News Articles

The International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM), the International Mathematical Union (IMU) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) today released the Citation Statistics report. The report is written from a mathematical perspective and states that while citation-based statistics such as impact factor are often used to assess scientific research they are not the best measures of research quality.
The use of citations in assessing research quality is a topic that is of increasing interest throughout the world's scientific community. The report cautions against the over-reliance on citation statistics such as the impact factor and h-index. These are often promoted because of the belief in their accuracy, objectivity, and simplicity, but these beliefs are unfounded.
Among the report’s key findings:

Male homosexuality is difficult to explain under strictly Darwinian evolutionary models, because carriers of genes predisposing towards male homosexuality would be likely to reproduce less than average, suggesting that alleles influencing homosexuality should progressively disappear from a population.
Partly due to that, homosexuality in males is thought to have both psycho-social factors and genetic components. This is suggested by the high concordance of sexual orientation in identical twins and the fact that homosexuality is more common in males belonging to the maternal line of male homosexuals. These effects have not been shown for female homosexuality, indicating that these two phenomena may have very different origins and dynamics.
An Italian research team, consisting of Andrea Camperio Ciani and Giovanni Zanzotto at the University of Padova and Paolo Cermelli at the University of Torino, found that the evolutionary origin and maintenance of male homosexuality in human populations could be explained by a model based around the idea of sexually antagonistic selection, in which genetic factors spread in the population by giving a reproductive advantage to one sex while disadvantaging the other.
Previous work by Camperio Ciani and collaborators, published in 2004, showed that females in the maternal line of male homosexuals were more fertile than average, giving less weight to the idea that alleles influencing homosexuality should progressively disappear from a population.

Want to get a male mouse excited? A group of steroids found in female mouse urine is all it takes, say researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. They found the compounds activate nerve cells in the male mouse's nose with unprecedented effectiveness.
"These particular steroids, known as glucocorticoids (GCCs), are involved in energy metabolism, stress and immune function," says senior author Timothy E. Holy, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy. "They control many important aspects of the mouse's physiology and theoretically could give any mouse that sniffs them a detailed insider's view of the health of the animal they came from."
Holy plans further research to see if activating the nerves in the male mouse's nose leads to particular behavioral responses. He probes the male mouse's reaction to chemical signals from female mice to advance understanding of pattern recognition and learning in the much more complex human brain. In 2005, he found that female mice or their odors cause male mice to sing. He doesn't know yet if the GCC steroids' effects on the male mouse nose help to trigger this behavior.

Female chimps think sleeping around is more important than finding the strongest mate, according to University of St Andrews scientists. They even go so far as to keep quiet during sex so that other females don't find out about it, thus preventing any unwanted competition.
The research, by psychologists Simon Townsend and Klaus Zuberbühler, sheds new light on the sophisticated mental capacities and social intelligence of our closest living relatives.
The researchers observed the behavior of chimps in the Budongo Forest, Uganda, in collaboration with Tobias Deschner of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

We like to think that newer ideas are always better and indoor plumbing may be one newer idea that should be reconsidered in the developing world, according to Michigan researchers.
Clean water scarcity is not as critical an issue as often thought say Michigan Technological University Associate Professor David Watkins, Professor James Mihelcic and PhD student Lauren Fry of the University's Sustainable Futures Institute. But installing water-guzzling appliances such as toilets can actually promote unsanitary conditions when the effluent is discharged untreated into once-clean rivers and streams.
Instead, a properly built latrine keeps sewage safely separate from drinking water. Diseases such as dysentery attack millions of people every year, often fatally, largely as a result of poor sanitation.

Mount Sinai researchers have discovered that polyphenolics derived from red grape seeds may be useful agents to prevent or treat Alzheimer's Disease(AD).
This new study explored the possibility of developing 'wine mimetic pills' that would replace the recommended beneficial glass of red wine a day for AD prevention.
Giulio Maria Pasinetti, senior author and Director of the NCCAM-NIH funded Center of Excellence for Research in Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Alzheimer's Disease at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and his collaborator Dr. Jun Wang of Mount Sinai, through a partnership between the Research Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Dr. Anil Shrikhande, the Director of the Polyphenolics Division of Constellation Brands, a producer of biologically active grape products, tested the hypothesis that certain molecules contained in red wine, in particular in red grape seeds currently being developed with the name of Meganatural AZ, might offset disease progression in mice genetically modified to develop Alzheimer' disease.

