News Articles

A new study to investigate the population structure and historical processes responsible for the geographic distribution of the species in the Mediterranean finds that the bottlenose dolphin only colonized the region after the last Ice Age, about 18,000 years ago.The Mediterranean basin is now a global biodiversity hotspot and several marine species exhibit complex population structure patterns over relatively short geographic distances, so it is interesting to investigate the drivers of population structure in marine organisms. Tissue samples from 194 adult bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) were collected between 1992 and 2011 from the five main eastern Mediterranean basins. 

A nicotine metabolite once thought to be inactive, cotinine, instead supports learning and memory, by amplifying the action of a primary chemical messenger involved in both, finds a new study.
The new findings indicate cotinine makes brain receptors more sensitive to lower levels of the messenger acetylcholine, which are typical in Alzheimer's, and may boost effectiveness, at least for a time, of existing therapies for Alzheimer's and possibly other memory and psychiatric disorders.

At least five mass extinction events have profoundly changed the course of life on Earth - animal life, at least. Plants have been very resilient to those events, finds a new study.For over 400 million years, plants have played an essential role in almost all terrestrial environments and covered most of the world’s surface. During this long history, many smaller and a few major periods of extinction severely affected Earth’s ecosystems and its biodiversity.

It's a firmly established fact straight from Biology 101: Traits such as eye color and height are passed from one generation to the next through the parents' DNA.
But now, a new study in mice by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has shown that the DNA of bacteria that live in the body can pass a trait to offspring in a way similar to the parents' own DNA. According to the authors, the discovery means scientists need to consider a significant new factor - the DNA of microbes passed from mother to child - in their efforts to understand how genes influence illness and health.

Caring for offspring is unequal between the sexes in many animal species and a new study suggests evolution is the culprit.
Making babies is one of the fundamental conflicts of interest between the sexes. Care by either partner is beneficial to both partners as it increases the health and survival prospects of the common young, while providing care is costly only to the caring individual. As a result, each partner does best in a situation where most of the care is provided by the other partner--an outcome that is clearly impossible.

In 2006, there was a large die-off in bees and though their numbers quickly rebounded and have continued upward since, scientists have been looking for ways to make the periodic collapses that occur less dramatic. The cause the last time it happened was the same plague that bees have endured for as long as science has been able to study them; parasites. But a new study shows that "nature's medicine cabinet" may be able to smooth out those natural booms and busts.

Scientifically engineered tissues intended to repair or regenerate damaged or diseased human tissues require three-dimensional tissue constructs that are densely packed with living cells. The Bio-P3, an innovative instrument able to pick up, transport, and assemble multi-cellular microtissues to form larger tissue constructs is described in an article in Tissue Engineering, Part C: Methods.

A new mathematical analysis tool can numerically describe the skull as an extended network structured in ten modules. Anatomical Network Analysis (AnNA) is based on network analysis mathematical tools for studying anatomy and has led to several studies of both the human skeleton and of the rest of terrestrial vertebrates, especially in regard to the development and evolution of the skull.

Over the long term, a high-fat diet is bad for heart attack risk. Yet a new study finds that if you are going to have a heart attack, you are likely to get through it better if you ate a high-fat diet before it happened. Mice fed a high-fat diet for one day to two weeks days before a heart attack had heart attack reduced by about 50 percent. If the results could be translated to humans, that would mean piling on cheeseburgers and ice cream for a month to a year, not a winning strategy for lots of other reasons.It's another example of the obesity paradox, an unexplained phenomenon where obese patients who do have a heart attack live longer than thin ones.

Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), in collaboration with other colleagues of the Genetic Epidemiology of Lung Cancer Consortium (GELCC), have identified a gene that is associated with lung cancer.
The findings are published in American Journal of Human Genetics. Through whole exome sequencing, researchers identified a link between a mutation in PARK2, a gene associated with early-onset Parkinson's disease, and familial lung cancer.
The researchers sequenced the exomes (protein coding region of the genome) of individuals from a family with multiple cases of lung cancer. They then studied the PARK2 gene in additional families affected by lung cancer.

For chimpanzees, just like humans, teasing, taunting and bullying are familiar parts of playground politics. An analysis of 12 years of observations of playground fights between young chimpanzees in East Africa finds that chimps with higher-ranked moms are more likely to win.
The results come from an analysis of daily field notes recorded from 2000 to 2011 at Gombe National Park in western Tanzania. Stored in the Jane Goodall Institute Research Center at Duke University and also at The George Washington University, the records are part of a larger database containing more than 50 years of data on over 300 wild chimpanzees, going all the way back to Jane Goodall's first observations from the early 1960s.

It's always helpful to have text or verbal claims about where a video was taken, but when it comes to terrorists or other criminals, they might not be telling the truth. Researchers from Ramón Llull University in Spain have created a system capable of geolocating videos by comparing audiovisual content with a worldwide multimedia database and it is able to locate where the videos were taken with no indication of where they were produced.