Body

"Increased demand for food, driven by population growth and dietary change, along with the degradation of natural resources and climate change, render the challenge of achieving food security for all substantial."

This is how Dr. John S. I. Ingram from Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, UK, and Professor Dr. John R. Porter from Copenhagen Plant Science Centre, Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of Copenhagen, DK, start their article in Nature Plants.

Like the treadmills and stationary bikes that become rec room coatracks, fitness and other health-related smartphone apps are acquired in large numbers by Americans, but over time, many are left unused by those who download them.

Vindel River LIFE is an EU project aimed at restoring tributaries in northern Sweden that were affected by a century-long timber-floating era. The project spanned over nearly six years and came to an end on 31 October 2015.

Using sugar, silicone and a 3-D printer, a team of bioengineers at Rice University and surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania have created an implant with an intricate network of blood vessels that points toward a future of growing replacement tissues and organs for transplantation.

The research may provide a method to overcome one of the biggest challenges in regenerative medicine: How to deliver oxygen and nutrients to all cells in an artificial organ or tissue implant that takes days or weeks to grow in the lab prior to surgery.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill) are part of an international team led by the University of Bonn, Germany, who have found a link between the origin of hepatitis A virus (HAV) and small mammals. With the emergence of Ebola virus from bats and hantaviruses from rodents, investigators say identifying the other species infected with HAV provides novel insight into the evolution of HAV and how it spread to humans, and highlights the utility of analyzing animal reservoirs for risk assessment of emerging viruses.

A new discovery published in the Nov. 2015 issue of The FASEB Journal shows that cancer cells use previously unknown channels to communicate with one another and with adjacent non-cancerous cells. Not only does this cast an important light on how cancer metastasizes and recruits cellular material from healthy cells, but it also suggests that these physical channels might be exploitable to deliver drug therapies.

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside might have found a breakthrough in the spider-control field. In a paper published in the Journal of Economic Entomology, the researchers wrote that oil-based pesticides are more effective than water-based pesticides at killing the contents of brown widow spider egg sacs.

The hepatitis A virus can trigger acute liver inflammation which generally has a mild course in small children but which can become dangerous in adults. The virus, which is found worldwide, has previously been considered to be a purely human pathogen which at most is found in isolated cases in non-human primates. An international team of researchers under the direction of the University of Bonn has now discovered in a large-scale study with nearly 16,000 specimens from small mammals from various continents that the hepatitis A virus - like HIV or Ebola as well - is of likely animal origin.

Scientists at the MaxDelbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC) and the Leibniz-Institut für Molekulare Pharmakologie (FMP) in Berlin, in cooperation with a Dutch group, have now succeeded in showing that the volume-regulated anion channel VRAC is 50 % responsible for active substance uptake. If one of the VRAC subunits LRRC8A or LRRC8D is down-regulated, cells take up considerably less of the anti-cancer drug. In addition to this finding, programmed cell death or apoptosis is also significantly disturbed when LRRC8A is missing.

QUT scientists have discovered the gene that will open the door for space-based food production.

Professor Peter Waterhouse, a plant geneticist at QUT, discovered the gene in the ancient Australian native tobacco plant Nicotiana benthamiana, known as Pitjuri to indigenous Aboriginals tribes.

Professor Waterhouse made the discovery while tracing the history of the Pitjuri plant, which for decades has been used by geneticists as a model plant upon which to test viruses and vaccines.

WASHINGTON - Rates of military sexual trauma among men who served in the military may be as much as 15 times higher than has been previously reported, largely because of barriers associated with stigma, beliefs in myths about male rape, and feelings of helplessness, according to articles published by the American Psychological Association.

JUPITER, FL - Nov. 3, 2015 - A team led by scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the University of Pittsburgh has shown for the first time how one set of specialized cells survives under stress by manipulating the behavior of key immune system cells.

Older people with an age-related loss of muscle mass and strength may be at greater risk of falling and bone fractures, according to new research led by the University of Southampton.

A study by an international team of researchers into sarcopenia -where muscles lose form and function with age - found that those with the condition reported higher numbers of falls in the last year and a higher prevalence of fractures.

VERNON - Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the Southern Great Plains could require a change of grazing management by traditional cow-calf producers, according to a study by Texas A&M AgriLife Research.

Adaptive multi-paddock grazing is an advanced, more efficient form of rotational grazing and is a potential option to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions, or GHG, on a cow-calf operation in the Southern Great Plains.

A DNA sample thought to show prehistoric trade in cereals is most likely from modern wheat, according to new research led by the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology.