Body

(Edmonton, AB) A new discovery from the University of Alberta's Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry could open the door to one day treat or prevent diseases caused by West Nile virus and Dengue virus infections.

HANOVER, N.H. - New research by a Dartmouth scientist and her colleagues shows that policies aimed at protecting tropical forests in the Congo Basin may unexpectedly lead to increased deforestation and timber production.

The findings link tropical deforestation -- in the Congo Basin and globally -- with rising international demand for timber, foreign investment and other factors, and contradict the goal of collaborative efforts by governments, environmentalists and corporations to adopt sustainable forest management since the 1992 Rio Summit.

HOUSTON - (Dec. 17, 2015) - Despite the increasing risks of mosquito-transmitted epidemics in the United States and Mexico, policymakers in both countries have made little effort to prevent future outbreaks, according to a new policy brief by tropical-disease and science policy experts at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.

How do cybersecurity experts discover how to properly defend a system or build a network that's secure?

As in other domains of science, this process involves hypothesis, experimentation, and analysis -- or at least it should. In reality, cybersecurity research can happen in an ad hoc fashion, often in crisis mode in the wake of an attack.

A steep rise in human cases of P. knowlesi malaria in Malaysia is likely to be linked to deforestation and associated environmental changes, according to new research published in Emerging Infectious Diseases. The study, led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, is the first to explore how changes in land use are impacting the emergence of the disease.

Epilepsy remains one of the most common neurological conditions, affecting one in 26 Americans in their lifetime, with one-third having a form of the condition that resists treatment or effective management. With those statistics in mind, more than 5,200 neurologists, scientists, nurses and health professionals came to Philadelphia December 4-8 for the 2015 American Epilepsy Society (AES) Annual Meeting to discuss new discoveries and emerging technologies that can lead to more effective treatment.

Warmer temperatures increase biodiversity and photosynthesis in phytoplankton, researchers at the University of Exeter and Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) have found. Globally, phytoplankton -- microscopic water-borne plants -- absorb as much carbon dioxide as tropical rainforests and so understanding the way they respond to a warming climate is crucial.

The groundbreaking study, published in the journal PLOS Biology, was carried out over five years using artificially warmed ponds that simulated the increases in temperature expected by the end of the century.

Centenarians show successful aging as they remain active and alert at very old ages. Scientists at Stanford University and the University of Bologna have begun to unravel the basis for longevity by finding genetic loci associated with extreme longevity.

In light of recent outbreaks of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), two studies provide new insights into this life-threatening pathogen, with the first identifying five different lineages of the virus that have circulated between humans and camels, and the second evaluating a MERS-CoV vaccine for camels that could work as a preemptive measure to reduce the pathogen's spread. Over the past three years, several MERS outbreaks have been reported in the Middle East and most recently in South Korea, with a fatality rate of roughly 35%.

Science has chosen the genome editing method called CRISPR as its 2015 Breakthrough of the Year, an "unprecedented selection," Managing News Editor John Travis explains, given that the technique appeared twice before among Science's runner-ups, and is the only runner-up to subsequently be elevated to Breakthrough status.

Many policies regulating carnivore hunting do not adequately acknowledge and address the negative effects of hunting on demography and population dynamics, authors of this Policy Forum say. Increasingly, numbers of large, terrestrial carnivores around the world are in decline, a phenomenon that holds consequences for ecosystem structure and function. Focusing on wolf harvesting in the western United States, the hunting ban for which was lifted in 2008, Scott Creel et al. highlight four ways in which current hunting policies do not align well with ecological theory and data.

An international group of carnivore biologists, writing in the journal Science, say that policies regulating the hunting of large carnivores do not always align with basic scientific data.

Sydney -- A thigh bone found in China suggests an ancient species of human thought to be long extinct may have survived until as recently as the end of the last Ice Age.

The 14,000 year old bone -- found among the remains of China's enigmatic 'Red Deer Cave people' -- has been shown to have features that resemble those of some of the most ancient members of the human genus, (Homo), despite its young age.

Having emerged late during evolution, seeds have transformed many plants into miniature travelers, contributing greatly to their colonization of terrestrial habitats. Researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, have just discovered one of the keys to this success: the cuticle. Present as a thick waxy layer in the seed coat and composed of cutin -- a type of fatty acid --, the cuticle increases seeds' viability, their resistance to reactive oxygen species, and contributes to maintaining their dormant state.

New research has revealed that a plant protein known to detect growth-promoting compounds in smoke from burning vegetation has a much older and broader role: recognising initial signals sent from the beneficial soil fungi that deliver nutrients directly into plant cells.