News Articles

A newly discovered function for a hormone in melons suggests it plays a role in how sexual systems evolve in plants.
Scientists from several French institutions, led by Abdel Bendahmane of the National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), isolated the melon sex determination gene and determined its function. As part of this collaborative effort, New York University biologists Jonathan Flowers and Michael Purugganan, who are part of NYU's Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, conducted the evolutionary analysis of the study.
Because plants' sexual systems are varied—species may possess various combinations of male, female, or hermaphrodite systems—their evolution has long been of interest to scientists. This is especially the case in melons, whose sexual system—andromonoecy—carries both male and bisexual flowers and appears to have evolved recently. In this study, the researchers sought to understand what determines the recent formation of melons' new sexual system.

People like ideological commitment more than moderation and 'across the aisle' thinking in times of uncertainty, says University of Southern California economist Juan Carrillo, so extreme positions build trust among an electorate during rough periods.
In defiance of oddsmakers, he seems to think this is an advantage for Republicans, who have been predicting a 1964-era loss for John McCain.
"The current political advantage of the Republican Party stems from the ability of its candidates to develop 'signature ideas.' This strategy is rewarded even when the electorate has ideological reservations," he says.

We don't have spacecraft to take us outside our solar system but astronomers have still been able to develop a good understanding of how our solar system formed and in turn, how others formed. In the last dozen years, the nearly 300 exoplanets have been discovered have added to our knowledge base.
Conventional knowledge said most solar systems were like our own but three Northwestern University researchers questioned that assumption and explored the question in detail. What they learned is that the solar system in which the Earth orbits our sun is actually uncommon.
Edward Thommes, Soko Matsumura and Frederic Rasio were the first to develop large-scale, sophisticated computer simulations to model the formation of planetary systems from beginning to end. Because of computing limitations, earlier models provided only brief glimpses of the process. The findings of their study titled, "Gas Disks to Gas Giants: Simulating the Birth of Planetary Systems," are detailed in the August 8, 2008 issue of Science magazine.
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High levels of testosterone may be a key factor in spreading disease among mice, according to biologists. The findings could help explain why males in a population are often more likely to get infected, and transmit disease.
Previous research has linked testosterone, the male sex hormone, to immune system suppression. Studies have shown that males, compared to females, experience more bouts of disease, and account for a larger share of disease transmission. However, it is not fully clear what makes males such super-spreaders of disease.

South Africans don't use bug zappers or commercial flypaper to ward off pesky flies, but instead hang up a bunch of Roridula gorgonias leaves.
Attracted to the shiny adhesive droplets on the leaf's hairs, the flies are soon trapped by this 'natural flypaper.' But R. gorgonias plant is also home to a population of Pameridea roridulae (mirid bugs), which dine on the trapped insects and the mirid bugs never get stuck.
Curious to find out how that works, Dagmar Voigt and Stanislav Gorb from the Max-Planck Institute for Metals Research, Germany, decided to take a look at the non-stick bugs to see how they elude R. gorgonias' grasp and they published their results in The Journal of Experimental Biology on August 8 2008.
They were able to call on R.

Scientists have unravelled a potential mechanism for how top-level rowers develop enlarged strengthened hearts as a result of long-term intensive training.
The research in the August edition of Clinical Endocrinology suggests a causal link between naturally occurring hormone levels and strengthening of the heart muscle in professional rowers. Elite rowers were found to have higher levels of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) compared to healthy sedentary volunteers. In these athletes, IGF-1 values correlate with enlargement and strengthening of heart muscle cells.
IGF-1 is a hormone that is produced by the liver in response to growth hormone stimulation.

Many sports teams select their uniforms based on the mascot, city or country they are representing and not on a referee’s preference or bias but a new study has found that choosing the color red for a uniform in competitive sports can actually affect the referee’s split-second decision-making ability and even promote a scoring bias.
Psychologists Norbert Hagemann, Bernd Strauss and Jan Leiβing from the University of Münster specifically found that referees tended to assign more points to TaeKwon Do competitors dressed in red than those dressed in blue. The researchers presented 42 experienced tae kwon do referees with videos of blue- and red-clad competitors sparring. The two sets of clips were identical except that the colors were reversed in the second set, making the red athlete appear to be wearing blue and vice versa. The referees were then asked to score the performance of each competitor, red or blue, after each video.

Nihilist types, and even prevailing theoretical models, attempting to explain the formation of the solar system have assumed it to be average in every way but a new study by Northwestern University astronomers that used recent data from the 300 exoplanets discovered orbiting other stars turns that view on its head.
Our solar system is pretty special and if early conditions had been just slightly different planets could have been thrown into the sun or jettisoned into deep space.

The Third Law of Thermodynamics states that as the temperature of a pure substance moves toward absolute zero (the mathematically lowest temperature possible) its entropy, or the disorderly behavior of its molecules, also approaches zero. The molecules should line up in an orderly fashion.

Ice seems to be the exception to that rule. While the oxygen atoms in ice freeze into an ordered crystalline structure, its hydrogen atoms do not.
Researchers at the University of Maryland are using meta-materials, which mimic the behavior of ice but are created out of completely different substances, to try and figure out why water ice doesn't completely conform to the Third Law of Thermodynamics.

Some climate models have predicted that global warming will increase the intensity of extreme precipitation events but a new study conducted at the University of Miami and the University of Reading (U.K.) says their observational evidence confirms the link between a warmer climate and more powerful rainstorms.
It's no more scientifically accurate to imply this year's floods were caused by or made worse by global warming than it was for Al Gore to imply global warming caused Hurricane Katrina but there is no question more intense rain events increase the risk of flooding and can have substantial societal and economic impacts.

A beam will finally be circulated. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will now be ready to go in September, according to CERN's latest estimate.
The LHC is the world's most powerful particle accelerator, producing beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine, and around 30 times more intense when it reaches design performance, probably by 2010. Housed in a 27-kilometer tunnel, it relies on technologies that would not have been possible 30 years ago. The LHC is, according to the press from CERN, its own prototype.
There have been numerous delays but most in the physics community had regarded previous estimates with caution anyway.(1) Starting up such a machine is not as simple as flipping a switch and commissioning is a long process that starts with the cooling down of each of the machine's eight sectors, a process which had already been delayed.

Researchers have long sought a factor that can trigger the brain's ability to learn – and perhaps recapture the "sponge-like" quality of childhood. In the August 8 issue of the journal Cell, neuroscientists at Children's Hospital Boston report that they've identified such a factor, a protein called Otx 2.
Otx2 helps a key type of cell in the cortex to mature, initiating a critical period -- a window of heightened brain plasticity, when the brain can readily make new connections.