News Articles

We all share our genetic make up with relatives, but should we also share ownership of the results of DNA analysis or should this knowledge be considered private?
Dr Anneke Lucassen, a clinical geneticist at the University of Southampton, believes that if anyone is to own genetic information, it has to be all those who have inherited it and, more importantly, it must be available to all those who might be at risk.
The question, she says, is how to balance a right to privacy with disclosing risks to others.

Should a ban on smoking exempt people who do it for 'cultural' reasons? What if the science regarding the detrimental effects of certain types of smoking is inconclusive?
This is an issue lawmakers in the UK will have to struggle with as advocates try to get hookah smoking exempted from England’s smoking ban.
A hookah is a glass waterpipe. It has primarily been used in Arabic communities for smoking herbal fruits after meals, but it has become popular among young people for smoking tobacco, massel (aromatic tobacco), cannabis and the cheaper bango, write Dr Rashid Gatrad and colleagues.

At the annual meeting of the American Society of Plant Biologists in Chicago, Dr. Jorge Zavala, Sr. of the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois, and colleagues showed that elevated CO2 may negatively impact the relationship between some plants and insects.
Elevated CO2 is considered to be a serious catalyst of global change. Its effects can be felt throughout the ecosystem, including the insect-plant food chain link. Safeguarding highly-usable crops is of great importance to many local and national economies.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has revealed for the first time surface details of Saturn's moon Hyperion, including cup-like craters filled with hydrocarbons that may indicate more widespread presence in our solar system of basic chemicals necessary for life.
Hyperion yielded some of its secrets to the battery of instruments aboard Cassini as the spacecraft flew close by in September 2005. Water and carbon dioxide ices were found, as well as dark material that fits the spectral profile of hydrocarbons.

This map shows the composition of a portion of Hyperion's surface.

From Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" to heated Congressional debates about federal tax incentives for new alternative fuels, the issue of coal's place in supplying America's energy and fuel needs has taken on added importance in recent months.
A research institute at the University of Kentucky, though, has been exploring ways to increase the efficiency of converting coal to liquid fuel well in advance of national discussions of the process.
At the UK Center for Applied Energy Research (CAER), Burt Davis is refining the process to identify ways to reduce or capture carbon dioxide generated by the Fischer-Tropsch method of converting coal to diesel and other products, such as paraffin and chemicals for making plastics.

Scientists' hunt for the cause of depression has implicated so many suspects and found so many treatments with different mechanisms that the condition remains an enigma. Now researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified one unifying principle that could explain how a range of causes and treatments for depression converge.
They found that in rats the differing mechanisms of depression and its treatment in the end appear to funnel through a single brain circuit. Changes in how the electrical signals spread through the circuit appear to be the cause of depression-related behavior, according to their study.

New research led by University of New Hampshire physicists has proved the existence of a new type of electron wave on metal surfaces: the acoustic surface plasmon, which will have implications for developments in nano-optics, high-temperature superconductors, and the fundamental understanding of chemical reactions on surfaces. The research, led by Bogdan Diaconescu and Karsten Pohl of UNH, is published in the July 5 issue of the journal “Nature.”
“The existence of this wave means that the electrons on the surfaces of copper, iron, beryllium and other metals behave like water on a lake’s surface,” says Pohl, associate professor of physics at UNH. “When a stone is thrown into a lake, waves spread radially in all directions.

For some years now, scientists throughout the world have been in a position to use the complete base sequence of the human genome for their analyses.
A question often encountered is whether or not specific sequence motifs have a special function. This is likely in cases where the motif is found in a particular place more often than mere chance distribution would suggest. So far, such calculations have only been possible using time-consuming computer simulations.

Increased exposure to common chemicals may impact ovarian development, says Dr. Paul Fowler, of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. His research showed that exposing a developing female sheep fetus to low doses of chemicals in the modern-day environment can disturb the development of the ovary
“Our ‘real life’ model exposed developing sheep fetuses by pasturing their mothers on fields fertilised with either inorganic fertiliser, the control group, or, in the case of the treatment group, with digested human sewage sludge, before and during pregnancy”, said Dr. Fowler.

A generator that is 10 times more powerful than any other similar devices has been developed by engineers at the University of Southampton.
Dr Steve Beeby and his team at the University's School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) have developed a kinetic energy generator which generates electrical energy from the vibrations and movements present within its environment.

A team of international researchers has collected the oldest ever recovered DNA samples and used them to show that Greenland was much warmer at some point during the last Ice Age than most people have believed. Their findings also confirm that the whole ice sheet will not melt and bring about the tremendous sea-level rises which have been the subject of so much discussion.
The ancient DNA was discovered at the bottom of a two kilometer thick ice sheet and came from the trees, plants and insects of a boreal forest estimated to be between 450,000 and 900,000 years-old.

Refuting the popular stereotype that females talk more than men, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have found women and men both use an average of 16,000 words each day.
The psychology researchers have published their findings in “Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men"” in the July issue of Science.
For more than a decade, researchers have claimed that women use far more words each day than men. One set of numbers that is commonly tossed around is that women use 20,000 words per day compared to only 7,000 for men.