In an effort that reaches back to the 19th-century laboratories of Europe, a discovery by University of Georgia chemistry researchers establishes new research possibilities for silicon chemistry and the semiconductor industry.
The study, published April 20 in the journal Nature Chemistry, gives details on the first time chemists have been able to trap molecular species of silicon oxides.
Americans are more likely to be heavy drinkers and binge drinkers than in recent years due in large part to rising rates of drinking among women, according to a new analysis of county-level drinking patterns in the United States. By contrast, the percentage of people who drink any alcohol has remained relatively unchanged over time, according to the latest research by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.
New genetic data suggest the red lionfish invasion in the Caribbean Basin and Western Atlantic started in multiple locations, not just one as previously believed, according to a new study led by the U.S. Geological Survey.
Florida has often been cited as the likely location of the introduction, but the new research suggests multiple introductions occurred, with some potentially coming from the more southern parts of the range. The Caribbean Basin stretches from parts of Florida's Gulf Coast through South America.
Why do animals fight with members of other species? A nine-year study by UCLA biologists says the reason often has to do with "obtaining priority access to females" in the area.
The scientists observed and analyzed the behavior of several species of Hetaerina damselflies, also known as rubyspot damselflies. For the study, published this month in the print edition of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers observed more than 100 damselflies a day in their natural habitat along rivers and streams in Texas, Arizona and Mexico.
In 2012 the USA saw the highest number of pertussis (whooping cough) cases since 1955. New research finds that a likely explanation for this rise in disease is a drop in the degree of vaccine protection for each vaccinated individual.
A team led by Dr. Manoj Gambhir (Monash University, Melbourne, Australia), Dr. Thomas Clark (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, USA), and Professor Neil Ferguson (Imperial College London, UK), worked with 60 years of pertussis disease data to determine what best explained the recent increase in the disease.
University of Utah seismologists discovered and made images of a reservoir of hot, partly molten rock 12 to 28 miles beneath the Yellowstone supervolcano, and it is 4.4 times larger than the shallower, long-known magma chamber.
The hot rock in the newly discovered, deeper magma reservoir would fill the 1,000-cubic-mile Grand Canyon 11.2 times, while the previously known magma chamber would fill the Grand Canyon 2.5 times, says postdoctoral researcher Jamie Farrell, a co-author of the study published online today in the journal Science.
Photosynthesis leaves behind a unique calling card, a chemical signature that is spelled out with stable oxygen isotopes, according to a new study in Science. The findings suggest that similar isotopic signatures could exist for many biological processes, including some that are difficult to observe with current tools.
"We've found a new type of biosignature," said co-lead author Laurence Yeung, an assistant professor of Earth science at Rice University. "We show that plants and plankton impart this type of biosignature on the oxygen they produce during photosynthesis."
The recent slowdown in the rise of the global average air temperatures will make no difference to how much the planet will warm by 2100, a new study in Nature Climate Change says. The work compared climate models that capture the current slowdown in warming to those that do not. The study found that long-term warming projections were effectively unchanged across the two groups of models. Obviously there has been concern about the accuracy of models, since they did not factor in the global warming pause, so averaging models will not dissuade critics.
High elevation environments around the world may be warming much faster than previously thought, according to members of an international research team including Raymond Bradley, director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They call for more aggressive monitoring of temperature changes in mountain regions and more attention to the potential consequences of warming.
Life as a wild baby bird can involve a lot of stress; competing with your siblings, dealing with extreme weather, and going hungry due to habitat loss are just a few examples. However, birds have an amazing capacity to overcome stresses experienced early in life and go on to reproductive success as adults, according to a new Perspective paper in The Auk: Ornithological Advances by Hugh Drummond and Sergio Ancona of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
The famous Vitruvian Man, which was drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, pictures the canon of human's proportions. However, humans have become bilaterally symmetric not at once. There are two main points of view on the last common bilaterian ancestor, its appearance and the course of evolution.
Stegosaurus, a large, herbivorous dinosaur with two staggered rows of bony plates along its back and two pairs of spikes at the end of its tail, lived roughly 150 million years ago during the Late Jurassic in the western United States.
Some individuals had wide plates, some had tall, with the wide plates being up to 45 per cent larger overall than the tall plates. According to the new study, the tall-plated Stegosaurus and the wide-plate Stegosaurus were not two distinct species, nor were they individuals of different age: they were actually males and females.
A study of disease dynamics in a California grassland has revealed fundamental principles underlying the spread of pathogens among species, with broad implications for the maintenance of biodiversity and for addressing practical problems related to plant diseases.
Neonicotinoids are used for seed dressing of rapeseed, to protect the young plants against flea beetles. Since 2013, use of this type of pesticide has been restricted by the EU for crops that are attractive to bees. The research findings in Nature, and they show that the insecticide has a negative impact on wild bees. This is a serious matter, because wild bees play an important role in pollination of crops. Wild bees include both bumblebees and solitary bees.
A genetic test that can prevent 'killer' bees from spreading around the world has been created in a research effort led by University of Sydney scholars jointly with York University scientists.
"Our genetic test is highly accurate and considerably more sophisticated than the old tests that have a high tendency to misclassify hybrid bees," says Professor Amro Zayed in the department of Biology, Faculty of Science.