News Articles

A family of molecules called TAML activators provide an environmentally friendly method for breaking down toxic compounds that contaminate water, including endocrine disruptors.

Shrinking sea ice cover in the North Atlantic - baby harp seals impacted most.
A new paper says satellite images have allowed researchers to gauge the relative roles that genetic, environmental and demographic factors such as age and gender may be playing in harp seal stranding rates along the U.S. and Canadian east coasts in recent years.  Recent warming in the North Atlantic gets the blame, according to the paper by advocacy group the International Fund for Animal Welfare and Duke University. 

Resveratrol, a natural antioxidant compound found in red grapes and other plants, has received widespread attention for being a possible anti-aging compound and is now widely available as a dietary supplement; many claims have been made about its role in explaining the cardiovascular health benefits of red wine, and other foods.
New research in The Journal of Physiology instead suggests that eating a diet rich in antioxidants may actually block or counteract many of the health benefits of exercise, including reduced blood pressure and cholesterol. This is in contrast to studies in animals where resveratrol improved the cardiovascular benefits of exercise.

Since 1935, when Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger created his famous thought experiment about a cat that was both alive and dead, physicists have tried to create large scale systems to test how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to everyday objects.
Researchers say they have made a significant step forward in this direction by creating a large system that is in two substantially different states at the same time
Understanding Schrödinger's cat

A new paper in Biology Letters raises more questions about the benefits of vitamins as a health supplement.High doses of dietary antioxidants such as vitamins are claimed to slow the process of cellular aging by lessening the damage to proteins, lipids and DNA caused by free radicals. Some research has found that the longevity of mice could be extended by administering particular vitamin supplements, despite the supplements' limited effectiveness in reducing free radical damage. However, the opposite was found to be true in voles in a new study.

The genetic sequence of the X chromosome, the female counterpart to the male-associated Y chromosome, reveals that large portions of the X have evolved to play a specialized role in sperm production.

Insect limbs can move without muscles – and a new study helps to explain how insects control their movements using a close interplay of neuronal control and 'clever biomechanical tricks', which may provide engineers with new ways to improve the control of robotic and prosthetic limbs.Their work helps to explain how insects control their movements using a close interplay of neuronal control and 'clever biomechanical tricks,' says lead researcher Dr Tom Matheson, a Reader in Neurobiology at the University of Leicester.

The ancient Romans were the first to officially discovered that rotating crops improves plant nutrition and inhibits the spread of disease. While it's common wisdom today, science is often about confirming why nature works the way it does. A new paper details profound effect crop rotation has on enriching soil with bacteria, fungi and protozoa. Soil was collected from a field near Norwich and planted with wheat, oats and peas. After growing wheat, it remained largely unchanged and the microbes in it were mostly bacteria. However, growing oat and pea in the same sample caused a huge shift towards protozoa and nematode worms. Soil grown with peas was highly enriched for fungi.

Researchers using  ‘metagenomics’,  the open-ended sequencing of DNA from samples without the need for culture or target-specific amplification or enrichment, have recovered tuberculosis (TB) genomes from the lung tissue of a 215-year old mummy using a technique known as metagenomics.

Lots of people who watch the news see when records, some that have stood for a hundred years, are broken in heat waves. But the increase in minimum daily temperatures is telling a more interesting story than maximum ones. Since 1901, nighttime heat waves, when the daily low is in the top 1 percent of the temperatures on record for at least three nights in a row, have quadrupled, according to a new paper.
Researchers found that these nighttime heat waves are becoming more frequent in western Washington and Oregon. It's a good time to stay inside and read this article because, on average, heat waves tend to strike around the last week of July.

A potential barrier to deep Antarctic circumpolar flow until the late Miocene?

On July 18th, 2013, at 9:06 a.m. EDT, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) captured an image of a gigantic coronal hole hovering over the sun's north pole.
Coronal holes are dark, low density regions of the sun's outermost atmosphere, the corona, and contain little solar material and lower temperatures so they appear much darker than their surroundings.