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BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A new research study from Indiana University supports the commonly held view that people from disadvantaged groups are using the Internet to broaden their social networks.

Those who are from racially or educationally advantaged groups depend more on face-to-face interactions and use the Internet to reinforce their connections with others.

The paper, accepted by the journal Communication Research, is the first to use real-time, within-person measures of both race and tie strength to prove a concept of social diversification across cultures.

Researchers have found that a genetic variant is linked with an increased risk of fatty liver disease in obese youth; however, children with the variant tend to have lower total and LDL cholesterol levels.

As indicated by the condition's name, fat accumulates in the liver cells of patients with fatty liver disease. The variant analyzed in this study lies within the gene that codes for the transmembrane 6 superfamily member 2 (TM6SF2) protein, which helps regulate the liver's metabolism of fat.

New research indicates that commonly-used insecticide mixtures continue to impact aquatic invertebrate species over multiple weeks, even when the chemicals are no longer detectable in water.

Through experiments meant to generally reflect runoff from a multiple-homeowner watershed, investigators found that pesticide mixtures had negative effects on the abundance of certain snails, water fleas, and crustaceans.

Plants that have flowers that point towards the sky may be better at attracting moth pollinators than plants that have 'shy' flowers that point sideways.

Researchers discovered this when they studied two species: Zaluzianskya natalensis, whose flowers point upwards, and Zaluzianskya microsiphon, whose flowers point sideways. Hawkmoths are the main pollinators of Z. natalensis flowers and showed a preference for its flowers. Long-tongued flies are the main pollinators of Z. microsiphon.

After analyzing 20 years of data on the S&P 1,500 firms, researchers have proposed a theory that women in top management face an implicit quota, whereby a firm's leadership makes an effort to have a small number of women on the top management team but makes less effort to have, or even resists having, larger numbers of women.

Therefore, the likelihood that a given position in a top management team is occupied by a woman is lower if another position on the same team is occupied by a woman.

Paleontologists with the University of Washington's Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture find that tiny organisms called foraminifera have a big story to tell about the health of Puget Sound.

A new Biotechnology and Bioengineering viewpoint article provides insights on how rapid advancements in DNA reading and writing technologies will impact how researchers go about engineering biological systems, which include processes that occur within and around cells.

Examples of biological systems include all kinds of cells, ranging from the more complex mammalian cells that make up our own bodies to the less complex microbial cells that can be manipulated to produce proteins and other molecules.

On an expedition in Scotland, researchers recently discovered the fossilized remains of a mouse-sized mammal dating back around 170 million years to the Middle Jurassic. The fossil represents a lower jaw belonging to a species of 'stem therian' mammal called Palaeoxonodon that was previously known solely from isolated teeth.

Palaeoxonodon is an important species for understanding the evolution of molar teeth in modern mammals.

A scientist from The Cleveland Museum of Natural History led research that revised the horned praying mantis group and traced the evolution of its distinctive camouflage features. Dr. Gavin Svenson and his colleagues identified a new genus and new tribe of praying mantis and discovered that disruptive camouflage evolved twice within the group. The second, more recent, occasion occurred after the re-evolution of a special leg lobe that disguises the body profile to help the insect hide from predators. The research was publishedNov. 16, 2015 online in the journal Systematic Entomology.

Peptides promise to be useful drugs, but they're hard to handle. 

Because peptides, like proteins, are chains of amino acids, our bodies will digest them and excrete the remnants. Even if delivered to their targets intact through intravenous injection, peptides mostly can't get into cells without help.

Chemists at the University of California, San Diego, have found a simple, potentially broadly useful way to send peptides into cells and tissues. 

The primary way that researchers know anything about the distribution of species in the natural world is via the specimen collections housed in museums all around the world. As a result, tremendous effort is being put into uploading data on those collections into free and accessible databases (for example, http://www.gbif.org).

An initiative to improve prescribing of antibiotics for urinary tract infections (UTIs) resulted in better-quality prescribing of first-line antibiotics, although the number of prescriptions also increased, according to new research in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

A new guideline aims to help Canadian physicians, nurses and pharmacists treat children and adults with acne, a disease that can severely affect quality of life. The guideline, published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal), updates the previous guidance published 15 years ago.

As many as 50% of all natural history specimens held in the world's museums could be wrongly named, according to a new study by researchers from Oxford University and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Signalling processes in organisms are governed by specific extracellular and intracellular interactions and involve hundreds of different functionally highly versatile receptors situated in cell membranes. For scientists wishing to understand signalling processes the situation is made more complex by the receptors not only being unevenly distributed and often able to bind more than one ligand but also by the same type of receptor being able to bind a ligand strongly, weakly or not all. New methods that allow precise quantifications of such complex interactions are urgently required.