News Articles

The modern world of Big Data increasingly requires knowledge of statistics and biologists are scrambling to master that along with all of the expertise needed to solve mysteries of nature.
A new statistical framework could help, according to a new paper, because it can substantially increase the power of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to detect genetic influences on human disease.
Despite the proliferation of
genome-wide association studies
, the associations found so far have largely failed to account for the known effects of genes on complex disease — the problem of "missing heritability." Standard approaches also struggle to find combinations of multiple genes that affect disease risk in complex ways, known as genetic interactions.

The climate hockey stick, a popular visual metaphor for climate change, has received considerable attention. It depicts a slightly cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere from 1000 A.D. until 1900 A.D. and then swings sharply upward in the last 80 years. It was created using tree ring data for the older timeframes but not recently - after 1960, tree ring data showed a cooling trend so it was replaced. Clearly that was not correct but if tree rings don't detect the modern warming trend, they might also have 'missed' warming episodes in the past - we know that the climate is not cooler now, that is not the issue, but if tree ring proxies are unreliable, it casts doubt on the whole onus of media and IPCC accounts since 2001.

Synchrotron-imaging techniques have shed new light, literally, on the healing process that took place when dinosaurs were still alive. 
They examined the cracks, fractures and breaks in the bones of a 150 million-year-old predatory dinosaur - possible because dinosaur bones occasionally preserve evidence of trauma, sickness and the subsequent signs of healing.

Diagnosis of such fossils used to rely on the grizzly inspection of gnarled bones and healed fractures, often entailing slicing through a fossil to reveal its cloying secrets. But the synchrotron-based imaging, which uses light brighter than 10 billion Suns, meant the team could tease out the chemical ghosts lurking within the preserved dinosaur bones.

Yellow fever, an acute viral disease, is estimated to have been responsible for 78,000 deaths in Africa in 2013 according to new research published in PLOS Medicine this week. The research by Neil Ferguson from Imperial College London, UK and colleagues from Imperial College, WHO and other institutions also estimates that recent mass vaccination campaigns against yellow fever have led to a 27% decrease in the burden of yellow fever across Africa in 2013.

A newly discovered "hypervelocity star" is the closest, second-brightest and among the largest found so far. It is speeding at more than 1 million mph and may provide clues about the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way. Also, add in the obligatory "dark matter" reference.
Hypervelocity stars appear to be remaining pairs of binary stars that once orbited each other and got too close to the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center. Intense gravity from the black hole – which has the mass of 4 million stars like our sun – captures one star so it orbits the hole closely, and slingshots the other on a trajectory headed beyond the galaxy.

Synthetic Genomics announceda multi-year research and development agreement with Lung Biotechnology to develop humanized pig organs using synthetic genomic advances. The collaboration will focus upon developing organs for human patients in need of transplantation, with an initial focus on lung diseases. In the United States alone, about 400,000 people die annually from various forms of lung disease including cancer. 2,000 people are saved with a lung transplant and about the same number are added to the transplant wait list annually. 99% of deaths due to lung failure are unavoidable because of the shortage of transplantable human lungs.

The esophagus carries food and liquid from the mouth to the stomach. There are two main types of esophageal cancer: adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma. The most common form of the disease in the U.S. is adenocarcinoma and is most prevalent in Caucasian men between the ages of 50 and 70. Adenocarcinoma, which is one of the fastest growing cancers in the country, has also been linked to obesity – perhaps related to chronic exposure to stomach acid. According to the National Cancer Institute, about 18,000 Americans were diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2013.

A paper by The Environmental Justice and Health Alliance (EJHA), Center for Effective Government (CEG) and Coming Clean, links higher poverty to many Black and Latino communities living within chemical disaster "vulnerability zones" and say the risk of danger is much greater for those communities than for the U.S. as a whole - the very definition of disproportionate danger. 

PULLMAN, Wash.—It sounds like a phrase from Urban Dictionary, or the title of an animated gif, but a Washington State University researcher says "exploding head syndrome" is an authentic and largely overlooked phenomenon that warrants a deeper look.
"It's a provocative and understudied phenomenon," said Brian Sharpless, a WSU assistant professor and director of the university psychology clinic, who recently reviewed the scientific literature on the disorder for the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews. "I've worked with some individuals who have it seven times a night, so it can lead to bad clinical consequences as well."

Most dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago but one dinosaur lineage survived and lives on today – we call these the birds and they rule the skies the way they once ruled land. 
An international team, led by scientists from Oxford University and the Royal Ontario Museum, estimated the body mass of 426 dinosaur species based on the thickness of their leg bones. The team found that dinosaurs showed rapid changes in body size shortly after their origins, around 220 million years ago. 
However, these soon slowed: only the evolutionary line leading to birds continued to change size at this rate, and did so for a further 170 million years, producing new ecological diversity not seen in other dinosaur lineages.

Pregnant women show increased activity in the area of the brain related to emotional skills as they prepare to bond with their babies, according to a new study by scientists at Royal Holloway, University of London.
The research, which will be presented at the British Psychological Society's annual conference on Wednesday 7 May, found that pregnant women use the right side of their brain more than new mothers do when they look at faces with emotive expressions.

Neutron stars are extraordinarily dense stellar bodies created when massive stars collapse. They host the strongest magnetic fields in the universe -- as much as a billion times more powerful than any man-made electromagnet.
But some neutron stars are much more strongly magnetized than others and no one is sure why.
A paper by McGill University physicists Konstantinos Gourgouliatos and Andrew Cumming
in Physical Review Letters  sheds new light on the expected geometry of the magnetic field in neutron stars and could help scientists measure the mass and radius of these unusual stellar bodies, and thereby gain insights into the physics of matter at extreme densities.