Curated News: Staff Picks

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Students produce sustainable, versatile product ideas.

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Results can help provide warning of red tide conditions in Florida’s coastal regions.

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ASU professor discusses advances in recycling dirty water, and harvesting its content.

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Study funded by Ivy Foundation shows SGEF plays roles in how cancer cells survive and invade brain tissue.

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New large-scale computational analysis of gene expression in single cells in the brain identifies distinct cell types.

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Bioengineers and cognitive scientists have developed the first portable, 64-channel wearable brain activity monitoring system that’s comparable to state-of-the-art equipment found in research laboratories. The system is a better fit for real-world applications because it is equipped with dry EEG sensors that are easier to apply than wet sensors, while still providing high-density brain activity data.

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New research released today shows that workers at a Fortune 500 company who participated in a pilot work flexibility program voiced higher levels of job satisfaction and reduced levels of burnout and psychological stress than employees within the same company who did not participate.

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University of Utah lab experiments found that when temperatures get warmer, woodrats suffer a reduced ability to live on their normal diet of toxic creosote – suggesting that global warming may hurt plant-eating animals.

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Individuals addicted to cocaine may have difficulty in controlling their addiction because of a previously-unknown 'back door' into the brain, circumventing their self-control, suggests a new study led by the University of Cambridge.

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The Greenland Ice Sheet is the second largest ice sheet in the world and it’s melting rapidly, likely driving almost a third of global sea level rise. A new study shows clouds are playing a larger role in that process than scientists previously believed.

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More people in Europe are dying than are being born, according to a new report co-authored by a Texas A&M University demographer. In contrast, births exceed deaths, by significant margins, in Texas and elsewhere in the U.S., with few exceptions.

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IDH mutations disrupt how the genome folds, bringing together disparate genes and regulatory controls to spur cancer growth.

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Aphids suck up an almost endless supply of sugary sap from their plant hosts. They can survive on this junk food diet because bacterial partners help them convert the handful of amino acids in the sap into other, essential amino acids—not by recycling them, but by breaking them down and rebuilding from scratch, a new study finds.

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Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have successfully converted human skin cells into fully-functional pancreatic cells. The new cells produced insulin in response to changes in glucose levels, and, when transplanted into mice, the cells protected the animals from developing diabetes in a mouse model of the disease.

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A team of investigators based in Seattle, Amsterdam, and Luxembourg, have established the cause of a rare syndrome consistent with Fanconi Anemia, a chromosome instability disorder which is clinically typified by birth defects, bone marrow failure, leukemia, and susceptibility to solid tumors. The results were reported by researchers from the Institute for Systems Biology (Seattle), the Free University Medical Center in Amsterdam, and the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine and several other institutions in the United States and Europe in the journal Nature Communications on December 18, 2015 (DOI: 10.1038/ncomms9829).

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In atherosclerosis, plaque builds up on the inner walls of arteries that deliver blood to the body. Studying mice and tissue samples from the arteries of patients, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine​ in St. Louis suggest this accumulation is driven, at least in part, by processes similar to the plaque formation implicated in brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

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UCLA scientists have discovered that an overlooked region in brain cells houses a motherlode of mutated genes previously tied to autism. Recently published in Neuron, the finding could provide fresh drug targets and lead to new therapies for the disorder, which affects one in 68 children in the United States.

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A hormone that extends lifespan in mice by 40% is produced by specialized cells in the thymus gland, according to a new study by Yale School of Medicine researchers. The team also found that increasing the levels of this hormone, called FGF21, protects against the loss of immune function that comes with age.

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A doctor treating a patient with a potentially fatal metastatic breast tumor would be very pleased to find, after administering a round of treatment, that the primary tumor had undergone a change in character – from aggressive to static, and no longer shedding cells that can colonize distant organs of the body. Indeed, most patients with breast and other forms of cancer who succumb to the illness do so because of the cancer’s unstoppable spread.

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It’s not easy to make confusing mathematics topics understandable, let alone interesting, to non-mathematicians, but University of Pennsylvania professor Robert Ghrist has figured out the formula.

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Stanford researchers have developed the first lithium-ion battery that shuts down before overheating, then restarts immediately when the temperature cools.

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Stanford nuclear policy experts say that economic sanctions alone might not be enough to curtail the country's nuclear program.

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A UC Davis scientist flying in a pollution-detecting airplane provided the first, and so far only, estimates of methane emissions spewing from the Aliso Canyon Natural Gas Storage Facility in Southern California since the leak began on Oct. 23, 2015.

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Among HIV-positive patients with Hodgkin lymphoma, a new study finds that blacks are significantly less likely than whites to receive treatment for the cancer, even though chemotherapy saves lives.

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Research suggests we do not yet have the whole story about how fertilised eggs produce the many different types of cell that make up our adult bodies.

