLoS Biology and PLoS ONE today:
Time-of-Day-Dependent Enhancement of Adult Neurogenesis in the Hippocampus:
Adult neurogenesis occurs in specific regions of the mammalian brain such as the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus. In the neurogenic region, neural progenitor cells continuously divide and give birth to new neurons. Although biological properties of neurons and glia in the hippocampus have been demonstrated to fluctuate depending on specific times of the day, it is unclear if neural progenitors and neurogenesis in the adult brain are temporally…