Earth

The crucial genetic mashup that spawned the yeast that brews the vast majority of beer occurred at least twice -- and both times without human help -- according to new study.

Lager yeast, a hybrid that thrives in cold temperatures, is used in lager beer production, which accounts for about 94 percent of the world's beer. And while 15th century Bavarian monks invented lager beer, they probably did not deliberately cause the hybridizations detailed by a team led by Chris Hittinger, an assistant professor of genetics at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

For thousands of years, people have used yeast to ferment wine, brew beer and leaven bread.

Now researchers at Stanford have genetically engineered yeast to make painkilling medicines, a breakthrough that heralds a faster and potentially less expensive way to produce many different types of plant-based medicines.

Writing today in Science, the Stanford engineers describe how they reprogrammed the genetic machinery of baker's yeast so that these fast-growing cells could convert sugar into hydrocodone in just three to five days.

From Austrian monks to American craft brewers, beer geeks are everywhere. But making a good beer not only depends on the best ingredients, but also the best yeast.

In 1884, a delegation of international representatives convened in Washington, D.C. to recommend that Earth's prime meridian (the north-south line marking zero degrees longitude) should pass through the Airy Transit Circle at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England.

(A transit circle is an instrument for measuring star positions, and could be used for determining local time; this one was named for its designer, British Astronomer Royal George Airy.)

The practice of sexting may be more common than generally thought among adults. More than eight out of 10 people surveyed online admitted to sexting in the prior year, according to research presented at the American Psychological Association's 123rd Annual Convention.

"Given the possible implications, both positive and negative, for sexual health, it is important to continue investigating the role sexting plays in current romantic and sexual relationships," said Emily Stasko, MS, MPH, of Drexel University, who presented the research.

Scientists on the NuMI Off-Axis Electron Neutrino Appearance (NOvA) experiment saw their first evidence of oscillating neutrinos, confirming that the extraordinary detector built for the project not only functions as planned but is also making great progress toward its goal of a major leap in our understanding of these ghostly particles. If you are curious, NuMI is itself an acronym, standing for Neutrinos from the Main Injector, Fermilab's flagship accelerator.

Today, many wealthy countries are able to mitigate, to some degree, their risk of delta flooding through vulnerability-reducing investments, but a new model suggests that this mitigation may not be sustainable in the long-term. Ultimately, wealthy countries could be feeling the strain of floods to a similar degree as developing countries.

Prolonged spaceflight may give you a nasty case of diarrhea, according to an article in the FASEB journal. Specifically, when mice were subjected to simulated spaceflight conditions, the balance of bacteria and the function of immune cells in the gut changed, leading to increased bowel inflammation.

If you are watching what you eat, working out, and still not seeing improvements in your cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, etc., here's some hope. A new report appearing in the August 2015 issue of The FASEB Journal suggests that inflammation induced by deficiencies in vitamins and minerals might be the culprit. In this report, researchers show that - in some people - improvement results in many of the major markers of health when nutritional deficiencies are corrected. Some even lost weight without a change in their diet or levels of activity.

Despite their beauty, flowers can pose a grave danger to bees by providing a platform of parasites to visiting bees, a team of researchers has determined.

"Flowers are hotspots for parasite spread between and within pollinator populations," said Peter Graystock, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Entomology at the University of California, Riverside and a member of the research team. "Both the flower and bee species play a role in how likely parasite dispersal will occur."

Many studies have been conducted on the dangers of endocrine disrupting chemicals that mimic or block estrogen, the primary female hormone, but have met with indifferent success at real-world levels or in real-world animals. A new finds that similar methods can create harm using chemicals that affect male hormones, or androgens.

Biodiversity performs critical ecosystem functions that cannot be replaced indefinitely by technology, such as pesticides and herbicides. This includes a diverse population of insects on farms.

In a study of corn farms across the Northern Great Plains, we found that farms with lower insect biodiversity have more pests. The findings suggest that farming practices that promote insect biodiversity may be an effective way to control pests.

When it comes to vaccinating their babies, bees don't have a choice -- they naturally immunize their offspring against specific diseases found in their environments. And now for the first time, scientists have discovered how they do it.

Researchers from Arizona State University, University of Helsinki, University of Jyväskylä and Norwegian University of Life Sciences made the discovery after studying a bee blood protein called vitellogenin. The scientists found that this protein plays a critical, but previously unknown role in providing bee babies protection against disease.

Churning raw milk sufficiently creates butter. Squirting lemon juice coagulates it into curd. These two phenomena are not as straightforward as they sound on the molecular level.

When milk is churned, the fat molecules in it come closer to form aggregates. Lemon juice increases milk's acidity and creates similar molecular lumps. Yet butter and curd are not solids because in both cases, the aggregated molecules still maintain consistent distances from each other, behaving as if they are part of a liquid.

California's disastrous environmental management practices have crippled the state to such an extent that it would have to have rain for a full year to offset the "rain debt" accumulated.