News Articles

Contrary to the TV sitcom where the wife experiencing strong labor pains screams at her husband to stay away from her, women rarely give birth alone. Today, there are typically doctors, nurses and husbands in hospital delivery rooms, and sometimes even other relatives and friends. Midwives often are called on to help with births at home.  Assisted birth has likely been around for millennia, possibly dating as far back as 5 million years ago when our ancestors first began walking upright, according to University of Delaware paleoanthropologist Karen Rosenberg.  She says that social assistance during childbirth is just one aspect of our evolutionary heritage that makes us distinctive as humans.

U.S. intelligence officials have spent more than seven years searching for Osama bin Laden but UCLA geographers say that, if he is still alive, they have a good idea of where he was at the end of 2001 — and perhaps where he has been in the years since. 

Cancer cells need a lot of nutrients to multiply and survive. While much is understood about how cancer cells use blood sugar to make energy, not much is known about how they get other nutrients. Now, researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have discovered how the Myc cancer-promoting gene uses microRNAs to control the use of glutamine, a major energy source. The results, which shed light on a new angle of cancer that might help scientists figure out a way to stop the disease, appear Feb. 15 online at Nature.

Without formalized sign language instruction, deaf children in families develop their own language using simple gestures that become more complex over time.     Unless they are gather in large groups, those specific deaf languages can result in thousands of dialects, called 'homesigns' by researchers.There may be thousands of homesigners in a given society.    Marie Coppola, postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Illinois, says her work with four Nicaraguan homesigners shows how such individual gesture systems likely provided the raw materials for the language that emerged in a school for the deaf there.

 A research review published recently in Nutrition Today(1) says that the high-quality protein in eggs makes a valuable contribution to muscle strength, provides a source of sustained energy and promotes satiety. High-quality protein is an important nutrient for active individuals at all life stages, they say, and while most Americans consume the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for protein, additional research suggests that some Americans are not consuming enough high-quality protein to achieve and maintain optimal health.(2,3,4) Study Findings

A team of MIT undergraduate students has invented a shock absorber that harnesses energy from small bumps in the road, generating electricity while it smoothes the ride more effectively than conventional shocks. The students hope to initially find customers among companies that operate large fleets of heavy vehicles. They have already drawn interest from the U.S. military and several truck manufacturers.

According to a recent study, diets rich in omega-3 fatty acids protect the liver from damage caused by obesity and the insulin resistance it provokes. This research should give doctors and nutritionists valuable information when recommending and formulating weight-loss diets and help explain why some obese patients are more likely to suffer some complications associated with obesity. Omega-3 fatty acids can be found in canola oil and fish.

To astrobiologists, hot springs hold a great deal of significance.   Many of the most ancient organisms on Earth thrived in and around hydrothermal springs and their modern descendants still do.If life forms have ever been present on Mars, hot spring deposits would be ideal locations to search for physical or chemical evidence of these organisms and data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) suggesting there might be evidence of ancient springs in the Vernal Crater would be a fine place to look, according to a report in Astrobiology.

Aerosols are fine particles suspended in the atmosphere. Sources of human-generated aerosols include industry, motor vehicles and vegetation burning. Natural sources include volcanoes, dust storms and ocean plankton. Human-generated aerosols have long been known to exert a cooling effect on climate. This has partly masked the warming effect of increasing greenhouse gases. As aerosol pollution is predicted to decrease over the next few decades, unmasking of the greenhouse effect may lead to accelerated global warming.

Research performed in the Center for Biomolecular Science&Engineering (CBSE) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, suggests that mobile repetitive elements--also known as transposons or "jumping genes"--do indeed affect the evolution of gene regulatory networks.

A little more than a year after University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists showed they could turn skin cells back into stem cells, they have pulsating proof that these "induced" stem cells can indeed form the specialized cells that make up heart muscle. In a study published  in Circulation Research, the team showed that they were able to grow working heart-muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) from induced pluripotent stem cells, known as iPS cells. The heart cells were originally reprogrammed from human skin cells by James Thomson and Junying Yu, two of Kamp's co-authors on the study. 

A York University research team has tracked the migration of songbirds,  the most common type of bird in our skies, by outfitting them with tiny geolocator backpacks – a world first and interesting because they are too small for conventional satellite tracking.    They now say we have underestimated the flight performance of songbirds dramatically.