After decades of public safety campaigns focused on drinking and driving, it may be time to focus on the seventh leading cause of injury-related death, according to Bureau of Occupational Health and Injury Prevention at New York State Department of Health and Columbia University scholars looking at New York State.
Cats seem to use their eyes rather than follow their nose when it comes to finding the location of food, according to a new paper by animal behaviorists.Felines have keen smell and vision, so a small study investigated which sense they prefer to use under test conditions – and suggests sight may be more important than smell.A group of six cats were placed in a maze which had ‘decision’ points – and the cats had to choose which avenue they took based on their preference for using images or smell. They were simultaneously presented with two squares of paper, each containing a different visual and odour cue. One combination of stimuli indicated they would receive a food reward, whereas the other led to no reward.
In the most comprehensive review to date addressing the relative safety of hormone therapy for transgender persons, researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have found that hormone therapy in transgender adults is safe. The findings, which appear in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Endocrinology, may help reduce the barriers for transgender individuals to receive medical care.
The world's national parks and nature reserves receive around eight billion visits every year, according to the first study into the global scale of nature-based tourism in protected areas. The paper, by researchers in Cambridge, UK, Princeton, New Jersey, and Washington, DC, published in the open access journal PLOS Biology, is the first global-scale attempt to answer the question of how many visits protected areas receive, and what they might be worth in terms of tourist dollars.
The authors of the study say that this number of visits could generate as much as US$600 billion of tourism expenditure annually - a huge economic benefit which vastly exceeds the less than US$10 billion spent safeguarding these sites each year.
Sewage sludge, green waste, even animal excrement can be utilized for energy recovery with the biobattery modular concept. Biogas plants are an important element for decentralized energy supply. They produce electricity from renewable resources and can compensate for highly fluctuating wind and solar energy. There are already 8,000 plants in operation in Germany with an electrical output of 3.75 gigawatts in total, that is the equivalent to roughly three nuclear power plants. However, the plants have several disadvantages too: they only process a limited range of organic substances and are in competition with the cultivation of food plants.
There is microbiology and then there is micro-micro-microbiology.The existence of ultra-small bacteria has been debated for decades, but now there is comprehensive electron microscopy and DNA-based evidence of the elusive microbes that are about as small as life can get. The cells have an average volume of 0.009 cubic microns (a micron is one millionth of a meter). About 150 of these bacteria could fit inside an Escherichia coli cell and more than 150,000 cells could fit onto the tip of a human hair.
The Intrexon synthetic biology company announced today that it is acquiring Okanagan Specialty Fruits, the science start-up behind the non-browning Arctic apple, for $31 million in Intrexon common stock and $10 million in cash.
New transcriptome data for underutilized legumes means underappreciated crops could soon become valuable tools in agriculture. Thousands of species belong to the legume family, the Fabaceae, yet only a few of them are used in mainstream agriculture. Dozens more are underutilized. Unlike soybean, peanut, chickpea, and other chart toppers, the underutilized species can grow in areas of very poor soil with limited water availability. This is because they are equipped with unique variations in plant growth genes that have been lost from mainstream crops through years of breeding.
A new type of methane-based, oxygen-free life form can metabolize and reproduce similar to life on Earth.This hypothetical cell membrane, modeled by a team of researchers, is composed of small organic nitrogen compounds and capable of functioning in liquid methane temperatures of 292 degrees below zero - necessary for a harsh, cold world - specifically Titan, the giant moon of Saturn, a planetary body awash with seas not of water, but of liquid methane, Titan could harbor methane-based, oxygen-free cells.
A new paper challenges a long-accepted hypothesis about the role the hippocampus plays in our unconscious memory. For decades, neuroscientists have believed that this part of the brain is not involved in processing unconscious memory, the type that allows us to do things like button a shirt without having to think about it, but research by University of Texas at Dallas lecturer Dr. Richard Addante raises doubts about that. Much of the knowledge about the hippocampus and how our brains organize memory comes from research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on an amnesia patient known in textbooks as "Patient H.M.", revealed as Henry Molaison, upon his death in 2008.
A strong electric field applied to a section of the Keystone pipeline can smooth oil flow and yield significant pump energy savings, found a new study.The physics basis is to electrically align particles within the crude oil, which reduces viscosity (thickness) and turbulence. Traditionally, pipeline oil is heated over several miles in order to reduce the oil's viscosity, but this requires a large amount of energy and counter-productively increases turbulence within the flow.
Researchers focusing on a new way to discuss statistical mechanics have modeled "World War Z", an oral history of the first zombie war, to explore how an "actual" zombie outbreak might play out in the U.S.
The National Academy of Sciences is presenting its 2015 Public Welfare Medal to astrophysicist Dr.Neil deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History, in recognition of his "extraordinary role in exciting the public about the wonders of science, from atoms to the Universe.”
