News Articles

Researchers writing in PNAS state they have seen an increased reaction to stress in animals whose ancestors were exposed to an environmental compound, vinclozolin, a popular fruit and vegetable fungicide, even generations earlier. The findings put a new twist on the notions of nature and nurture and may have implications for how certain behavioral tendencies might be inherited.  They exposed gestating female rats to vinclozolin and then put the rats' third generation of offspring through a variety of behavioral tests and found the descendant rats were more anxious, more sensitive to stress, and had greater activity in stress-related regions of the brain than descendants of unexposed rats.

A team of Australian scientists has identified new genes that show identifiable changes in the blood of people with bowel cancer.

The discovery has the potential to underpin a new cost-effective blood test that would signal the early stages of bowel cancer. This test could potentially save thousands of lives by supplementing existing screening programs and encouraging those at risk to have a colonoscopy.

The research presented today is the result of over five years of scientific collaboration between Australian biotechnology company Clinical Genomics, CSIRO and the Flinders Centre for Innovation in Cancer at Flinders University in Adelaide, lead by senior investigator Professor Graeme Young.

Giant planets have diverse chemistry; Jupiter, for example, first formed as a large solid core and then then accreted gas from the disk around it, which led to a different chemistry in its outer layers. When the Galileo spacecraft entered Jupiter’s atmosphere in 1995, it found the proportion of heavier elements (astronomers call these ‘metals’) to be three times higher than in the Sun. Brown dwarfs, around the same size, are instead star-like objects with insufficient mass to ignite hydrogen fusion in their cores. Over time they cool to temperatures of just a few hundred degrees. Like stars, they formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud a few hundred light years across.

Polar bears are evolutionarily older and genetically more distinct than believed. This largest Arctic carnivore evolved as early as 600,000 years ago, five times older than previously recognized. 

What do diamonds and chocolate have in common?  Well, urban legend says girls love them both.  Maybe we can add volcanoes if we are using correlational woo.A previously unrecognized volcanic process similar to one used in chocolate manufacturing is important in the dynamics of volcanic eruptions. 'Fluidised spray granulation'  is a type of gas injection and spraying process used to form smooth coatings on confectionaries but it can also occur during kimberlite eruptions to produce well-rounded particles containing fragments from the Earth's mantle - most notably diamonds. 

Based on new fossil evidence, the age of the Rhine river is five million years older than previously believed.The famous Rhine of song and legend flows through Switzerland, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands on its way to the North Sea. The catchment area of the Rhine, around 1,200 kilometers of it, draws from Luxembourg, Belgium, France, Lichtenstein and Italy. As widely known as the river is, its original age has remained a science puzzle.

Men are generally more reluctant to try vegetarian products and a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says that is influenced by a strong association of meat with masculinity. "We examined whether people in Western cultures have a metaphoric link between meat and men" write the authors.  And they concluded there was a strong cultural connection to meat - especially muscle meat, like steak. Evolutionary psychologists would likely disagree, as do unbiased dietary scientists.

Around election season, in whatever country you are in (assuming you have elections) you can tell True Believers in their earnest politics truly wish the other side could be labeled as having defective brains and genetics and therefore be cured - or at least sterilized. 

A group of studies says that salmon raised in man-made hatcheries can harm wild salmon through competition for food and habitat. Salmon, which survived millions of years of evolution, are in danger from...salmon.The studies provide new evidence that fast-growing hatchery fish compete with wild fish for food and habitat in the ocean as well as in the rivers where they return to spawn and even raises questions about whether the ocean can supply enough food to support future increases in hatchery fish while still sustaining wild salmon. 

Things would seem to be good in China.  They are the only world economy not in a financial demilitarized zone, things are booming.  Yet more money is not making people there happier. They're actually less happy today than shortly after the Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing was crushed by the military, says economist Richard Easterlin, researcher in "happiness economics" and namesake of the Easterlin Paradox.

Researchers  have uncovered a new way to stimulate activity of immune cell opiate receptors, leading to efficient tumor cell clearance - their pharmacological approach can activate the immune cells to prevent cancer growth through stimulation of the opiate receptors found on immune cells.

Understanding neurons - their shape, patterns of electrical activity even a profile of which genes are turned on at a given moment - remains as much art as science due to the complexity of research.But that could soon change: Researchers at MIT and the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a way to automate the process of finding and recording information from neurons in the living brain. The researchers have shown that a robotic arm guided by a cell-detecting computer algorithm can identify and record from neurons in the living mouse brain with better accuracy and speed than a human experimenter.