Curated News: Staff Picks

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New research led by York University Professor Michael Connor highlights how fat cells could help determine the most effective way to fight breast cancer; including using exercise to combat the disease.

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LAWRENCE — U.S. immigration policy has become a hotly debated issue in the presidential primaries, and it figures to continue in the campaign as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump appear headed to receiving their parties' nominations later this summer.

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A violent outburst by the young star V883 Orionis has given astronomers using ALMA their first view of a water "snowline" in a protoplanetary disk – the transition point around the star where the temperature and pressure are low enough for water ice to form.

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Dr Diego Altamirano from the University of Southampton has contributed to new research that has proved the existence of a ‘gravitational vortex’ around a black hole.

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Scientists have discovered a new method of creating human stem cells which could solve the big problem of the large-scale production needed to fully realise the potential of these remarkable cells for understanding and treating disease.

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Dieters tend to adopt the wrong strategies, often planning to ditch their favorite foods and replace them with less-desirable options, according to new research from Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business. Conversely, successful dieters focus on adding healthy foods – foods that they actually like.

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A small rise of 1% in alcohol prices could significantly reduce violence-related injuries in England and Wales, consequently reducing their burden on hard-pressed emergency departments, concludes a study by Cardiff University.

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Realizing the risks of social media, major news organizations have created guidelines for employees regarding how to use these outlets, separate from the companies' existing codes of conduct. Little scholarly attention has been paid to the guidelines so far.

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Crows are performing a useful function and keeping our environment free from rotting carcasses, research carried out at the University of Exeter in Cornwall has discovered.

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No single assessment tool is able to consistently determine driving ability in people with Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment, a St. Michael's Hospital research review has found.

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No single assessment tool is able to consistently determine driving ability in people with Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment, a St. Michael's Hospital research review has found.

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A study by an Indiana University sociologist subjected both men and women to the negative social conditions that many women report experiencing in male-dominated occupations. The result: Men showed the same physiological stress response to the conditions as did women.

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A small phase I study provides molecular evidence that an FDA-approved drug for leukemia significantly increased brain dopamine and reduced toxic proteins linked to disease progression in patients with Parkinson’s disease or dementia with Lewy bodies.

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As many as 24 assassin bugs new to science were discovered and described by Dr. Guanyang Zhang and his colleagues. In their article, published in the open access Biodiversity Data Journal, they describe the new insects along with treating another 47 assassin bugs in the same genus. To do this, the scientists examined more than 10,000 specimens, coming from both museum collections and newly undertaken field trips.

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Europe will be spared the worst economic impacts of climate change by a slowing down of the Gulf Stream, new research predicts.

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Whether at school, in car accidents, on the sports field or the battlefield, mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is a common part of our lives. It is especially frequent among children, athletes, and the elderly. Now, scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have shown that a single dose of a new molecule they developed can effectively protect the brain from inflammation, cell death, and cognitive impairments that often follow a mild traumatic brain injury.

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Physicists from New Zealand's University of Otago have used steerable 'optical tweezers' to split minute clouds of ultracold atoms and slowly smash them together to directly observe a key theoretical principle of quantum mechanics.

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For the first time, researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland have coupled the nuclear spins of distant atoms using just a single electron. Three research groups took part in this complex experiment, the results of which have now been published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

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The subtropical weather in Cornwall means new exotic crops such as quinoa and Japanese persimmon are now more likely to succeed, according to a new technique developed by University of Exeter experts to monitor the climate.

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A metallic molecule being studied at Rice University begins to glow when bound to amyloid protein fibrils of the sort implicated in Alzheimer's disease. When triggered with ultraviolet light, the molecule glows much brighter, which enables real-time monitoring of amyloid fibrils as they aggregate in lab experiments.

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Traumatic brain injury (TBI) with a loss of consciousness (LOC) may be associated with later development of Parkinson’s disease but not Alzheimer’s disease or incident dementia.

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The phrase “tipping point” passed its own tipping point and caught fire after author Malcolm Gladwell’s so-named 2000 book. It’s now frequently used in discussions about climate change, but what are “climate tipping points”? And what do they mean for society and the economy? Scientists at Rutgers University and Harvard University tackle the terminology and outline a strategy for investigating the consequences of climate tipping points in a study published online today in the journal Earth’s Future.

