News Articles

Did late Lower Paleolithic people hunt or were they scavengers?    A University of Arizona anthropologist says that humans living at a Paleolithic cave site (Qesem Cave) in central Israel between 400,000 and 250,000 years ago were as successful at big-game hunting as were later stone-age hunters at the site, but earlier humans shared meat differently.Qesem Cave ("Qesem" means "surprise") people hunted cooperatively, then carried the highest quality body parts of their prey to the cave, where they cut the meat with stone blade cutting tools and cooked it with fire.

Treelines are not responding to global warming the way previous projections said they should, according to the first global quantitative assessment of the relationship between warming and treeline advance published in Ecology Letters.The study tests the consensus that treelines have been globally advancing in response to the warming climate since 1900.

Even in adults born with extremely impaired sight, the brain can rewire itself to recognize sections of the retina that have been restored by gene therapy.  This surprising adaptability comes a year after three blind volunteers received doses of corrective genes to selected areas of their retinas at Shands at the University of Florida medical center. More than a year later,  tiny portions of the patients' retinas that have received gene therapy have kept their restored function, as much as 1,000-fold increases for day vision and 63,000-fold for night vision.

Labels on prescription drugs tell you what researchers know about the medication, but what is left out can be important as well and researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine think it's high time that the labeling tell you what isn't known. Randall Stafford, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, and colleagues write in an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should require drug manufacturers to state how new medications compare with similar, existing treatments.

An insulator can now be transformed to conduct electricity by an ordinary camera flash, says a Northwestern University professor and his students who have found a new way of turning graphite oxide, a low-cost insulator made by oxidizing graphite powder, into graphene, a hotly studied material that conducts electricity. Graphene is the material du jour in studies to produce low-cost carbon-based transparent and flexible electronics.Previous processes to reduce graphite oxide relied on toxic chemicals or high-temperature treatment.  Instead of that, the Northwestern folks kept it simple, wondering if something like a camera flash could instantly heat up the graphite oxide and turn it into graphene.

A previously unknown chemical compound in the atmosphere may help explain how and when clouds are formed, say a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of Copenhagen.The discovery of so-called dihydroxyepoxides (an aerosol precursor) was originally found when a team of researchers from Caltech mounted a measuring device known as a Chemical Ionization Mass Spectrometer (CIMS) on an airplane and flew it over the forests of North America.Professor Henrik Kjærgaard from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen calls the new compounds a 'missing link' in the formation of clouds.

Researchers at the Department of Psychiatry, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Technische Universität München, say they have shown that formal education diminishes the impact of Alzheimer’s disease on cognition even if a manifest brain volume loss has already occurred.Dr. Robert Perneczky, Department of Psychiatry at Klinikum rechts der Isar explains, “We know that there is not always a close association between brain damage due to Alzheimer’s disease and the resulting symptoms of dementia. In fact, there are individuals with severe brain pathology with almost no signs of dementia, whereas others with only minor brain lesions exhibit a considerable degree of clinical symptoms.”

If you feel lethargic or that your memory is slipping, diet may be a factor.   A new research study says that in less than 10 days of eating a high-fat diet, rats had decreased ability to exercise and experienced significant short-term memory loss. The researchers say the results show an important link between what we eat, how we think, and how our bodies perform. 

A group of researchers from Indiana University's Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research (CHPPR) say they have found that support for government health insurance for individuals under age 65 remains virtually the same regardless of how the plan is described or how involved the government would be.   So support is not a 'framing' issue, public relations or political roadblocks, it seems to be a fundamental disagreement about what the government can and cannot effectively do - and that falls along political party lines.

The science is in and men are easy.Men are far more interested in casual sex than women, according to Dr. Achim Schützwohl, from the Department of Psychology at Brunel University in the UK, and a team who published their results in Human Nature.  Their research showed that men are more likely than women to report having had casual sex and they express a greater desire for it than do women.But men need to be exceptionally attractive to tempt women to consider casual sex, they say.

Biology has just gotten a new set of standards for graphically representing biological information, biology's equivalent of the circuit diagram in electronics.Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and their colleagues say this visual language should make it easier to exchange complex information, so that models are accurate, efficient and readily understandable. The new standard, called the Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN), is published today in Nature Biotechnology.

100 years ago you had to be rich to be fat.  Now apparently you have to be rich to stay thin.  And women add more pounds being poor than anyone.A nationwide study that followed participants for 14 years correlates the U.S. Food Stamp Program to obesity among its users.Researchers found that the average user of food stamps had a Body Mass Index (BMI) 1.15 points higher than non-users. The link between food stamps and higher weight was almost entirely based on women users, who averaged 1.24 points higher BMI than those not in the program, the study found. For an average American woman, this would mean an increase in weight of 5.8 pounds.