News Articles

Storing carbon in agricultural soils presents an immediate option to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide and slow global warming. Farmers who adopt practices that store carbon in soil may be able to "sell" the stored carbon to buyers seeking to offset greenhouse gas emissions. Before farmers can sell carbon credits, however, they need to be able to verify that changing soil management has increased the soil organic carbon (SOC) in their fields.

British scientists working with David A. Russell have made it possible to gain information about the lifestyle of a person from their fingerprint - this includes drug and doping transgressions, what foods have been consumed, diagnosis of diseases and they can even use specific antibodies to differentiate between the fingerprints of smokers and nonsmokers.
Knowing more about the lifestyle of the person who made the fingerprints will allow investigators to shrink the pool of crime suspects, the researchers say.

Scientists at the University of Virginia and the Medical College of Wisconsin have discovered that a gene that participates in the regulation of the body’s biological rhythms may also be a major control in regulating metabolism.
Their finding shows that mice lacking the gene Nocturnin, which is regulated by the circadian clock in the organs and tissues of mammals, are resistant to weight gain when put on a high fat diet and also are resistant to the accumulation of fat in the liver. This new understanding of weight gain could potentially lead to therapies for inhibiting obesity and for treating its effects on health.

How much money would it take to get you to stick a pin into your palm? How much to stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know? How much to slap a friend in the face (with his or her permission) as part of a comedy skit? Well, what about slapping you father (with his permission) as part of a skit? How you answer questions such as these may reveal something about your morality, and even your politics — conservatives, for example, tend to care more about issues of hierarchy and respect, while liberals concentrate on caring and fairness.

People who do well on a series of decision-making tasks involving hypothetical situations tend to have more positive decision outcomes in their lives, according to a study by decision scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and the RAND Corp.
The results suggest that it may be possible to improve the quality of people’s lives by teaching them better decision-making skills.

Yes, there are gender differences in cognitive function, but they're more limited than previously thought. And yes, income does affect cognitive performance – but less than expected when only healthy children are considered. And while basic cognitive skills steadily improve in middle childhood, they then seem to level off – questioning the idea of a burst of brain development in adolescence.
These findings, published online on May 18 in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, are the first data to emerge from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) MRI Study of Normal Brain Development, a large, population-based study that began in 1999 and is documenting structural brain development and behavior from birth to young adulthood.

The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii has a new way to look at the Universe, thanks to two revolutionary instruments called HARP and ACSIS. These instruments operate together, and they recently sliced through the Orion Nebula, recording for the first time the internal movements of its star-forming gases.

This movie takes the observer through the data cube and gives a feel of how the gas is moving. The movie starts with clouds in the southern region, and then shows them progressively more towards the north as it steps through the wavelength slices. This reveals an expansion of gas. Gas to the south is moving towards the observer, while to the north it is moving away from the observer.

By applying the techniques of computer engineering to a mechanistic diagram describing the development of the Nematode C. elegans, a group of researchers in Switzerland has been able to tease out what laboratory experiments have not – how and when the crucial cross-talk between cellular signaling pathways takes place in order to determine the fates of individual cells.

Many school children in the United States memorize President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, considered one of history's most brilliant speeches and a model of brevity and persuasive rhetoric.
But according to two medical researchers at University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, most historians have failed to recognize that when Lincoln delivered it on Nov. 19, 1863, he was in the early stages of a life-threatening illness — a serious form of smallpox. Their report appears in the current issue of Journal of Medical Biography, a scholarly quarterly published by the Royal Society of Medicine Press in London (www.rsmpress.co.uk/jmb.htm).

Tomatoes might be nutritious and tasty, but don’t count on them to prevent prostate cancer. In the May issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, researchers based at the National Cancer Institute and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center report that lycopene, an antioxidant predominately found in tomatoes, does not effectively prevent prostate cancer. In fact, the researchers noted an association between beta-carotene, an antioxidant related to lycopene, and an increased risk for aggressive prostate cancer.

Not so fast, AP

One of the world’s largest and least studied freshwater turtles has been found in Cambodia’s Mekong River, raising hopes that the threatened species can be saved from extinction.
Scientists from Conservation International (CI), World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Cambodian Fisheries Administration, and the Cambodian Turtle Conservation Team captured and released an 11-kilogram (24.2-pound) female Cantor’s giant softshell turtle (Pelochelys cantorii) during a survey in March.

© CI-Cambodia/David Emmett
A female Cantor’s giant softshell turtle was found in Cambodia’s Mekong River.

Despite the fact that they both infect the liver, the hepatitis A and hepatitis C viruses actually have very little in common. The two are far apart genetically, are transmitted differently, and produce very different diseases.
Hepatitis A spreads through the consumption of fecal particles from an infected person (in pollution-contaminated food or water, for example), but hepatitis C is generally transmitted only by direct contact with infected blood.