News Articles

A new study in PNAS of the side-blotched lizard (Uta stansburiana) may bolster the idea that 'morphs', morphologically distinct types often found within species, could be the raw material for speciation. Previous research has shown that competition among male side-blotched lizards takes the form of a rock-paper-scissors game in which each mating strategy beats and is beaten by one other strategy. Males with orange throats can take territory from blue-throated males because they have more testosterone and body mass. As a result, orange males control large territories containing many females.

People who are usually happy, enthusiastic and content are less likely to develop heart disease than those who tend not to be happy, according to a purely observational study that needs to be confirmed with clinical research.Over a period of ten years, researchers followed 1,739 healthy adults (862 men and 877 women) who were participating in the 1995 Nova Scotia Health Survey. At the start of the study, published in the European Heart Journal, trained nurses assessed the participants' risk of heart disease and, with both self-reporting and clinical assessment, they measured symptoms of depression, hostility, anxiety and the degree of expression of positive emotions, which is known as "positive affect".

Scientists have known that newly acquired, short-term memories are often fleeting, but a new study of Drosophila in Cell suggests that there is a good reason for that kind of forgetfulness. An active process of erasing memories may be as important as the ability to lay down new memories. "Learning activates the biochemical formation of memory," says Yi Zhong of Tsinghua University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. "But you need to remove memories for new information to come in. We've found that forgetting is an active process to remove memory."

A recent study of marine mammals by University of Florida aquatic animal health experts has revealed that dolphins may be the ideal model for studying cervical cancer in humans."We discovered that dolphins get multiple infections of apillomaviruses, which are known to be linked with cervical cancer in women," said Hendrik Nollens, a marine mammal biologist and clinical assistant professor at UF's College of Veterinary Medicine today (Feb. 18) at the annual meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. "Dolphins are the only species besides humans that we know of that can harbor coinfections, or infections of multiple papillomavirus types, in the genital mucosa."

 Scientists searching for alternatives to synthetic pesticides say volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by the fungus Muscodor albus may offer a biologically based way to rid certain crops of destructive pests. Reseachers from the USDA's Agriculture Research Service laboratories put the idea to the test in three different studies by pitting Muscodor against potato tuber moths, apple codling moths and Tilletia fungi that cause bunt diseases in wheat.

Ships blowing off steam are aiding researchers who are studying how manmade particles might help mitigate climate change. New results from modeling clouds like those seen in shipping lanes reveal the complex interplay between aerosols, the prevailing weather and even the time of day the aerosol particles hit the air, according to research to be presented Saturday morning at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting.

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Hannah Sutter says she has used the analytical eyes of a lawyer to look at the facts and myths of obesity, health and diet and says the proportion of men and women classed as obese has risen steeply in recent years, though there has been no particular increase in the number of people who are overweight, and calorie intake has generally decreased. So we are eating less but obesity has increased. What's going on?

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Vigorous two-party competition and modest salaries for lawmkaers are key to preventing pork barrel legislation and other bills that benefit only one lawmaker's constituents, finds a new study of state lawmaking published in the American Political Science Review.the study examined every piece of legislation, a total of 165,284 bills, introduced during seven legislative sessions between 1880 and 1997 in the lower house of 13 state legislatures: Alabama, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington.

Primitive stars are thought to have formed from material forged shortly after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago and are mainly observed in the Milky Way. But now researchers are reporting that they have uncovered more primitive stars located in neighboring dwarf galaxies. The discovery was made possible by much more detailed spectra obtained with the UVES instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope."We have, in effect, found a flaw in the forensic methods used until now," says Else Starkenburg, lead researcher on the project. "Our improved approach allows us to uncover the primitive stars hidden among all the other, more common stars."

The southern limit of permafrost in the James Bay Region in northern Quebec, Canada is now 130 kilometers further north than it was 50 years ago, according to two researchers from the Department of Biology at Université Laval. A lack of long term climatic data for the area makes it impossible for the researchers to confirm the cause, but If the trend continues, permafrost in the region will completely disappear in the near future. The results of the new study appear in Permafrost and Periglacial Processes.

An analysis of the skeletal remains found in Carthaginian burial urns could finally lay to rest the millennia-old conjecture that the ancient empire of Carthage regularly sacrificed its youngest citizens. An examination of the remains of Carthaginian children revealed that most infants perished prenatally or very shortly after birth and were unlikely to have lived long enough to be sacrificed.The findings, published this week in PLoS ONE, refute claims from as early as the 3rd century BCE of systematic infant sacrifice at Carthage that remain a subject of debate among biblical scholars and archaeologists. Authors of the new study say it's more likely that very young Punic children were cremated and interred in burial urns regardless of how they died.