BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Two recently diverged populations of a southern California songbird produce unique odors, suggesting smell could contribute to the reproductive isolation that accompanies the origin of new bird species. The Indiana University Bloomington study of organic compounds present in the preen oils of Dark-eyed Juncos is described in this month's Behavioral Ecology.
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WASHINGTON -- Urgency, cooperation, and persistent management are needed among producers, processors, government officials, and scientists while solutions are developed and implemented to combat the citrus greening disease threatening Florida citrus production, says a new report from the National Research Council. Requested by the Florida Department of Citrus, the report lays out a strategic plan to control citrus greening and develop a comprehensive solution to diseases that damage citrus crops.
Scientists have shed light on a key control process within cells that helps ensure our bodies function efficiently.
They have defined the shape of a protein molecule at different stages as it performs a key activity within a cell – breaking down sugar to turn it into energy.
The findings – which enable scientists to create graphics of the molecular structure at various stages of the process – could prove vital in informing the quest for new medicines.
Grapes are one of the world's most economically important fruit crops, but the woody perennial takes three years to go from seed to fruit, and that makes traditional breeding expensive and time-consuming.
A team of Agricultural Research Service (ARS) researchers has found a way to speed things up by developing a way to identify genetic markers in the grapevine's genome that can be linked with specific traits, such as fruit quality, environmental adaptation, and disease and pest resistance.
Researchers from the Jaume I University have proven the usefulness of DUWAS, a new scale for measuring addiction to work, a disorder that affects around 12% of all working people in Spain. The experts say that 8% of the working population in Spain devotes more than 12 hours per day to their job.
The endangered freshwater mussel species has been given a welcome boost by scientists from Queen's University Belfast following a 12 year cultivation project.
Over 300 of the mussels, which are threatened in many parts of Europe and North America, have been released back into the wild at a range of secret locations in Northern Ireland.
Fossils and their surrounding matrix can provide insights into what our world looked like millions of years ago. Fossils of angiosperms, or flowering plants (which are the most common plants today), first appear in the fossil record about 140 million years ago. Based on the material in which these fossils are deposited, it is thought that early angiosperms must have been weedy, fast-growing shrubs and herbs found in highly disturbed riparian stream channels and crevasses.
A new study from UCSF shows that prenatal health care professionals are concerned about patients' excessive weight gain during pregnancy but have difficulty providing effective counseling.
Boston, MA -- A new study led by researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) in collaboration with researchers from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington estimates that smoking, high blood pressure, elevated blood glucose and overweight and obesity currently reduce life expectancy in the U.S. by 4.9 years in men and 4.1 years in women. It is the first study to look at the effects of those four preventable risk factors on life expectancy in the whole nation.
Boston, MA – Although for nearly 60 years people have been urged to decrease their consumption of saturated fats to prevent heart disease, until now there has been surprisingly little scientific evidence that doing so actually decreased the risk of coronary heart disease events.
A study in this week's PLoS Medicine shows that the replacement of dietary saturated fatty acids with polyunsaturated fatty acids reduces coronary heart disease events, bringing much needed scientific evidence to an issue debated by experts and clinical guidelines. Dariush Mozaffarian and colleagues from Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials studying the effects on coronary heart disease of increasing polyunsaturated fat in place of saturated fat.
Just like the rest of us, scientists today are swamped with information. As more chemical resources become freely available, text mining applications - previously focused on correctly identifying gene and protein names – are now shifting towards also correctly identifying chemical names. Now database experts have compared two chemical name dictionaries head to head, and report on the payoffs of manual versus automatic data curation in the open access publication, Journal of Cheminformatics.
ALEXANDRIA, VA – A physical therapy exercise and health education program is effective in improving postnatal well-being and reducing the risk for postnatal depression (PND), according to a randomized controlled trial published in the March issue of Physical Therapy, (PTJ) the scientific journal of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA).
It was still an open question in medicine. Whereas scientific research has shown beneficial effects of moderate alcohol consumption in healthy people, it was not clear whether this could be valid also for patients who already had heart attack, stroke or another ischemic vascular event.
OAK BROOK, Ill. – A new, large-scale study of more than 10,000 adults found that more than one in every 200 asymptomatic people screened with CT colonography, or virtual colonoscopy, had clinically unsuspected malignant cancer and more than half of the cancers were located outside the colon. The findings were published in the April issue of the journal Radiology.