Body

In a paper published in Nature Communications on January 22, 2013, a team of paleontologists including Dr. Luis Chiappe, Director of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County's (NHM) Dinosaur Institute, has discovered a way to determine the sex of an avian dinosaur species.

NEW YORK (January 22, 2012) —Wildlife Conservation Society scientists have documented a thriving population of lowland tapirs – the strange forest and grassland-dwelling herbivore with the trunk-like snout – living in a network of remote national parks spanning the Peru-Bolivia border.

Using a combination of camera traps, along with interviews with park guards and subsistence hunters, WCS estimates at least 14,500 lowland tapirs in the region. The population bridges five connected national parks in northwest Bolivia and southeastern Peru.

Mama bear appears to know best when it comes to selecting a place to call home, according to a new University of Alberta study.

The study, published in the latest issue of PLOS ONE, explored whether the rearing of cubs by their mothers shaped which habitats grizzly bears eventually choose.

The findings "suggest that habitat selection is learned by young grizzly bears from their mothers, and would likely be a more adaptive strategy than using instinct," said lead author Scott Nielsen, assistant professor in the U of A Department of Renewable Resources.

When people wash their hands with antibacterial soap, most don't think about where the chemicals contained in that soap end up. University of Minnesota engineering researchers do.

A new University of Minnesota study determined that the common antibacterial agent, called triclosan, used in soaps and many other products is found in increasing amounts in several Minnesota freshwater lakes. The findings are directly linked to increased triclosan use over the past few decades.

Endangered Mexican howler monkeys are consuming more leaves and less fruit as a result of habitat disturbance by humans, which is forcing them to invest much more time foraging for sustenance and leading to increased 'stress' levels, as detected through hormone analysis.

The introduction of smoke-free legislation in England was immediately followed by a fall in the number of children admitted to hospital with asthma symptoms, a new study has found.

NHS statistics analysed by researchers at Imperial College London show a 12.3 per cent fall in admissions for childhood asthma in the first year after the law on smoking in enclosed public places and workplaces came into effect in July 2007. The researchers found that asthma admissions continued to fall in subsequent years, suggesting that the benefits of the legislation were sustained over time.

A new study has found strong evidence for a link between cleaning jobs and risk of developing asthma.

Researchers at Imperial College London tracked the occurrence of asthma in a group of 9,488 people born in Britain in 1958. Not including those who had asthma as children, nine per cent developed asthma by age 42. Risks in the workplace were responsible for one in six cases of adult onset asthma – even more than the one in nine cases attributed to smoking, according to the analysis.

A new study from Lund University in Sweden shows that the average life expectancy of men and women with schizophrenia is 15 years and 12 years shorter respectively than for those who do not suffer from the disease. The study has been carried out in collaboration with Stanford University in the US.

The reasons why people with schizophrenia have a shorter life expectancy have previously been unknown, but have been much discussed in recent years. The research report that has now been published shows that individuals with schizophrenia are more likely to die of two major diseases.

Wildlife conservationists are well aware of the potential conflicts that exist between the endangered species they seek to protect and the human populations which inhabit areas where the animals live. Carnivores, such as tigers, pose a risk to humans and their livestock and can be killed because of this potential risk. Previous research has found that killing of animals can be motivated as much by social and psychological factors, such as perception of danger, as by any actual real risk posed by a species.

Charlottesville, VA (January 22, 2013). Researchers from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (New York, NY) have found that tumor "separation surgery" followed by high-dose hypofractionated stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) or high-dose single-fraction SRS is safe and effective in controlling spinal metastases regardless of the radiosensitivity of the particular tumor type that has invaded the spine.

In the fall of 2010, Hoi-Ying Holman of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) was approached by an international team researching a mysterious microbial community discovered deep in cold sulfur springs in southern Germany.

"They told me what they were doing and said, 'We know what you contributed to the oil-spill research,'" recalls Holman, who heads the Chemical Ecology group in Berkeley Lab's Earth Sciences Division. "They wondered if I could help them determine the biochemistry of their microbe samples."

Over 500 billion cells in our bodies will be replaced daily, yet natural selection has enabled us to develop defenses against the cellular mutations which could cause cancer. It is this relationship between evolution and the body's fight against cancer which is explored in a new special issue of the Open Access journal Evolutionary Applications.

Ann Arbor, Mich. — Egg allergic children, including those with a history of anaphylaxis to egg, can safely receive a single dose of the seasonal influenza vaccine, according to a new study from the University of Michigan.

Historically, the CDC recommended that the seasonal influenza vaccine not be administered to egg allergic children. Recent research conducted at the University of Michigan, and elsewhere, helped modify this recommendation in 2011 so that caution was warranted for only those with severe egg allergy.

Women with hypertensive disorders in pregnancy are at higher risk of chronic kidney disease and end-stage renal disease compared with women without the disorders, according to a study in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).