News Articles

A newly discovered parasite so dramatically transforms its host, an ant, that the ant comes to resemble a juicy red berry, ripe for picking, according to a report accepted for publication in The American Naturalist. This is the first example of fruit mimicry caused by a parasite, the co-authors say.
Presumably, the dramatic change in appearance and behavior tricks birds into eating infected ants - parasites and all - so that the bird can spread the parasite in its feces.

The Sigourney Community School District in southeast Iowa, has been using one of the country's first hybrid school buses since Jan. 3. And they're pretty excited about it.
Dan Taghon, director of transportation and driver, said the V-8 diesel engine and electric motor gave him plenty of acceleration. “It has quite a bit of get up and go,” he said. “You push the pedal and it takes right off.”
Advanced Energy, a nonprofit corporation based in Raleigh, N.C., led the effort to bring the country’s first 19 hybrid school buses to school districts in 11 states.
Researchers at Iowa State’s Center for Transportation Research and Education worked with Advanced Energy for more than two years to bring the hybrid buses to Iowa.

The p53 regulatory network, the 'guardian of the genome' has, during the course of human evolution, created additional safeguards in human genes to further guard against DNA damage that could a variety of genetic diseases, according to an international team of scientists writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Ethology is the study of animal behavior, with a focus on behavioral patterns in natural environments. A new paper shows that researchers are now taking a machine-learning approach.
The work by Csaba Molnár from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary and his research team shows that a new piece of software is able to classify dog barks according to different situations and even identify barks from individual dogs, a task humans find challenging.
The aim of Molnár and colleagues’ experiments was to test a computer algorithm’s ability to identify and differentiate the acoustic features of dog barks, and classify them according to different contexts and individual dogs.

All multicellular animals have an innate immune system. When bacteria, parasites or fungi invade the organism, small protein molecules are released that eliminate the attackers. Scientists of the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) have now discovered a new molecule that plays an important role in triggering the innate immune response of the fruit fly Drosophila, mice and even humans.
The cells of the innate immune system recognize hostile invaders with the aid of receptors on their surface: The moment these receptors recognize a foreign structure, they send a message, via a complicated signaling pathway, into the cell¡¦s interior. The cell then releases immunologically active proteins.

Climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City released an analysis showing that 2007 tied with 1998 for Earth’s second warmest year in a century. 2006 was fifth in that period.
There will be some issue with accuracy. The researchers used temperature data from weather stations on land, satellite measurements of sea ice temperature since 1982 and data from ships for earlier years.
The greatest warming in 2007 occurred in the Arctic, and neighboring high latitude regions. Global warming has a larger affect in polar areas, as the loss of snow and ice leads to more open water, which absorbs more sunlight and warmth. Snow and ice reflect sunlight; when they disappear, so too does their ability to deflect warming rays.

Bisexuality in women appears to be a distinctive sexual orientation and not a transitional stage that some women adopt "on their way" to lesbianism or as a temporary phase in otherwise heterosexual behavior, according to new research in Developmental Psychology.
The study of 79 non-heterosexual women over 10 years found that bisexual women maintained a stable pattern of attraction to both sexes.

In an PLoS ONE article, Joan B. Company and colleagues at the Institut de Ciències del Mar (CSIC) in Spain describe a mechanism of interaction across ecosystems showing how a climate-driven phenomenon originated in shelf environments controls the biological processes of a deep-sea living resource.
The progressive depletion of world fisheries is one of the key socio-economical issues of the forthcoming century. However, amid this worrying scenario, Company’s study demonstrates how a climate-induced phenomenon occurring at a decadal time-scale, such as the formation of dense shelf waters and its subsequent downslope cascading can repeatedly reverse the general trend of overexploitation of a deep-sea living resource.

It's possible to generate energy by growing plant material and burning it. If managed well, most of the carbon released by burning the material will be captured by the growing plants, and so have a low impact on overall levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
A better solution is using the growing plants to help solve other environmental problems.
One set of systems currently running in Sweden grows willow trees and irrigates them with sewage effluent. This helps purify the sewage outflow at the same time as providing fuel.

A fundamental difference in the way males and females respond to chronic liver disease at the genetic level helps explain why men are more prone to liver cancer, according to MIT researchers.
“This is the first genome-wide study that helps explain why there is such a gender effect in a cancer of a nonreproductive organ, where you wouldn't expect to see one,” said Arlin Rogers, an MIT experimental pathologist and lead author of a paper that appeared last month in the journal Cancer Research.
Men develop liver cancer at twice the rate of women in the United States. In other countries, especially in Asia, the rate for men can be eight or 10 times that for women.

Members of the National Science Board today delivered to the President and the Congress Science and Engineering Indicators 2008 (SEI'08), the Board's biennial report on the state of science and engineering research and education in the United States. Called the "gold standard," it is the most comprehensive source of information on research and development conducted by universities, industry, the federal government and the international science and engineering enterprise.
The highlights; we spend a lot overall but not enough on basic research, the public supports science and spending, and researchers are perhaps a little too reliant on federal funding.
In addition to SEI'08, the Board, concerned that the data revealed disturbing trends with serious policy implications, published a companion piece, Research and Development: Essential Foundation for U.S. Competitiveness in a Global Economy. In this policy statement and in presentations in the U.S. House of Representatives, National Science Board Chairman Steven Beering, Subcommittee Chairman on SEI'08 Louis Lanzerotti and SEI'08 Subcommittee Member Arthur Reilly stressed the need for increased government and industry sharing of funding for basic research.
"These indicators come at an important time," said Chairman Beering. "The confluence of a range of indicators raises key questions about future U.S. high-technology industry's competitiveness in international markets and implications for highly skilled jobs at home."
The Board made three major recommendations:

By the time Congress mandated ethanol subsidies and usage in 2005, it was difficult to find anyone in the environmental community who thought it was a good idea - even Al Gore, who championed it for almost two decades, is against it now.
Worse, while in vogue it overshadowed something that was both more cost- and energy-effective; algae.
Microbiologists have always known that algae contains oil that can be turned into diesel fuel - and in better quantities than other alternatives. Soybeans produce about 50 gallons of oil per acre per year, and canola produces about 130. Algae, however, can produce about 4,000 gallons per acre a year. Algae requires only sunshine and non-drinkable water to grow.