The modern debate about protein has extended far beyond the Atkin's Diet and into a large part of our culture. On this site alone, you can find articles written by T. Colin Campbell, who says that 'complete' proteins in meat are a myth, to Seth Roberts and an intriguing interview with Gary Taubes.
New findings in the May issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition(1) describes the conclusions of a Protein Summit held last spring, which brought together the world's leading scientists in protein research and is certain to add fuel to the fire.
The summit's attendees report that eating a higher protein diet - still within the recommended range, but toward the top of it - may play a role in optimal health, as higher protein diets are linked with a lower risk for many health conditions such as type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular diseases and osteoporosis as well as sarcopenia, the degenerative loss of skeletal muscle mass and strength.

Nutrition researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified five common genetic variations that increase the risk of metabolic syndrome, a group of factors linked to heart disease and diabetes. Another variant they found appeared to protect against the condition.
People with metabolic syndrome have at least three of the following symptoms: abdominal obesity, high blood triglyceride levels, lower good cholesterol (HDL), elevated blood pressure and elevated fasting blood glucose. They are four times as likely to develop heart disease and at least seven times more likely to develop diabetes as individuals without metabolic syndrome.
The investigators, who report their findings in the June issue of the journal Human Molecular Genetics, looked for changes in the CD36 gene, which is located in a region of chromosome 7 that has been linked to metabolic syndrome in several genome-wide studies.

Think an octopus is just an invertebrate mollusk with a brain that contains fewer nerve cells and a much simpler anatomical organization than that of vertebrate brains? Well, you're right, and that's what makes them important for learning studies.
Octopuses and other related creatures, known as cephalopods, are considered to be the most intelligent invertebrates because they have relatively large brains and they can be trained for various learning and memory tasks, says Dr. Benny Hochner of the Department of Neurobiology at the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Their behavior repertoire and learning and memory abilities are even comparable in their complexity to those of advanced vertebrates, which makes them ideal to tackle one of the most interesting questions in modern neuroscience - how the brain stores and recalls memories.

Researchers have long known that type-2 diabetes and depression often go hand in hand. However, it's been unclear which condition develops first in patients who end up with both. Now, a new study led by Johns Hopkins doctors suggests that this chicken-and-egg problem has a dual answer: Patients with depression have an increased risk of developing type-2 diabetes, and patients with type-2 diabetes have an increased risk of developing depression.
For the study, published in the June 18 Journal of the American Medical Association, diabetes expert Sherita Hill Golden, M.D., M.H.S., and her colleagues took advantage of data generated by the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), which examined risk factors for atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, in an ethnically diverse group of 6,814 men and women between ages 45 to 84. Participants in the MESA study identified themselves when they enrolled as white, black, Hispanic or Chinese.

Meningiomas are tumors of the brain and nervous system and they account for 20% of all brain tumors. Doctors have a problem discriminating between the four different subtypes of meningiomas due to three key problems:
* The work can be painstakingly slow requiring up to two hours of analysis and expert consideration of a full "slide" of information.
* The finest histopathologists (tumor specialists) can at times come up with completely contradictory findings based on slight variations in their method of analysis.
* Currently the slides that specialists examine contain a few million pixels of data and the task of tumour diagnosis is painstakingly slow already. This problem is quite literally growing as medical equipment is coming out that can produce slides with hundreds of millions pixel resolution.
Clearly doctors would welcome any technological support which could speed up this process, use more of the information available and allow them time to diagnose and treat many more patients.

That convergence of media, telecommunication, information technology and consumer electronics you've been hearing about? Mostly hype, says new research from Cass Business School, London, and it's now over.
All that's left is a focus on exploiting the business opportunities created by the digital revolution, they say.
Dr Gianvito Lanzolla, Senior Lecturer in Strategy at Cass, suggests that because the revolutionary conceptual shifts from analogue to digital technology took place in 2003 – 2004, with a focus on first mover advantage and innovations, subsequent developments within digital technologies are adjustments rather than major changes.