News Articles

Scaled versions of Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star 5000 light-years away, half as massive as the Sun, have been revealed from an effort involving a world-wide net of telescopes, including the UK's Liverpool Telescope on the Canary Islands.
This marks the first discovery of another system of planets that has striking similarities with our Solar System. Moreover, it suggests that such giant planets do not favour the single-life but are more likely to be found in family groups. The research is published in the 15th February issue of Science.
Whilst there are more than 250 planets now known, there are only about 25 such systems with multiple planets and the newly discovered system resembles our own Solar System more closely than any previously observed.

Insects will feast and leafy plants will suffer if temperatures warm and atmospheric carbon dioxide increases, according to a team of researchers who studied evidence of insect feeding on fossil leaves from before, during and after the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.
The PETM occurred 55.8 million years ago and was an abrupt global warming event linked to a temporary increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This event is comparable in size and rate to the current climate changes brought on by human activity.

Results from field research supported by Earthwatch, the international environmental charity, will help scientists predict threats to wildlife should climate change result in a sea level rise in the Baltic.
During the six year research programme, coordinated by Earthwatch scientists Drs. Chris Joyce and Niall Burnside (University of Brighton), and Elle Puurmann (NGO Läänerannik), monitoring stations were installed in Vormsi Island, Silma Nature Reserve and Matsalu National Park, some of the best coastal wetlands in Estonia for nature conservation. The stations’ data loggers recorded water levels and soil moisture. Bird life was also recorded at fixed locations.

A comprehensive new study documents in detail the dynamics of parts of Greenland’s ice sheet, important data that have long been missing from the ice sheet models on which projections about sea level rise and global warming are based.
The research is published this month in the Journal of Glaciology, also demonstrates how remote sensing and digital imaging techniques can produce rich datasets without field data in some cases.
Traditionally, ice sheet models are very simplified, according to Beata Csatho, Ph.D., assistant professor of geology and lead author of the paper. The implications of these richer datasets may be dramatic, Csatho said, especially as they impact climate projections and sea-level rise estimates, such as those made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The traditional idea of the balance of nature gets quite a beating by a study that appears in the current issue of Nature. Using a long-term laboratory experiment, the authors conclude that, even under constant conditions, all species in a food web continued to fluctuate in a chaotic fashion. Chaos makes long-term prediction of species abundances impossible.
Theoretical ecologists already argued in the 1970s that populations of plants and animals might fluctuate in an unpredictable manner, even without external influences. These predictions, derived from chaos theory, attracted a lot of debate. However, only few scientists believed that species in real ecosystems would truly fluctuate in a chaotic fashion.

Contrary to some reports, the epilepsy drug oxcarbazepine does not appear to prevent migraine, according to research published in the February 12, 2008, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
The nearly five-month study involved 170 men and women at clinics across the United States with half of the group receiving a daily dose of oxcarbazepine; the other half took placebo. Both groups included people who had three to nine migraine attacks within a month.
Researchers found no difference between the oxcarbazepine and placebo groups in the change in the number of migraine attacks from the beginning to the end of the study.

A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims to have solved this scientific riddle by analysing the genomics of primitive living fishes such as sharks and lampreys and their spineless relatives, such as the sea squirts.
Vertebrates - animals such as humans that possess a backbone - are the most anatomically and genetically complex of all organisms, but explaining how they achieved this complexity has vexed scientists since the conception of evolutionary theory.

New research from the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute shows that an interaction between fetal brain cells and maternal antibodies could be linked with the repetitive behavior – also called stereotypies – that is characteristic of autism. While additional studies are needed to confirm the outcome, this result leads investigators to suspect that brain-directed antibodies during the prenatal period could be a causal factor for the disorder. The study appears online now and will be published in a future issue of Brain, Behavior and Immunity.
The study builds on recent research led by UC Davis immunologist Judy Van de Water (to be published in the March 2008 issue of Neurotoxicology) showing that IgG antibodies from the blood of mothers of children with autism react against fetal brain proteins. The outcome was predominant with IgG samples from mothers of children with the regressive form, rather than the early onset form, of the disorder. Her outcome raised the possibility that some cases of autism may be linked to antibody transplacental transfer during pregnancy which, in turn, affects the growing brain.

A healthy lifestyle during the early elderly years—including weight management, exercising regularly and not smoking—may be associated with a greater probability of living to age 90 in men, as well as good health and physical function, according to a report in the February 11 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. A second article in the same issue finds that although some individuals survive to 100 years or beyond by avoiding chronic diseases, other centenarians live with such conditions for many years without becoming disabled.
Studies of twins have found that about one-fourth of the variation in human life span can be attributed to genetics, according to background information in the article. That leaves about 75 percent that could be attributed to modifiable risk factors.

Detailed images from Hubble’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) reveal an infant galaxy, dubbed A1689-zD1, undergoing a firestorm of star birth as it comes out of the dark ages, a time shortly after the Big Bang, but before the first stars completed the reheating of the cold, dark Universe. Images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope’s Infrared Array Camera provided strong additional evidence that it was a young star-forming galaxy in the dark ages.
“We certainly were surprised to find such a bright young galaxy 13 billion years in the past”, said astronomer Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA and a member of the research team.

Oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) cultivation has expanded dramatically in recent decades and is frequently cited as a major threat to tropical biodiversity. This is because oil palm is grown in lowland tropical regions and so impacts on the most biodiverse terrestrial habitats: tropical rainforests.
Analysis of the published literature by scientists led by Edgar Turner at the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge has revealed significant changes in the focus of oil palm research over the last 30 years.

According to the Chinese proverb, a bird sings because it has a song, not because it has an answer. A team of French and Brazilian researchers, however, may have the answer as to how the song of Brazilian white-browed warbler has become so well-adapted to the acoustic properties of the rainforest environment.
Understanding the evolution of acoustic communication systems in animals is a hot topic in evolutionary biology and one of the main challenges is to understand how environmental pressures drive this evolution.