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A team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory say they've found a way to make a battery cathode with a hierarchical structure where the reactive material is abundant yet protected--key points for high capacity and long battery life.

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Government instability prompts both Black and White Americans to show a preference for lighter-skinned over darker-skinned political candidates, researchers at New York University, the University of Chicago, and Rutgers University have found.

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U.S. government officials released the new 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) on Jan. 7, 2016. Nutrition expert Frank Hu, who served on the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee — which made recommendations on what should be included in the guidelines — assesses the new advice on how the nation should eat.

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Extreme rain events fueled by the current strong El Nino have started to affect California. NASA estimated rainfall over a period of 7 days while NASA/NOAA's GOES Project created a satellite animation showing the storms affecting the region over the past three days.

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The Paris climate summit ended last year with landmark national commitments for greenhouse gas reductions, but much of the hard work of reducing emissions will fall on cities to change their residents’ behavior.

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Brain scans show that stories that force us to think about our deepest values activate a region of the brain once thought to be its autopilot.

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While Dungeness crab captured headlines, record levels of the neurotoxin domoic acid were found in a range of species, and the toxin showed up in new places.

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he J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) policy group today released a new report titled, “DNA Synthesis and Biosecurity: Lessons Learned and Options for the Future,” which reviews how well the Department of Health and Human Services guidance for synthetic biology providers has worked since it was issued in 2010.

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UNC-Chapel Hill researchers show how social relationships reduce health risk in each stage of life.

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Magnesium infused with dense silicon carbide nanoparticles could be used for airplanes, cars, mobile electronics and more.

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Penn State scientists have discovered a novel drug target and have rescued functional deficits in human nerve cells derived from patients with Rett Syndrome, a severe form of autism-spectrum disorder.

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The Galápagos Islands have long offered researchers a natural laboratory in which to study unique volcanic features and a diverse population of native plants and animals.

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Many doctors will ask about quality of sleep when children have problems at school, but new research shows it’s just as important to pay attention to how high achievers are sleeping.

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Critically ill patients who are exposed to higher daily levels of ozone are more likely to develop acute respiratory disease syndrome (ARDS), according to a new study published online ahead of print in the American Thoracic Society’s American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. ARDS is a life-threatening inflammatory lung illness in which patients fail to obtain enough oxygen to the lungs. While previous research has shown a clear association between cigarette smoke and ARDS, the study “Long-Term Ozone Exposure Increases the Risk of Developing the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome” by Lorraine Ware, MD, of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and colleagues is the first to demonstrate a risk related to ozone.

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The Earned Income Tax Credit aids millions of Americans each year, lifting many out of poverty – but spacing it out in multiple payments could significantly reduce recipients’ dependence on payday loans and borrowing from friends and family, suggests a recent University of Illinois study of a pilot program in Chicago.

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This semester, 14 University of Virginia architecture and landscape architecture undergraduate and graduate students spent 10 days on Norwegian Arctic islands 800 miles north of the Arctic Circle, learning how to design for a harsh, dynamic environment that many see as the next great frontier of development.

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As delegates from 195 nations meet in Paris to debate mankind’s response to global climate change, scientists from the University of Kansas and Rothamsted Research in England today issue a study of a major crop pest that underlines how “climate is changing in more ways than just warming.”

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Astronomers have made the most detailed study yet of an extremely massive young galaxy cluster using three of NASA's Great Observatories. This multiwavelength image shows this galaxy cluster, called IDCS J1426.5+3508, in X-rays recorded by Chandra in blue, visible light observed by Hubble in green, and infrared light detected by Spitzer in red. is so far away that the light detected is from when the universe was roughly a quarter of its current age. This is the most massive galaxy cluster detected at such an early age.

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Athletes, musicians and actors who commit acts of domestic violence continue to face heightened scrutiny, and new research from the University of Maryland reveals that the news coverage of such cases is often racially biased.

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Advocates of huge hydroelectric dam projects on the Amazon, Congo, and Mekong rivers often overestimate economic benefits and underestimate far-reaching effects on biodiversity, according to an article in the Jan. 8 issue of Science.

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Study shows thinking from God’s perspective can reduce bias against others.

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Research has shown that drinking coffee is good for you. A recent Harvard study found that people who drank three to five cups a day had a 15 percent lower chance of prematurely dying than non-drinkers.

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Children younger than 5 who live in economically disadvantaged areas had a greater risk of medication poisoning that resulted in referral to a health care facility, according to scientists at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and the University of California, San Diego. These areas were rural and experienced high unemployment, along with lower rates of high school graduation and lower household income.

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A UA researcher and clinician team has discovered that genetic mutations in a protein associated with asthma can affect a person’s susceptibility to a variety of lung diseases — and could lead to new treatments.

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Global Temperature Report: December 2015