News Articles

An international research team writing in Science says that a section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas.The results show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.

A team of researchers has demonstrated for the first time the specific activity of the protein NEIL3, one of a group responsible for maintaining the integrity of DNA in humans and other mammals. The discovery is detailed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Since it first was identified about eight years ago, NEIL3 has been believed to be a basic DNA-maintenance enzyme of a type called a glycosylase. These proteins patrol the long, twisted strands of DNA looking for lesions—places where one of the four DNA bases has been damaged by radiation or chemical activity.

Cosmic oddities have set astronomers onto ‘the case of the missing neighboring galaxies’. Located half a billion light-years from Earth, ESO 306-17 is a large, bright elliptical galaxy in the southern sky known as a fossil group. Astronomers use that term to emphasize the isolated nature of these galaxies but are they really like fossils,  the last remnants of a once-active community, or did ESO 306-17 gobble up its next-door neighbors? 

Tel Aviv University biologists say a solution to our search for alternative energy may come from an unexpected source ―  peas. Researchers isolating minute crystals of the PSI super complex from the pea plant suggests these crystals can be illuminated and used as small battery chargers or form the core of more efficient man-made solar cells.To generate useful energy, plants have evolved very sophisticated "nano-machinery" which operates with light as its energy source and gives a perfect quantum yield of 100%. Called the Photosystem I (PSI) complex, this complex was isolated from pea leaves and crystallized, which enabled researchers to describe in detail its intricate structure.

Marketing experts may be able to test a product's appeal while it is still being designed thanks to advanced tools used to see the human brain at work, according to researchers from Duke and Emory Universities.So-called "neuromarketing" takes tools like the functional MRI and applies them to the somewhat abstract likes and dislikes of customer decision-making.Though this raises the specter of marketers being able to read people's minds, neuromarketing may prove to be an affordable way for marketers to gather information that was previously unobtainable, or that consumers themselves may not even be fully aware of, says Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University.

A new study of the Atlantic longarm octopus, Macrotritopus defilippi, indicates that the species has exceptional camouflage capabilities. Scientists say the octopus avoids predators in part by expertly disguising itself as a flounder. While two other species of octopuses are known to imitate flounder, this is the first report of flounder mimicry by an Atlantic octopus, and only the fourth convincing case of mimicry in cephalopods.The study was published this week in Biological Bulletin.

Preventing mosquitoes from urinating as they feed on blood could prevent the spread of dengue fever, yellow fever and other diseases, say researchers writing in the American Journal of Physiology.When mosquitoes consume and process blood meals, they must urinate to prevent fluid and salt overloads that can kill them. The research team found that blocking a protein in the renal tubules of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes prevents them from relieving themselves. The work may lead to the development of new insecticides to disrupt the mosquito's renal system, which contributes to a mosquito's survival after feeding on blood.

An asteroid colliding with Earth was responsible for the Cretaceous–Tertiary mass extinction, which wiped out the dinosaurs and more than half of species on Earth, according to a new review published in Science. Scientists have previously argued about whether the extinction was caused by the asteroid or by volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps in India, where there were a series of super volcanic eruptions that lasted approximately 1.5 million years. These eruptions spewed 1,100,000 km3 of basalt lava across the Deccan Traps, which would have been enough to fill the Black Sea twice, and were thought to have caused a cooling of the atmosphere and acid rain on a global scale.

Sea ice may have extended to the equator 716.5 million years ago, bringing new precision to a "snowball Earth" event long suspected to have taken place around that time, geologists report this week in Science.The new findings -- based on an analysis of ancient tropical rocks that are now found in remote northwestern Canada -- bolster the theory that our planet has, at times in the past, been ice-covered at all latitudes.The survival of eukaryotic life throughout this period indicates sunlight and surface water remained available somewhere on the surface of Earth. The earliest animals arose at roughly the same time, following a major proliferation of eukaryotes.

Flowing lava probably carved at least one of the river-like channels on the surface of Mars, according to results of a study presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Whether channels on Mars were formed by water or by lava has been debated for years, and the outcome is thought to influence the likelihood of finding life there.

A new study in Environmental Science and Technology reports that soil microbes have become progressively more resistant to antibiotics over the last 60 years, despite more stringent rules on the use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture.The study involved an analysis of 18 different antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) to four different classes of antibiotics in soil samples collected in the Netherlands from 1940 to 2008.

A low-cost water purification technique that uses seeds from the Moringa oleifera tree can produce a 90.00% to 99.99% bacterial reduction in previously untreated water, according to a paper published in Current Protocols in Microbiology. The method could help drastically reduce the incidence of waterborne disease in the developing world. "Moringa oleifera is a vegetable tree which is grown in Africa, Central and South America, the Indian subcontinent, and South East Asia. It could be considered to be one of the world's most useful trees," said Michael Lea, a researcher at Clearinghouse, a Canadian organization dedicated to investigating and implementing low-cost water purification technologies.