News Articles

Nepotism has a bad connotation in the workplace or French politics but being surrounded by relatives does lead to better group dynamics and more cooperation in some animals, and certainly spiders, according to a new study published in BMC Evolutionary Biology.In a new study, the researchers found that Stegodyphus tentoriicola spiders are far more efficient at foraging for food and cooperate better when they’re related to each other and, as with humans and other animals, relatedness may favor the evolution of less selfish behavior, more collaboration and better group dynamics.

Caltech researchers have created a nanoscale crystal device that allows them to confine both light and sound vibrations in the same tiny space.The interactions between sound and light in this optomechanical crysta can result in mechanical vibrations with frequencies as high as tens of gigahertz, or 10 billion cycles per second. Being able to achieve such frequencies gives these devices the ability to send large amounts of information, and opens up a wide array of potential applications—everything from lightwave communication systems to biosensors capable of detecting (or weighing) a single macromolecule.

Body builders will tell you that protein is key to bigger, stronger muscles.   For the truly elite, that may be the case but for the all but 50 of you who are not elite muscle builders, a recent study by University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston metabolism researchers provides evidence that a more normal eating pattern is going to get you the same results as wolfing down protein shakes; something  your  commission-based, fitness-center trainer does not want you to read.The study's results, obtained by measuring muscle synthesis rates in volunteers who consumed different amounts of lean beef, show that only about the first 30 grams (just over one ounce) of dietary protein consumed in a meal actually produce muscle.

"Speciation is one of the most fascinating, unsolved problems in biology," says Harmit Malik, Ph.D., an associate member of the Hutchinson Center's Basic Sciences Division.   The first appearance of new beings on Earth - the mystery of mysteries - is a great puzzle for scientists and philosophers alike.

Exercise makes cigarettes less attractive, says a new study from the University of Exeter. Exercise can lessen the power of cigarettes and smoking-related images to grab the attention of smokers, the authors write in the journal Addiction.   They did a study involving 20 moderately heavy smokers who had abstained from cigarettes for 15 hours before the trial. During two visits to the laboratory participants began by being shown smoking-related and neutral images, and then spent either 15 minutes sitting or exercising on a stationary bike at a moderate intensity. Afterwards, they were again shown the images. 

A marine crustacean could inspire the next generation of DVD and CD players, says a new study in Nature Photonics.Mantis shrimps found on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia have the most complex vision systems known to science. They can see in twelve colors (humans see in only three) and can distinguish between different forms of polarized light.Special light-sensitive cells in mantis shrimp eyes act as quarter-wave plates; they can rotate the plane of the oscillations (the polarization) of a light wave as it travels through it. This capability makes it possible for mantis shrimps to convert linearly polarized light to circularly polarized light and vice versa.

The great diversity of male sexual traits, ranging from peacock's elaborate train to formidable genitalia of male seed beetles, is the result of female choice, say researchers from Uppsala University, but why do females choose among males? In a new Current Biology study they found no support for the theory that the female choice is connected to "good genes".There is no consensus among biologists over the key question why females choose among males but the heart of this debate has two preferred possibilities - that female choosiness is beneficial to the females themselves or that female choice traits are favored because of 'good genes' that males contribute to female's offspring. 

A report examining the impact of biofuels on greenhouse gas emissions during the 21st century has found that carbon loss stemming from the displacement of food crops and pastures for biofuels crops may be twice as much as the CO2 emissions from land dedicated to biofuels production.The Science Express study also predicts that increased fertilizer use for biofuels production will cause nitrous oxide emissions (N2O) to become more important than carbon losses, in terms of warming potential, by the end of the century. 

One small step for mankind, one giant leap for ... averting natural and man-made disasters?A new Tel Aviv University technology combines sensors in orbit with sensors on the ground and in the air to create what they call a "Hyperspectral Remote Sensor" (HRS) which will provide advance warnings about water contamination after a forest fire, alert authorities of a pollution spill long before a red flag is raised on earth - or even tell people in China where a monsoon will strike. The HRS simultaneously acquires hundreds of optical images, each from a different frequency, that enable a "spectral assessment" from distances high in the air via airplanes and in orbit using satellites. This raw data is then processed to yield sophisticated thematic maps.

Antidepressants are ineffective in fully 50% of the people who take them.   It is clearly early 20th century medicine, where you keep trying things and hope something happens while pharmaceutical companies who impress doctors the most make the most money.With so much research and money spent on depression studies, how is it possible that it is only as effective as doing nothing at all?  1)  The cause of depression has been oversimplified.  A study from the laboratory of  depression researcher Eva Redei presented at the Neuroscience 2009 conference in Chicago this week addresses some strongly held beliefs about depression.

Prenatal sex-based biological differences extend to genetic expression in cerebral cortices and the differences in question are probably associated with later divergences in how our brains develop, according to a new study by Uppsala University researchers Elena Jazin and Björn Reinius in Molecular Psychiatry.Professor Elena Jazin and doctoral student Björn Reinius at the Department of Physiology and Developmental Biology previously say they have demonstrated that genetic expression in the cerebral cortices of human beings and other primates exhibits certain sex-based differences. It is presumed that these differences are very old and have survived the evolutionary process.

The most distant galaxy cluster yet, known as JKCS041, has been discovered by combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical and infrared telescopes at the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT), the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope in Hawaii and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The JKCS041 cluster is located about 10.2 billion light years away, and is observed as it was when the Universe was only about a quarter of its present age.The previous record holder for a galaxy cluster was 9.2 billion light years away, XMMXCS J2215.9-1738, discovered by ESA's XMM-Newton in 2006, which broke the previous distance record by only about 0.1 billion light years while JKCS041 surpasses XMMXCS J2215.9 by about ten times that.