At the 2015 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meetings, researcher Michael Cherney of the University of Michigan, presented findings about weaning age (i.e. when a calf stops nursing) in fossil mammoths. By studying modern African elephants at the Toledo Zoo, Cherney was able to characterize the isotopic effects of weaning in a close relative of mammoths. Decreased nursing causes predictable changes in the isotopic composition of elephant tail hairs sampled over time.
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(BOSTON) - A consortium of 48 scientists from 50 institutions in the United States - including Pamela Silver, Ph.D., a Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University - are calling for a Unified Microbiome Initiative that would span national cross-institutional and cross-governmental agency support.
Much of the world frowns on the practice of polygamy. Most countries around the globe ban or restrict marriages to more than one spouse at a time. And polygyny--where one husband has more than one wife--is decried by the United Nations Human Rights Committee and women's rights organizations as discriminatory to women.
But a new study of polygyny in Tanzania finds that the practice of sharing a husband may, in some circumstances, lead to greater health and wealth for women and their children.
While the anthropogenic impact on global species diversity is clear, the role of ancient human populations in causing extinctions is more controversial. New data presented at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meetings in Dallas, Texas, implicates early humans in the extinction of large mammals, birds and lizards in Australia. More precise dating of these extinction events places them 10 thousand years after the first arrival of humans in Australia, suggesting human predation was the most likely cause.
In 2001, a paleontology field crew from Burpee Museum of Natural History (Rockford, IL) were prospecting for dinosaur fossils near Ekalaka, Montana, when they discovered bones of a half-grown T. rex weathering out from exposures of the Hell Creek Formation. "Jane", as she was later named, turned out to be the most complete adolescent T. rex ever discovered, filling a critical gap between juvenile and adult that had caused decades of scientific debate.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill.-- Bacteria have many methods of adapting to resist antibiotics, but a new class of spiral polypeptides developed at the University of Illinois targets one thing no bacterium can live without: an outer membrane.
Microbes are essential to life on Earth. They're found in soil and water and inside the human gut. In fact, nearly every habitat and organism hosts a community of microbes, called a microbiome. What's more, microbes hold tremendous promise for innovations in medicine, energy, agriculture, and understanding climate change.
Rare birds living in Hawaii's higher elevation forests may lose more than 50% of their habitat under climate shifts projected by the end of the century, according to a study published October 28, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Lucas Fortini from the U.S. Geological Survey and colleagues.
Understanding why a tumour metastasises in specific organs and do not in others is one of the top goals of oncology, and also one of the oldest. 126 years ago, the British physician, Stephen Paget, formulated his 'seed and soil theory', which advocates that metastasis requires the dispersal of tumour cells, 'seeds', as well as a welcoming environment, 'fertile soil', in the recipient organ. However, since then "the progress made in deciphering the mechanisms that guide metastasis to specific organs has been insufficient," write the authors in the report published in 'Nature'.
PHILADELPHIA - Autophagy, literally self-eating or the degradation of unwanted cellular bits and pieces by the cell itself, has been shown for the first time to also work in the cell nucleus. In addition, in this setting it plays a role in guarding against the start of cancer, according to new research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
A new study suggests the road to obesity may be paved with non-nutritious carbohydrates in breast milk, shifting popular notions about how and why children grow to become overweight adults.
Previous research has shown that maternal obesity strongly affects a baby's risk for becoming overweight, but scientists are unsure about how fatness is transmitted, said Michael Goran, the study's corresponding author and director of the Childhood Obesity Research Center at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.
A consortium of 48 scientists from 50 institutions in the United States has called for an ambitious research effort to understand and harness microbiomes - the communities of microorganisms that inhabit ecosystems as varied as the human gut and the ocean, to improve human health, agriculture, bioenergy, and the environment.
Their proposal, published in the October 30 issue of the journal Science, calls for a major research project to develop new research tools and collaborations that will unlock the secrets of Earth's microbial communities.
Even fish look forward to retirement.
After making an exhausting migration from river to ocean and back to river -- often multiple years in a row -- one species of Alaskan trout decides to call it quits and retire from migrating once they are big enough to survive off their fat reserves.
This is the first time such a "retirement" pattern has been seen in fish that make this river-to-ocean migration, according to University of Washington-led research published in July in the journal Ecology.
A new publication from scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai offers a glimpse of precision medicine in action, with a massive data analysis project that identified clinically and genetically distinct subtypes of patients with type 2 diabetes. This work not only points to the possibility for more tailored diagnosis and treatment of type 2 diabetes in the future, but also reveals a novel approach that can be applied to virtually any disease.
Researchers at New Mexico State University tested 10 commercially available products for their effectiveness at repelling mosquitoes, and the results were published in the Journal of Insect Science.