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According to an international team of researchers, the rapid pace of climate change is threatening the future presence of fish near the equator.

"Our studies found that one species of fish could not even survive in water just three degrees Celsius warmer than what it lives in now," says the lead author of the study, Dr Jodie Rummer from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at James Cook University.

Fashion magazines come pre-loaded with scratch-and-sniff panels for perfume and aftershave, but what about advertisements for foods like chocolate chip cookies and fresh-baked bread? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, when food advertisements combine a photo of food with an "imagined odor," consumers both salivate more for the item and then consume it in larger quantities.

Complex heritable traits are not only determined by changes in the DNA sequence. Scientists from the University of Groningen Bioinformatics Centre, together with their French colleagues, have shown that epigenetic marks can affect traits such as flowering time and architecture in plants. Furthermore, these marks are passed on for many generations in a stable manner. Their results were published in Science Express on Thursday, 6 February 2014. It seems that a revision of Genetics textbooks is now in order.

Low pH in tumours counteracts the desired effect of the drug chloroquine, according to a new study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. The results, which are published in the journal Autophagy, might explain possible lack of efficacy of chloroquine in clinical studies.

When natural disaster strikes, calls for help are broadcast on television and across the Internet. Despite being exposed to the needs of widespread relief organizations, only a small percentage of us actually follow through by making a financial contribution. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, the more connected we feel with the people needing our help, the more likely we are to donate.

From wearing a suit to a wedding to donning a tie for a job interview, American society has established unspoken rules for dress codes and proper etiquette. But there's always that one guy who wears the bright socks or the obnoxious bow tie. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, this type of behavior has the potential to increase a person's perceived success.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Inspired by tiny particles that carry cholesterol through the body, MIT chemical engineers have designed nanoparticles that can deliver snippets of genetic material that turn off disease-causing genes.

This approach, known as RNA interference (RNAi), holds great promise for treating cancer and other diseases. However, delivering enough RNA to treat the diseased tissue, while avoiding side effects in the rest of the body, has proven difficult.

When most people envision crocodiles, they think of them waddling on the ground or wading in water—not climbing trees. However, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, study has found that the reptiles can climb trees as far as the crowns.

Vladimir Dinets, a research assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, is the first to thoroughly study the tree-climbing and -basking behavior. The research is published in the journal Herpetology Notes and can be found at http://bit.ly/Myi8yr.

In 2011, biologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) demonstrated a highly effective method for delivering HIV-fighting antibodies to mice—a treatment that protected the mice from infection by a laboratory strain of HIV delivered intravenously. Now the researchers, led by Nobel Laureate David Baltimore, have shown that the same procedure is just as effective against a strain of HIV found in the real world, even when transmitted across mucosal surfaces.

It's widely acknowledged that a common threat unites people. Individuals who were previously separated by social class, race or ethnicity come together, forming new cooperative alliances to defeat a common enemy. But does it take an external threat — an attack like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 — to make these social divisions melt away?

A study by behavioral scientists at UC Santa Barbara demonstrates that peaceful cooperation has the same effect as intergroup conflict in erasing social boundaries connected to race. Their findings appear today in the journal PLOS ONE.

Forest management is based on recommendations that are supposed to maximize economic revenues. However, in 40% of cases a better economic result would be achieved by neglecting some of the recommendations. This would also greatly benefit biodiversity.

These results were obtained by a research group lead by Professor Mikko Mönkkönen at the University Jyväskylä. The group studied a production forest landscape encompassing 68 square kilometers of land and more than 30,000 forest stands in Central Finland.

February 11, 2014 Kootenay National Park, British Columbia -- Yoho National Park's 505-million-year-old Burgess Shale – home to some of the planet's earliest animals, including a very primitive human relative – is one of the world's most important fossil sites. Now, more than a century after its discovery, a compelling sequel has been unearthed: 42 kilometres away in Kootenay National Park, a new Burgess Shale fossil site has been located that appears to equal the importance of the original discovery, and may one day even surpass it.

Tamoxifen, a drug currently used to treat breast cancer, also kills a fungus that causes a deadly brain infection in immunocompromised patients. The findings, which could lead to new treatments for a disease that kills more HIV/AIDS patients than tuberculosis, appear in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM.)

The abundance of crop pests in developing countries may be greatly underestimated, posing a significant threat to some of the world's most important food producing nations, according to research led by the University of Exeter.

Data on the known distributions of almost 2,000 crop-destroying organisms in 195 countries were analysed in the first global assessment of the factors determining the distribution of crop pests.

1. Combo therapy with lower intensity statin may be an alternative to higher-intensity monotherapy for some patients