News Articles

There was a period of time when hunters were the greatest conservationists.  Think President Teddy Roosevelt, who evangelized national parks and setting aside wilderness for the public.Later, environmentalism became an occupation for urbanites and they distanced themselves from sportsmen and people who enjoyed nature - they even listed them as enemies, in the case of hunting and fishing. 

It was once believed that crazy ladies acquired a lot of cats. Then it was discovered that a lot of cats instead created crazy ladies; cat poop is laden with an infectious parasite known as Toxoplasma gondii, a protozoan that has recently caused toxoplasmosis epidemics in people. At first it was just schizophrenia in older women, but then broadened out to pregnant women and all people with immune deficiencies. 
Once any link is established some will connect it to obsessive-compulsive disorder and kids' trouble in school, so maybe things have gone overboard in blaming, but Toxoplasma gondii can still be a real concern. Each year in the United States, cats deposit about 1.2 million metric tons of feces into the environment.

Next-generation hydrogels can form synthetic scaffolds to support the formation of replacement tissues and organs in the emerging area of regenerative medicine.
Embedding peptides into the hydrogels stimulates the growth of essential microvascular networks to ensure a good blood supply.  A new paper describes the technology in which hydrogels functionalized with laminin-derived peptides were transplanted in a mouse cornea and were shown to support cell growth and blood vessel formation.

Tropical climates that allow for year-round farming have a tremendous economic advantage, even in the developing world but corn and soybean farmers in Mato Grosso, Brazil have a developed world problem;a 10 percent post-harvest loss, partially due to a lack of storage. 
A research project used Geographic Information System (GIS) software to map the coordinates of commercial, cooperative and private grain storage facilities in Mato Grosso. They focused on capacity greater than 50,000 metric tons, mapping the state's 2,143 registered warehouses. 

Our prehistoric close cousins, the Neandertals, were more similar than science used to think in a variety of ways.
And according to a new paper, they had something resembling modern speech and language, which can be traced back to the last common ancestor we shared with the Neandertals roughly half a million years ago.
Neanderthals have fascinated the academic world and the general public ever since their discovery almost 200 years ago. Initially thought to be sub-human brutes incapable of anything but the most primitive of grunts, they were later found to be a successful form of humanity inhabiting vast swathes of western Eurasia for several hundreds of thousands of years, during harsh ages and milder interglacial periods. 

As Egypt fights over new leadership, Israeli archaeologists have found evidence of an ancient ruler in northern Israel. 
At a site in Tel Hazor National Park, north of the Sea of Galilee, archaeologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have unearthed part of a unique Sphinx belonging to one of the ancient pyramid-building pharaohs. The Sphinx was brought over from Egypt, with a hieroglyphic inscription between its front legs that bears the name of the Egyptian king Mycerinus, who ruled in the third millennium BCE, more than 4,000 years ago and was one of the builders of the famous Giza pyramids. 

Wildfires and their witch's brew of carbon-containing particles significantly degrade air quality, damage human and wildlife health, and interact with sunlight to affect climate.
Measurements taken during the 2011 Las Conchas fire near Los Alamos National Laboratory show that the actual carbon-containing particles emitted by fires are very different than those used in numerical models, providing the potential for inaccuracy in current climate-modeling results.

When the members of a choir sing their heart beats are synchronized, according to a study from the Sahlgrenska Academy at University of Gothenburg.
The pulse of performing choir members tend to increase and decrease in unison. 
In the research project "Kroppens Partitur" (The Body's Musical Score), researchers at the Sahlgrenska Academy are studying how music, in purely biological terms, affects our body and our health. The object is to find new forms where music may be used for medical purposes, primarily within rehabilitation and preventive care and the research group says they were able to show how the musical structure influences the heart rate of choir members.

Max Scherzer, a 6-foot, 3-inch tall pitcher leads Major League Baseball in wins. He hasn't lost a game for the Detroit Tigers this season.
He is example of Constructal-law Theory, said Duke University engineer Adrian Bejan. Constructal-law Theory predicts that elite pitchers will continue to be taller and thus throw faster and seems also to apply to athletes who compete in golf, hockey and boxing.
Studying athletes  gives insight into the biological evolution of human design in nature because sports are meticulous about keeping statistics. The biological evolution of human design in nature is what Bejan terms the Constructal-law Theory, which is really a hypothesis but using Theory as a proper name is all the rage.

How did numerous small, glassy spherules become embedded within specimens of the largest class of meteorites, the chondrites? British mineralogist Henry Sorby first described these spherules, called chondrules, in 1877. Sorby suggested that they might be "droplets of fiery rain" which somehow condensed out of the cloud of gas and dust that formed the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. 
Researchers have continued to regard chondrules as liquid droplets that had been floating in space before becoming quickly cooled, but how did the liquid form? "There's a lot of data that have been puzzling to people," said Lawrence Grossman, professor in geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago.

Hydrogen sulfide, the pungent-smelling gas produced by rotten eggs, is a key player in colon cancer metabolism, and a potential target for therapies for the disease, according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Cell-culture and mouse experiments demonstrated that colon cancer cells produce large amounts of hydrogen sulfide, and depend on the compound for survival and growth. 
"They love it and they need it," said University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston professor Csaba Szabo, co-author of the paper. "Colon cancer cells thrive on this stuff — our data show that they use it to make energy, to divide, to grow and to invade the host."

Antonio Stradivari is universally recognized as the most famous violin maker in the world - if people can name one violin, it is his. During his life, he and his apprentices built more than a thousand violins, violas, cellos and other stringed instruments. The importance of Stradivari's work obviously lies in the craftsmanship, the quality of the materials used and the finishes on the instruments' surfaces. The sound of a violin is a result of the combination of the materials used e.g. wood species and varnishes, the construction technique and the skill of the maker.
So scientists have sought to duplicate that sound by reverse-engineering ways it could have been done.