News Articles

Red imported fire ants (RIFAs), which have caused trouble in Florida and Texas for decades, are now advancing in Virginia. Colonies of the tiny, highly aggressive insects have been observed in the commonwealth since 1989 and, in recent years, have caught the attention of Virginia Tech scientists who are trying to learn more about the increasing number of fire ant infestations.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) researchers have identified a function of neuregulin1 (NRG1), a gene previously linked to schizophrenia but whose role in the disease was unknown. "We found that when this gene or this pathway is impaired," explained CSHL's Bo Li. "It starts a chain reaction negatively impacting synapses in the brain which contribute to the abnormal development of brain circuits and may lead to schizophrenia."
By discovering the connections between genes and how they impact synapses and circuits in the brain, research is guiding the development of new strategies to diagnose and treat neurological disease.

The discovery of a flexible genetic coding in leaf-cutting ants sheds new light on how one of nature's ultimate self-organising species breeds optimum numbers of each worker type to ensure the smooth running of the colony.Research at the University of Leeds shows that despite an inherited genetic pre-disposition to grow into a particular worker caste, ant larvae can be triggered by environmental stimuli to switch development depending on colony's workforce needs.

Effector proteins are the bad guys that help bacterial pathogens do their job of infecting the host by crippling the body's immune system. In essence, they knock down the front door of resistance and disarm the cell's alarm system.
Now, researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have identified a novel molecular target for an effector protein called YpkA, one of several effectors of the bacteria Yersinia – the pathogen responsible for the Middle Ages' "Black Death" and a virulent form of food poisoning today. Their study will be published online in the May 25 issue of Molecular Cell.

The frequency of intense hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean appears to be closely connected to long-term trends in the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the West African monsoon, according to new research from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Geologists Jeff Donnelly and Jonathan Woodruff made that discovery while assembling the longest-ever record of hurricane strikes in the Atlantic basin.

A popular stereotype that boys are better at mathematics than girls undermines girls' math performance because it causes worrying that erodes the mental resources needed for problem solving, new research at the University of Chicago shows.
The scholars found that the worrying undermines women's working memory. Working memory is a short-term memory system involved in the control, regulation and active maintenance of limited information needed immediately to deal with problems at hand.

Integrating bio-chemical sensors into textiles for continuous monitoring of a person's health is the goal of the EU-funded BIOTEX ('Bio-sensing textile for health management') project.
As the first of its kind, the project is developing optimal electric, electrochemical and optical sensors which will be embedded into a textile substrate to create 'sensing patches' able to monitor the biochemical parameters of a user.

Scientists subjected mice to a diet that was 40 percent fat and lots of high fructose corn syrup - the human equivalent of a McDonald's meal and 8 cans of soda per day - and it took only four weeks for liver enzymes to increase and for glucose intolerance, the beginning of type II diabetes, to begin.

Heart researchers at the Center for Translational Medicine at Jefferson Medical College have used gene therapy to reverse heart failure in animals. In addition, they found that this gene therapy strategy had "unique and additive effects" to currently used, standard heart failure drugs called beta-blockers.

Researchers have found that bricks made from fly ash--fine ash particles captured as waste by coal-fired power plants--may be even safer than predicted. Instead of leaching minute amounts of mercury as some researchers had predicted, the bricks apparently do the reverse, pulling minute amounts of the toxic metal out of ambient air.

Score one for body language: It seems that body shape and the way people walk hold major cues to their attractiveness to others, according to collaborative research findings published by Texas A&M University professor Louis G.

The legislative push for "abstinence only" sex education has suggested that nonmarital sex negatively affects a teen's mental health but a new study says that the negative mental side effects of a teen's loss of virginity are confined to a small proportion of those who have sex -- specifically, young girls, but including both boys and girls who have sex earlier than their peers and whose relationships are uncommitted and ultimately fall apart.