News Articles

New research has helped unpick a long-standing mystery about how dietary fibre supresses appetite.
In a study led by Imperial College London and the Medical Research Council (MRC), an international team of researchers identified an anti-appetite molecule called acetate that is naturally released when we digest fibre in the gut. Once released, the acetate is transported to the brain where it produces a signal to tell us to stop eating.
The research, published in Nature Communications, confirms the natural benefits of increasing the amount of fibre in our diets to control over-eating and could also help develop methods to reduce appetite. The study found that acetate reduces appetite when directly applied into the bloodstream, the colon or the brain.

Direct current - DC - electricity is used by us every day. If you see a blocky black thing on a power cord, that is a transformer and it turns alternating current (AC) electricity into DC that is used by a device.
In the early days of mass electricity, it was Tesla (and then Westinghouse) versus Edison to create an electricity standard. Edison eventually lost because high-voltage AC electricity meant it could go longer distances - and that meant fewer dirty power plants in city neighborhoods. But the device you are reading this on uses DC power, because it needs to work in a 0 and 1 state and with AC, that 1 is always changing. Tell an electrical engineer you want your two-pole transistor to work with three-phase AC and he will throw a copy of Kreyszig at you.

 A new paper suggests that dopamine release is increased in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and may be normalized by the therapeutic application of deep brain stimulation (DBS). The authors of the paper in Biological Psychiatry
 characterize dopamine as the 'elixir of pleasure' because so many rewarding stimuli – food, drugs, sex, exercise – are correlated to its release in the brain.
Yet research also indicates that when drug use becomes compulsive, the related dopamine release becomes deficient in the striatum, a brain region that is involved in reward and behavioral control.

The genomics revolution has been going on for decades, but half of known eukaryote lineages remain unstudied at the genomic level.
A new survey, with results published in
of Trends in Ecology and Evolution, concludes that this is simply a popularity contest and the field is displaying research bias against 'less popular', but potentially genetically rich, single-cell organisms. The lack of microbial representation leaves a world of untapped genetic potential undiscovered.

UPTON, NY—Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory are seeking ways to synchronize the magnetic spins in nanoscale devices to build tiny yet more powerful signal-generating or receiving antennas and other electronics. Their latest work, published in Nature Communications, shows that stacked nanoscale magnetic vortices separated by an extremely thin layer of copper can be driven to operate in unison, potentially producing a powerful signal that could be put to work in a new generation of cell phones, computers, and other applications.
The aim of this "spintronic" technology revolution is to harness the power of an electron's "spin," the property responsible for magnetism, rather than its negative charge.

It's community pool season and while urban moms think that a chlorinated municipal pool is cleaner than a rural pond, microbiologists know that isn't really true.Bacteria and parasites can lurk in all kinds of water and put a real damper on summertime fun.At biggest risk are the youngest kids, for a variety of reasons.

Earlier this month, the Epic Electric American Road Trip, a 24-day, 12,183-mile battery-powered journey sponsored by electric vehicle (EV) software and information services company Recargo Inc., was completed. They expect to be awarded Guinness World Record verification for the longest vehicle journey ever taken using 100% electric power. The goal was to emphasize the possibilities of the nation's current electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

North Carolina farmers and landowners are participating in program to grow giant miscanthus grass for renewable products using underutilized and marginal land.
Giant miscanthus grass is a rapidly renewable biomass crop that provides a viable economic alternative for many farmers and landowners with underutilized and marginal land that might otherwise lay dormant or fail to provide annual profits. Perennial giant miscanthus grows well under a range of soil and environmental conditions. It requires little to grow and maintain. It's a simple, convenient and profitable crop to raise.
Planting biomass at commercial scale includes solving the significant challenge of establishing rhizome-propagated crops. 

Astronomers have taken unprecedented images of the intergalactic medium (IGM) — the diffuse gas that connects galaxies throughout the universe — with the Cosmic Web Imager, which was designed and built at the California Institute of Technology.
Until now, the structure of the IGM has mostly been a matterof speculation, but with observations from the Cosmic Web Imager, deployed on the Hale 200-inch telescope at Palomar Observatory, astronomers are obtaining our first three-dimensional pictures of the IGM.
The Cosmic Web Imager will make possible a new understanding of galactic and intergalactic dynamics, and it has already detected one possible spiral-galaxy-in-the-making that is three times the size of our Milky Way.

Take a muscle cell, modify it over millions of years, and you can end up with a shocking evolutionary result: the electric fish.
Electric fish have evolved several times in varying levels of complexity. Two groups of electric fish, one in Africa (Mormyroids) and one in South America (Gymnotiforms), have independently evolved sophisticated communication systems using these cells. By emitting and sensing weak electrical signals, the fish have bypassed the usual means of communication, such as with sounds and visual signals, and go directly to electrical signals.

Do you find yourself finishing the sentences of a speaker you are watching? You are not alone.
Our brain activity is similar to speakers we are listening to when we can predict what they are going to say, according to a team of neuroscientists writing in the Journal of Neuroscience. 
Traditionally, it was thought that our brains always process the world around us from the "bottom up"—when we hear someone speak, our auditory cortex first processes the sounds, and then other areas in the brain put those sounds together into words and then sentences and larger discourse units. From here, we derive meaning and an understanding of the content of what is said to us.

It's official - females prefer courtship over competitiveness. And she may talk with her friends about the size of your mandibles, but it really doesn't matter.   
Female mate choice and male-male competition are typical mechanisms of sexual selection. However, these two mechanisms do not always favor the same males.  Researchers have investigated the complicated sexual conflict over mating in Gnatocerus cornutus, the horned flour-beetle.

Male horned beetles have enlarged lower jaws – or mandibles – used to fight rivals, and those with larger mandibles do have a mating advantage when there is direct male-male competition. But until now, it has not been clear whether the females actually prefer these highly competitive males.