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Parents are more confident their pre-teen child would know what to do if there were a house fire or tornado than whether the child would avoid playing with guns if home alone.

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A deadly bacteria that can be picked up by a simple sniff can travel to the brain and spinal cord in just 24 hours, a new Griffith University and Bond University study has found.

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We have all bumped our heads at some point, and such incidents are usually harmless. This is thanks to fluid-filled chambers in our brain that offset minor knocks and jolts and provide padding for sensitive components of our nervous system. Cerebral fluid, however, has more than just a protective function: It removes cellular waste, supplies our nervous tissue with nutrients, and transports important messenger substances. How these messenger substances are actually being delivered to their destination in the brain, however, was unclear until now. Göttingen-based Max Planck researchers have now discovered that tiny cilia on the surface of specialized cells could lead the way. Through synchronized beating movements, they create a complex network of dynamic flows that act like conveyor belts transporting molecular "freight". The results obtained by the scientists suggest that these flows send messenger substances directly to where they are needed.

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Aalto University scientists have broken the world record by fourteen fold in the energy resolution of thermal photodetection.

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When talking about troubling sexual encounters some women mention faking sexual pleasure to speed up their male partner's orgasm and ultimately end sex.

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For the first time in New Zealand waters an extremely rare grouping of Shepherd's Beaked Whales has been spotted from a University of Otago research vessel off the coast of the city of Dunedin in the South Island.

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Utah State, Eco Logical Research, NOAA, Oregon Dept. of Fish and Wildlife, South Fork Research Publish in Nature's Scientific Reports.

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Boston’s subway system, known as the T, might be just as bacteria-laden as you’d expect but organisms found there are largely from normal human skin and incapable of causing disease, according to a study published June 28 in mSystems, an open access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

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Members of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) must do more to follow through on critical commitments to protect tuna and shark populations in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The IATTC, the world’s oldest regional fishery management organization (RFMO) for tuna, meets June 27 to July 1 in La Jolla, California.

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With commercial sperm banking giving women more opportunities to become mothers, a world-first QUT study has found the age and education of sperm donors are the most important characteristics considered.

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During the Ordovician period, the concentration of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere was about eight times higher than today. It has been hard to explain why the climate cooled and why the Ordovician glaciations took place. A new study, published in Nature Communications, shows that the weathering of rock caused by early non-vascular plants had the potential to cause such a global cooling effect.

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Philadelphia, PA, July 7, 2016 - Patients with multiple sclerosis have higher rates of depression than the general population, including people with other life-long disabling diseases. Symptoms of multiple sclerosis arise from an abnormal response of the body's immune system. Immune response has also been linked to depression, leading researchers to think it could be a shared pathological mechanism that leads to the increased rates of depressive symptoms in patients with multiple sclerosis.

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The Neanderthals displayed great variability in their behaviour and one of the aspects in which this becomes clear is their relationship with the dead. There is evidence on different sites (e.g. Chapelle-aux-Saints in France, and Sima de las Palomas on the Iberian Peninsula) that the Neanderthals buried the dead. Yet other sites show that the Neanderthals ate the meat and broke the bones of their fellow Neanderthals for food. Evidence of this cannibal behaviour has been discovered at various sites in France (e.g., Moula-Guercy, Les Pradelles) and on the Iberian Peninsula (Zafarraya, El Sidrón).

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Boredom may be contributing to a widening of political views among voters, according to a new study by researchers from King's College London and the University of Limerick.

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A new study by WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) says that breeding populations of white-naped cranes have decreased by 60 percent in Ulz River basin – an important stronghold for the species in Eastern Mongolia.

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This new Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the beating heart of one of the most visually appealing, and most studied, supernova remnants known — the Crab Nebula.

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Women who exercise during pregnancy are more likely to deliver vaginally than those who do not, and show no greater risk of preterm birth.

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Ancient mosaics depicting Noah’s ark and the parting of the Red Sea have been discovered by university scholars and students excavating a synagogue in Israel that dates to the fifth century.