News Articles

There's no awareness issue in climate change - almost no one on the planet hasn't heard of it or lacks an opinion.
62% of Americans believe global warming is happening - which means 38% do not. Like evolution or anti-science beliefs about genetic modification and vaccines and autism, the majority may fall along particular cultural lines but acceptance is still a problem that defies easy categorization and stereotypes. Yet framing and deficit thinking have all been tried, and they have made the problem worse. Instead of leading to more science acceptance, opinion on the climate now goes up and down with media reports about the weather.

A year after the 2009 human H1N1 pandemic began, researchers detected the H1N1 virus in free-ranging northern elephant seals off the central California coast. It is the first report of that flu strain in any marine mammal.H1N1 originated in pigs. It emerged in humans in 2009, spreading worldwide as a pandemic. The World Health Organization now considers the H1N1 strain from 2009 to be under control, taking on the behavior of a seasonal virus.

Over the past few years, demand from the surveillance market and huge spending by governments across the globe on biometric technologies has caused the facial recognition technology market to become more accurate, less costly and significantly more mainstream.
More accurate technology and the brighter economic future it can bring has led to more traction and investment from the commercial sector. The development of 3-D face recognition technology, backed by improved imaging solutions like middleware and fast analytics, has helped the technology to overcome its traditional flaws such as poor results in low lights, pose variation and image reconstruction 

Temperatures in central China are 10 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit hotter today than they were 20,000 years ago - an increase two to four times greater than many scientists previously thought.  

If you are physically strong, social science scholars believe they can predict whether or not you are more conservative than other men.
This might seem obvious. Fitness takes a lot of individual initiative, the government can do all of the outreach programs and legislate all of the soda cups they want, but it won't make people exercise. Super-fit people have to be conservative when it comes to their own exercise, even if they are liberal about money. 
Michael Bang Petersen, associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Government at Aarhus University, and evolutionary psychology colleagues at UC Santa Barbara say the strength/politics connection is due to evolution, which is sure to annoy biologists.

The Rubber Hand illusion never fails to teach us new things - not just about neuroscience, but also about culture.
If you are not familiar with the Rubber Hand illusion, it shows that the combination of seeing a touch on a rubber hand and feeing a touch on your own creates the illusion that the fake hand is now part of your body. In a new paper, scholars did that; they asked participants to look at a fake hand being touched, while at the same time the experimenter touched the participants' own hand, hidden out of view.

Between 1994 and 2008, Canada had 66,716 hospital admissions for cycling accidents. 30% of those were head injuries. Cyclists are vulnerable road users and head injuries account for 75% of cycling-related deaths. It's a dangerous way to travel and so the debate has long been whether or not helmet legislation makes any difference in injuries. 

During that time, there was a substantial and consistent fall in the rate of hospital admissions for cycling related head injuries - and reductions were greatest in provinces with helmet legislation - but that trend had been happening before the law was enacted.

A new study uses mouse genetics to demonstrate how a handful of workhorse signaling pathways interact to construct multiple structures that comprise the vertebrate body and how crosstalk between two of those pathways - those governed by proteins known as Notch and BMP (for Bone Morphogenetic Protein) receptors - occurs over and over in processes as diverse as forming a tooth, sculpting a heart valve and building a brain. 
One Notch family protein, Notch2, shapes an eye structure known as the ciliary body (CB), most likely by ensuring that BMP signals remain loud and clear. Understanding CB construction is critical, as excessive pressure is one risk factor for glaucoma.  

The toxin that causes botulism is the most potent that we know of - just 1/1,000th the weight of a grain of salt can be fatal, which is why so much effort has been put into keeping Clostridium botulinum, which produces the toxin, out of our food.

The evolution of the complex, weight-bearing hips of walking animals from the basic hips of fish was a much simpler process than previously thought, according to a new paper.
Tetrapods, four-legged animals, first came to land about 395 million years ago - a significant step, literally and figuratively, and it was made possible by strong hipbones and a connection through the spine via an ilium, features that were not present in the fish ancestors of tetrapods. 

The drug candidate J147 was able to reverse memory deficits and improve several aspects of brain function in mice with advanced symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study.  

Unique cellular and molecular mechanisms behind tooth renewal in American alligators may help science learn how to stimulate tooth regeneration in people, according to a new study.
We regenerate teeth now. We grow baby teeth and then we replace those with adult teeth.  Yet most vertebrates can replace teeth throughout their lives and we cannot, despite the lingering presence of dental lamina, a band of epithelial tissue crucial to tooth development. Because alligators have well-organized teeth with similar form and structure as mammalian teeth and are capable of lifelong tooth renewal, the authors reasoned that they might serve as models for mammalian tooth replacement.