We're bombarded with information at all times, so much that if we had to try and process it all times, we'd be paralyzed. Our cerebellum does information damage control by filtering out what changes. Evolution made it possible for us to conserve energy while still processing anomalies quickly.
The extinction of one carnivore species can trigger the demise of fellow predators - a phenomenon called horizontal extinction cascades, where extinctions of carnivore species can have a ripple effect across species triggering further unexpected extinctions of other carnivores.
Using insects, the research team Frank van Veen, Dirk Sanders and Rachel Kehoe from the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University's Penryn campus in Cornwall, set up experimental communities with complex food webs in 40 four-square metre outdoor field-cages which they observed over a spring and summer season. These communities consisted of several species of aphids and their natural enemies, parasitoid wasps.
The rainwater that fell in some of the villages of Zamora, Spain last autumn brought along a green microalgae that turns a reddish color when in a state of stress. Blood rain. It is not an isolated phenomenon. Kerala, India got a blood rain in the summer of 2001 and since then so has the southern part of the country and Sri Lanka. Scientific studies have confirmed that the algae Trentepohlia was responsible for those events.
PENSACOLA, Fla. - An increasing amount of drugs taken by humans and animals make it into our streams and waterways, and pharmaceutical pollution has had catastrophic ecosystem consequences despite low levels of concentration in the environment. The effect of pharmaceuticals and other contaminants of emerging concern on the environment will be addressed in a special issue of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (ET&C). Much progress has been made in the recent years on the topic and this special issue will illustrate the state of the science. Several preview articles are now available, and the complete issue will be online in spring 2016.
November 12, 2015 - A new study may alleviate concerns regarding increased cancer risk for patients undergoing spinal fusion surgery with recombinant human bone morphogenetic protein (rhBMP). The study appears in November 15 issue of Spine, published by Wolters Kluwer.
Were ancient bees specialists, devoting their pollen-collecting attentions to very specific plant partners? Or were they generalists, buzzing around to collect pollen from a variety of flowers in their midst? Researchers who've studied an ancient lineage of bees now say in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on November 12 that the answer to both questions is yes. Bees living some 50 million years ago simultaneously relied on both strategies in foraging for pollen.
Zachariæ Isstrøm, a glacier in northeast Greenland, began a rapid retreat in recent years, a new study reports. The glacier helps to drain 12 percent of the Greenland Ice Sheet and has the potential to raise sea level significantly if it were to melt, according to a study based on 40 years of glacier data including satellite observations.
CRISPR-Cas9 is a hybrid of protein and RNA, the cousin to DNA, that functions as an efficient search-and-snip system in bacteria. It arose as a way to recognize and kill viruses, but then was adopted in other cells, including humans, to facilitate genome editing. The Cas9 protein, obtained from the bacteria Streptococcus pyogenes, functions together with a "guide" RNA that targets a complementary 20-nucleotide stretch of DNA. Once the RNA identifies a sequence matching these nucleotides, Cas9 cuts the double-stranded DNA helix.
If you are apathetic, it would be a surprise to know your brain is making more effort, but a new study finds that some people traditionally perceived as lazy have a biology problem and not an attitude one.
Forty healthy volunteers completed a questionnaire that scored them on how motivated they were. They were then asked to play a game in which they were made offers, each with a different level of reward and physical effort required to win the reward. Unsurprisingly, offers with high rewards requiring low effort were usually accepted, while low rewards requiring high effort were less popular.
An estimated 12 million people in the United States experience diagnostic errors annually, when including a missed diagnosis, the wrong diagnosis, or a delayed one, all of which can lead to harm from delayed or inappropriate treatments and tests.
In an opinion piece published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Hardeep Singh of Baylor and Dr. Mark L Graber of RTI International in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina said the recent Institute of Medicine report on "Improving Diagnosis in Health Care" requires individual and collaborative action from all health care stakeholders nationwide.
When people are listening to music, their emotional reactions to the music are reflected in changes in their pupil size. Researchers from the University of Vienna and the University of Innsbruck, Austria, are the first to show that both the emotional content of the music and the listeners' personal involvement with music influence pupil dilation. A new paper demonstrates that pupil size measurement can be effectively used to probe listeners' reactions to music.
A new paper proposes an entirely new approach to risk assessment for future violence. Previous approaches have relied on looking at risk factors that happen to be linked to, but may not cause, violence, for example, being young, male, of lower social class, with previous violent convictions.
The new approach is instead based on identifying risk factors that have a clear causal link to violence, and include symptoms of major mental disorder, the patient's living condition, and whether they are taking medication.
Deep within your DNA, a tiny parasite called a LINE-1 retrotransposon lurks, waiting to pounce from its perch and land in the middle of an unsuspecting healthy gene. If it succeeds, it can make you sick. Like a jungle cat, this parasite sports a long tail but little was known about what role that tail plays in this dangerous jumping.
