In an effort to better understand what happens during Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), researchers at Umeå University in Sweden have compared the impact of ALS on the eye and limb muscles. They have focused on specific proteins that are important for muscle-nerve contacts. The eye muscles appear to be better equipped to maintain their muscle-nerve contacts and are thereby less affected.
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Genetic diversity is important for plant species to persist in Northern forests that experience human nitrogen inputs. This is one conclusions that Franziska Bandau at Umeå University in Sweden draws.
Nitrogen is an essential nutrient for plants. In Northern forests, nitrogen availability to plants is limited, but plant species growing in these forests are well adapted to the low nitrogen conditions.
Industrialized nations that view wildfire as the enemy have much to learn from people in some parts of the world who have learned to live compatibly with wildfire, says a team of fire research scientists.
The interdisciplinary team say there is much to be learned from these "fire-adaptive communities" and they are calling on policy makers to tap that knowledge, particularly in the wake of global warming.
ROSEMONT, Ill. (June 1, 2016)--Since September 11, 2001, an estimated 60,000 U.S. military service members have been injured in combat during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Nearly 45,000 (75 percent) of all combat injuries are caused by improvised explosive devices, also known as IEDs. Approximately two out of five service members with combat injuries (40 percent) have suffered fractures, traumatic amputations, and injuries to the spine.
More than 50 percent of today's population lives in cities. According to the United Nations Development Programme, that number is predicted to rise to 70 percent by 2050. Growing urbanization increases the overall temperature of a city as buildings, roads, parking lots and other infrastructure absorb heat, creating an urban heat island (UHI). A UHI causes areas like Chicago to be significantly warmer than surrounding rural areas, which threatens urban sustainability and can lead to high mortality rates and scarcity of resources as well as high electricity demands.
Among the major tools of supermarket promotions are coupons, but understanding which types of coupons accomplish the retailer's objectives can be tricky. A field study described in an article appearing in the June 2016 issue of the Journal of Retailing can help retailers map the categories and brands they should promote, depending on whether the objective is to increase customer loyalty by rewarding clients for buying brands they are already purchasing or entice them to buy in categories that they are not yet purchasing at the store.
Merchandise returns are expensive for retailers, and yet lenient return policies can boost consumer demand. For retailers seeking guidance on balancing these concerns, an analysis of the impact of various return policies on both purchases and returns, forthcoming in the June 2016 issue of the Journal of Retailing, provides a nuanced perspective.
Normal rules of economic behavior would dictate that free upgrades to a particular product would move it out the door in record numbers. Somewhat counterintuitively, new research from Professor Wen Mao reveals that a token upgrade fee, even no more than a penny, is often more attractive to consumers than a freebie.
Using a reverse paint-by-numbers approach, scientists have located another gene that controls the brilliant patterning of Heliconius butterfly wings. Led by former Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) fellow Nicole Nadeau, the researchers identified variations in the gene that correspond to wing color and pattern variation in three different Heliconius species. Published in Nature, June 2016, the discovery puts scientists a step closer to unlocking the code responsible for diversity and evolution in butterflies and moths.
University of Exeter researchers have found novel insight into the ways cells organise themselves. Their work, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and published this week in Nature Communications, uses an interdisciplinary approach to show, for the first time, that random distribution of organelles is a consequence of energy-dependent activity in a fungus and mammalian cell line.
Organelles are the functional units of a cell. Like "organs" in a body, they perform specialised functions that allow survival of the cell.
The Telomeres and Telomerase Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), in collaboration with the Centre's Transgenic Mice Core Unit, has succeeded in creating mice in the laboratory with hyper-long telomeres and with reduced molecular ageing, avoiding the use of what to date has been the standard method: genetic manipulation. This new technique based on epigenetic changes that is described today in the pages of Nature Communications, avoids the manipulation of genes in order to delay molecular ageing.
TAMPA, Fla. (June 2, 2016) - Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) represents approximately 14 percent of all types of lung cancer. Many patients with SCLC respond to initial chemotherapy; however, they eventually relapse and develop progressive disease that has no effective treatment options.
Men who live outside major Canadian cities and have sex with other men are less likely to get an HIV test than their metropolitan counterparts, a UBC study shows.
The study, conducted at UBC's Okanagan campus, also shows that the lower testing rates are likely connected to internalized feelings of homophobia and a reluctance to disclose sexual preferences at a doctor's office.
MISSOULA - A University of Montana graduate student's research on Alaskan brown bears and red salmon is the May cover story of the high-profile journal Ecology.
Will Deacy, a UM systems ecology graduate student under the direction of UM Professor Jack Stanford, researched brown bears on Kodiak Island, Alaska, in collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The obesity epidemic affects women and men of every ethnic group in the United States, but strong gender and racial disparities in the risk of overweight and obesity exist. African American women are currently more at risk than any other group in the United States: 82.1% of African American women are overweight or obese (defined as having a BMI of 25 or higher), compared to 76.2% of Hispanic women and 64.6% of Caucasian women, according to the 2011-2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) [1].