Antioxidants are natural food ingredients that protect cells from harmful influences. Their main task is to neutralize so-called "free radicals" which are produced in the process of oxidation and which are responsible for cell degeneration.
Earth
In big sagebrush country, re-establishing the ecosystem's namesake shrub may jump-start the recovery process more successfully after oil and gas development than sowing grass-dominated reclamation seed mixes typically used to quickly re-vegetate bare soil on well pads, report two Colorado scientists in the January 2015 issue of Ecological Applications.
In the new GSA BULLETIN, Matteo Maggi and colleagues from Italy and Brazil present a new model of the development of fractures showing a stairway trajectory, commonly occurring in finely laminated rock, such microbialites and travertines.
These fractures strongly enhance permeability by connecting several highly porous zones enveloped in tight impermeable levels. Understanding and predicting this fracture pattern geometry, distribution, and interconnection is valuable not only for locating water supplies, but also for oil, gas, and geothermal exploration.
A new Duke University-led study finds that most climate models likely underestimate the degree of decade-to-decade variability occurring in mean surface temperatures as Earth's atmosphere warms. The models also provide inconsistent explanations of why this variability occurs in the first place.
These discrepancies may undermine the models' reliability for projecting the short-term pace as well as the extent of future warming, the study's authors warn. As such, we shouldn't over-interpret recent temperature trends.
A Wake Forest University study to investigate the effects of acute beetroot juice ingestion on the exercise capacity of COPD patients shows some promise, but a larger clinical trial is needed to verify results.
The new research, published online ahead of print in the journal Nitric Oxide: Biology and Chemistry, looked at a small group of COPD patients who drank beetroot juice as compared to a placebo drink before exercise.
Pallid sturgeon come from a genetic line that has lived on this planet for tens of millions of years; yet it has been decades since anyone has documented any of the enormous fish successfully producing young that survive to adulthood in the upper Missouri River basin.
Imagine if every time you filled your car with gas, a few gallons didn't make it into the tank and instead spilled onto the ground. That's essentially what happens every day with the aging system of underground pipes and tanks that delivers natural gas to Boston-area households and businesses, with adverse economic, public health, and environmental consequences. Now a group of atmospheric scientists at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has produced hard numbers that quantify the extent of the problem.
In literature, crows and ravens are a bad omen and are associated with witches. Most people believe they steal, eat other birds' eggs and reduce the populations of other birds. But a new study, which has brought together over 326 interactions between corvids and their prey, demonstrates that their notoriety is not entirely merited.
A research team has developed a new technique for determining the role that a material's structure has on the efficiency of organic solar cells, which are candidates for low-cost, next generation solar power that would be superior to current solar technology and its environmentally costly mining and manufacturing process.
Lorentz invariance (LI) is a cornerstone of modern physics, and strongly supported by observations.
In fact, all the experiments carried out so far are consistent with it, and no evidence to show that such a symmetry needs to be broken at a certain energy scale. Nevertheless, there are various reasons to construct gravitational theories with broken LI. In particular, our understanding of space-times at Plank scale is still highly limited, and the renomalizability and unitarity of gravity often lead to the violation of LI.
Recent research shows that mild infections without symptoms of illness can still lead to serious consequences by reducing the lifespan of malaria-infected migratory birds. The infection is thought to speed up the ageing process by shortening the telomeres (i.e., the chromosomes ends) at a faster rate and thereby accelerating senescence.
An international team of scientists has taken a new path in the research into causes of epilepsy: The researchers determined the networks of the active genes and, like a dragnet, looked for the "main perpetrators" using a computer model. In doing so, they discovered the molecule sestrin-3 as a central switch. In animal models, the scientists were able to demonstrate that inhibition of sestrin-3 leads to a reduction in seizures.
scientists have experimentally observed for the first time a phenomenon in ultracold, three-atom molecules predicted by Russian theoretical physicsist Vitaly Efimov in 1970. "Quantum theory makes the existence of these gigantic molecules inevitiable, provided proper--and quite challenging--conditions are created," said Efimov, of the University of Washington.
In this quantum phenomenon, called geometric scaling, the triatomic molecules fit inside one another like an infinitely large set of Russian nesting dolls.
With endocrine-disrupting compounds affecting fish populations in rivers as close as Pennsylvania's Susquehanna and as far away as Israel's Jordan, a new research study shows that soils can filter out and break down at least some of these emerging contaminants. The results suggest that water pollution can be diminished by spraying treated wastewater on land rather than discharging it directly into streams, according to researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.
The idea that coral reefs have formed over millennia in a continuous process has been challenged by a study of the southern Great Barrier Reef. The research, led by the University of Sydney, shows that even small variations in sea level can cause significant change across the reef.