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Agricultural science has made magnificent strides in the last few decades. Where once was rampant concern about mass starvation and food riots, farmers in developed nations are now producing more food on more land than once thought possible.But the quest to use even fewer pesticides continues. Products need to protect plants against fungal and insect attack but the goal is to do that with fewer negative effects on the environment. Researchers are working to improve plant protection and one strategy is optimizing the interaction between the plant's barrier, plant protection products and adjuvants that are added to increase the effect of plant protection. 

Young children instinctively use a ‘language-like’ structure to communicate through gestures, a result which suggests that children are not just learning language from older generations, but instead their preference for communication has shaped how languages look today.In the paper, the research team examined how four-year-olds, 12-year-olds and adults used gestures to communicate in the absence of speech. The study investigated whether their gesturing breaks down complex information into simpler concepts. This is similar to the way that language expresses complex information by breaking it down into units (such as words) to express a simpler concept, which are then strung together into a phrase or sentence.

(MEMPHIS, Tenn. – June 5, 2014) St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists have identified problems in a connection between brain structures that may predispose individuals to hearing the "voices" that are a common symptom of schizophrenia. The work appears in the June 6 issue of the journal Science.
Researchers linked the problem to a gene deletion. This leads to changes in brain chemistry that reduce the flow of information between two brain structures involved in processing auditory information.

The first genotyping of grey squirrels shows a direct link between their genetic diversity and their ability to invade new environments.
Grey squirrels are an invasive species introduced from North America. While they are common throughout most of the UK and Ireland, on mainland Europe they are currently only found in Italy, where they mostly exist in discrete, but slowly expanding, populations.

A new study says the brain, not the eye, controls the cellular process that leads to glaucoma, a finding that may help develop treatments for one of the world's leading causes of irreversible blindness.
In the paper, vision scientists and ophthalmologists describe how they performed a data and symmetry analysis of 47 patients with moderate to severe glaucoma in both eyes. In glaucoma, the loss of vision in each eye appears to be haphazard. Conversely, neural damage within the brain caused by strokes or tumors produces visual field loss that is almost identical for each eye, supporting the idea that the entire degenerative process in glaucoma must occur at random in the individual eye — without brain involvement. 

In the rainforests of South America, scientists have discovered a new genus and three new species of
katydid
with the highest ultrasonic calling songs ever recorded in the animal kingdom.Katydids (bushcrickets) are insects known for their acoustic communication, with the male producing sound by rubbing its wings together (stridulation) to attract distant females for mating. But these newly discovered insects turn ultrasonic calling all the way up to 11 on the dial - males reach a frequency of a startling 150 kHz. For comparison, the calling frequencies used by most katydids range between 5 kHz and 30 kHz while nominal human hearing range ends at around 20 kHz. 

Earlier this year, a team of students from Eindhoven went to Finland and built the world’s biggest ice dome, with a diameter of 30 meters. Credit: Pykrete Dome team. Song: Youngblood Hawke - Stars (Hold On)This next winter, another Eindhoven team wants to top that. They are going to make a 1:4 scale copy of Barcelona's Sagrada Familia in the town of Juuka , 40 meters high, in just three weeks.

Does money buy championships? That is the prevailing theory. While it is common for a team like Chelsea, which got purchased buy a Russian billionaire who kept buying new teams until they won, to achieve success, a Swansea is less likely.Assuming scouts and personnel managers really know what they are doing, economics should be as fine an indicator of success as anything, in that case. You might think so, in baseball, where a season is 162 games. The New York Yankees certainly did well by buying the best free agent they could get each year. But what about World Cup soccer, where after the initial round each game is sudden death? Can a national team of all-stars who have played together infrequently win more often if their players are rich?

The Digital Mapping System (DMS) instrument attached to NASA’s P-3 Orion airplane for the Operation IceBridge campaign has captured an interesting image during its latest annual Operation IceBridge campaign to the Arctic and Antarctic to monitor glaciers, ice sheets, and sea ice. The 2014 northern spring campaign ended on May 23 after eleven weeks of flights, but not before taking photos of the Kee Bird, a wrecked B-29 Superfortress that made an emergency landing on a northwest Greenland ice sheet in 1947. 

Conventional touchscreens often use coatings made of indium tin oxide (ITO) which are  brittle, may shatter and increasingly costly to manufacture but polymer scientists have developed a transparent electrode that could make displays shatterproof.
In a recent paper, they demonstrated how a transparent layer of electrodes on a polymer surface could be extraordinarily tough and flexible, withstanding repeated scotch tape peeling and bending tests.  

If you ask any journalist who writes a science article, or a PR person pitching one, if they would rather have a blurb about their work or get mentioned on Twitter, every single one will go for the link from Science 2.0.

The mitochondrial DNA of the first Near Eastern farmers has been sequenced for the first time. In the research, experts analysed samples from three sites located in the birthplace of Neolithic agricultural practices: the Middle Euphrates basin and the oasis of Damascus, located in today's Syria and date at about 8,000 BC.
The study is focused on the analysis of mitochondrial DNA --a type of non-Mendelian maternally inherited DNA-- from the first Neolithic farmers, by means of samples obtained by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) research group which were first processed by the University of Barcelona (UB) research group.