Body

Researchers have figured out what makes certain chemicals accumulate to toxic levels in aquatic food webs. And, scientists have developed a screening technique to determine which chemicals pose the greatest risk to the environment.

According to the study led by the U.S. Geological Survey, two traits were identified that indicate how chemicals can build up and reach toxic levels: how easily a chemical is broken down or metabolized by an organism and the chemical's ability to dissolve in water.

URBANA, Ill. - Twenty-five years ago, waterhemp was virtually unknown to Illinois farmers. Today, the broadleaf weed blankets corn and soybean fields across the state and the Midwest, causing yield losses from 40 to 70 percent.

The potential of light as a non-invasive, highly-focused alternative to pain medication was made more apparent thanks to research conducted by scientists at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital of McGill University and the McGill University Health Centre.

Researchers bred mice with a light-sensitive trait in peripheral neurons that were known to be responsible for pain transmission. The mice were genetically modified so that these neurons, called Nav 1.8+ nociceptors, express proteins called opsins, which react to light, a process known as optogenetics.

A new study from the University of Houston Department of Health and Human Performance finds a child's risk for obesity or malnutrition may be tied to the mother's misperception of her child's weight status. A key to understanding this phenomenon may lie in how she regards her own weight status. Researchers say the situation shows that healthcare providers need to broaden their health care screenings.

Scale insects known as cochineals are major pests of prickly pear in Mexico, and pesticides are often used to control them. However, one prickly pear farmer has been controlling them without the use of insecticides since the year 2000.

Have a close-up look at DNA; you'll see it wiggles in the oddest way.

Put more scientifically, a piece of DNA's movements are often counterintuitive to those of objects in our everyday grasp. Take a rod of rubber, for example. Bend it until its ends meet, and you can count on the elastic tension to snap it back straight when you let go, said biological physicist Harold Kim.

Researchers have shown for the first time that some corals surviving bleaching events can acquire and host new types of algae from their environment, which may make the coral more heat-tolerant and enhance their recovery.

Carotenoids, which are found at various levels in different banana cultivars, are important vitamin precursors for eye health. In a study published in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, researchers report a new understanding of how the fruit makes and stores the compound. Their findings could someday help in the development of banana varieties with enhanced health benefits.

In the developing world, far more men than women smoke. This is usually ascribed to pronounced gender disparities in social, political or economic power. But what about a developing society with a high degree of gender equality like the Aka pygmy tribe living in West Africa's Congo Basin? Surprisingly, even there, smoking is definitely a male thing, says anthropologist Casey Roulette of Washington State University, leader of a study published in Springer's journal Human Nature.

Targeted missiles that can enter cancer cells and deliver lethal cell toxins without harming surrounding healthy tissue. This has been a long-standing vision in cancer research, but it has proved difficult to accomplish. A research group at Lund University in Sweden has now taken some crucial steps in this direction.

The work of University of Adelaide researchers is shedding new light on the evolution of what are believed to be the largest bears that ever walked the Earth.

Dr Kieren Mitchell, from the University's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, School of Biological Sciences, has a new paper just published in Biology Letters.

Scientists and health officials are marshalling forces to fight Zika, the latest in a string of recent outbreaks. Many of these efforts target that virus specifically, but some researchers are looking for a broader approach. Now one team reports in ACS' journal Macromolecules a new strategy to fight a wide range of viruses that appears to be safe in vivo and could evade a virus's ability to develop resistance.

Diagnosis of gastric cancer in the early stages is difficult because of the lack of simple and cheap methods of inspection and specific markers of gastric cancer while the symptoms of the disease are vague and tend to overlap with other common and benign conditions. Better tumor characterization and more individualized treatment planning can be expected only with the implementation of better diagnostic tools combined with advances in molecular and genetic analysis.

Mountain ecosystems are valuable providers of key resources including water. These ecosystems comprise diverse species, some of which appear to be especially important to the ecosystem's functioning. In poorly studied mountain environments in biodiversity-rich countries, these keystone species can often be overlooked and undervalued.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. - As its name suggests, inflammatory bowel disease, which afflicts more than 1.6 million Americans, involves chronic inflammation of all or some of the digestive tract. An autoimmune disease known to have a strong genetic component, its symptoms are abdominal cramps, bloody diarrhea, and fever and, sometimes, weight loss. IBD, which is a group of inflammatory conditions, includes Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis.