News Articles

Clean manure may sound like an oxymoron, but Dr. Brent Auvermann is working with feedyard owners to help them get the most "spark" from it as a fuel source.
"We're doing something that has never been done before," said Arles "Bugs" Graham, Panda Energy International's general manager for the Hereford plant. Graham spoke at the meeting. "We're using your manure as an energy source," he said. "It's a very complex process."

Researchers at the University of Warwick have found that sexual orientation has a real effect on how we perform mental tasks such as navigating with a map in a car but that old age does not discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation and withers all men’s minds alike.
The University of Warwick researchers worked with the BBC to collect data from over 198,000 people aged 20–65 years (109,612 men and 88,509 women). As expected they found men outperformed women on tests such as mentally rotating objects (NB the researchers’ tests used abstract objects but the skills used are also those one would use in real life to navigate with a map).

Leave it to white Canadians to tell African-Americans how they feel about people with health problems.
A study by the University of Alberta, published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, says African Americans appear to perceive people with extreme health problems as less productive or valuable
The study examined the differences in preferences for the EQ-5D health states among African Americans, Hispanics, and other races living in the United States.

A team of Texas A&M University researchers will soon be recovering artifacts from a 200-year-old shipwreck that lies more than 4,000 feet beneath the Gulf of Mexico, making it the deepest such recovery effort ever attempted in the gulf.
The $4.8 million project, funded by the Okeanos Gas Gathering Company, will begin today (May 22) says William Bryant, professor of oceanography, and Donny Hamilton, professor of anthropology at Texas A&M. Peter Hitchcock, a doctoral student and team leader of the project, says the vessel could be one of the most historically significant shipwrecks found in the gulf.

Could the food we eat be contributing to the continuing rise of antibiotic-resistant infections? Harmless and even beneficial bacteria that exist in our food supply may also be carrying genes that code for antibiotic resistance. Once in our bodies, could they transmit the resistance genes to disease-causing bacteria?
"The data indicate that food could be an important avenue for antibiotic-resistant bacterial evolution and dissemination. The role of commensals, especially food-borne microbes, in transmitting resistance genes are becoming a concern to the scientific community," says Hua Wang of Ohio State University.

Call it the cellular equivalent of big glasses, a funny nose and a fake mustache.
Bone marrow stem cells attracted to the site of a cancerous growth frequently take on the outward appearance of the malignant cells around them, University of Florida researchers report in a paper to be published in the August issue of Stem Cells.

A colon cancer researcher at the Ireland Cancer Center of University Hospitals Case Medical Center (UHCMC) has laid out the roadmap for how medical science should employ aspirin and new aspirin-like drugs for use in preventing colon cancer in certain high-risk individuals.

Botox is not just for keeping aging actresses looking eerily young any more. Injecting botulinum toxin A, or Botox, into the prostate gland of men with enlarged prostates eased symptoms and improved quality of life for up to a year after the procedure.
The study was based on 37 men with benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH).

UCLA and Dartmouth scientists have identified a crucial enzyme in plant vitamin C synthesis, which could lead to enhanced crops. The discovery now makes clear the entire 10-step process by which plants convert glucose into vitamin C, an important antioxidant in nature.
"If we can find ways to enhance the activity of this enzyme, it may be possible to engineer plants to make more vitamin C and produce better crops," said Steven Clarke, UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry, director of UCLA's Molecular Biology Institute and co-author of the research study, to be published as a 'Paper of the Week' in the Journal of Biological Chemistry and currently available online.

Professionally speaking, things in David Damanik's world don't line up – and he can prove it.
In new research, Damanik and colleague Serguei Tcheremchantsev offer a key proof in the study of quasicrystals, crystal-like materials whose atoms don't line up in neat, unbroken rows like the atoms found in crystals.

A data-driven computational approach developed by a University of Illinois statistician is revealing secrets about inner Earth and discovering unique gene expressions in fruit flies, zebra fish and other living organisms.
"Using mathematical concepts from inverse scattering and modern statistics, we let the data 'speak,' and automatically generate an appropriate model," said Ping Ma, a professor of statistics at the U. of I. and lead author of a paper describing the technique that has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

You may not be able to relive your youth, but part of your brain can. Johns Hopkins researchers have found that newly made nerves in an adult brain's learning center experience a one-month period when they are just as active as the nerves in a developing child. The study, appearing this week in Neuron, suggests that new adult nerves have a deeper role than simply replacing dead ones.