Earth

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—More than 60 percent of young adults between the ages of 19 and 22 received some financial help from mom and dad, according to a new University of Michigan study. The average amount they received – including help with college tuition, rent, and transportation – was roughly $7,500 a year.

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DURHAM, N.C. – If you don't like the taste of pork, the reason may be that your genes cause you to smell the meat more intensely, according to a new study.

Duke University Medical Center scientists, working with colleagues in Norway, found that about 70 percent of people have two functional copies of a gene linked to an odor receptor that detects a compound in male mammals called androstenone, which is common in pork. People with one or no functional copies of the gene can tolerate the scent of androstenone much better than those with two, the researchers said.

Science Ph.D. students' interest in a faculty job wanes after they have spent more years in school, while other careers become more attractive, according to a study published May 2 in the open access journal PLoS ONE.

The results are based on a survey of over 4,000 U.S. Ph.D. students in life sciences, chemistry, and physics conducted by a research team led by Henry Sauermann of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis are expected to have substantial ecological effects, but if researchers don't have enough data about the environment before the disaster strikes, as is usually the case, it is difficult to quantify these repercussions. The 2010 earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Chile is a rare exception to this trend, and researchers were able to conduct an unprecedented report of its ecological implications based on data collected on coastal ecosystems shortly before and after the event.

Big trees three or more feet in diameter accounted for nearly half the biomass measured at a Yosemite National Park site, yet represented only one percent of the trees growing there.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– The reappearance of long-forgotten habitats and the resurgence of species unseen for years may not be among the expected effects of a natural disaster. Yet that's exactly what researchers have found on the sandy beaches of south central Chile, after an 8.8-magnitude earthquake and devastating tsunami in 2010. Their study also revealed a preview of the problems wrought by sea level rise –– a major symptom of climate change.

Plants are leafing out and flowering sooner each year than predicted by results from controlled environmental warming experiments, according to data from a major new archive of historical observations assembled with the help of a NASA researcher.

Experiments may dramatically underestimate how plants will respond to climate change in the future. That's the conclusion of an analysis of 50 plant studies on four continents, published this week in an advance online issue of the journal Nature, which found that shifts in the timing of flowering and leafing in plants due to global warming appear to be much greater than estimated by warming experiments.

A paper published today in Biology of Reproduction's Papers-in-Press describes the effects of brief prenatal exposure to plant estrogens on the mouse oviduct, modeling the effects of soy-based baby formula on human infants. The results suggest that exposure to estrogenic chemicals in the womb or during childhood has the potential to affect a woman's fertility as an adult, possibly providing the mechanistic basis for some cases of unexplained female infertility.

Experiments may dramatically underestimate how plants will respond to climate change in the future. That's the conclusion of an analysis of 50 plant studies on four continents, published this week in an advance online issue of the journal Nature, which found that shifts in the timing of flowering and leafing in plants due to global warming appear to be much greater than estimated by warming experiments.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study has found that each step of the marine food chain is clearly controlled by the trophic level below it – and the driving factor influencing that relationship is not the abundance of prey, but how that prey is distributed.

The importance of the spatial pattern of resources – sometimes called "patchiness" – is gaining new appreciation from ecologists, who are finding the overall abundance of food less important than its density and ease of access to it.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new analysis of streams in the western United States with long-term monitoring programs has found that despite a general increase in air temperatures over the past several decades, streams are not necessarily warming at the same rate.

Margination, the natural phenomenon where bacteria and leukocytes (white blood cells) move toward the sides of blood vessels, is the inspiration for a novel method for treating sepsis, a systemic and often dangerous inflammatory response to microbial infection in the blood.

Climate change appears to be good news for destructive bark beetles, according to a new study by Lorenzo Marini from the University of Padova in Italy, and his team. Their work, published online in Springer's Climatic Change, shows that there were more attacks by the spruce bark beetle on European Alpine spruce forests over a 16 year period, as temperatures rose and rainfall dropped.