Earth

As man-made threats to coral reefs mount and interest in conserving reef ecosystems grows, scientists have turned to studying extremely remote and uninhabited reefs in an effort to understand what coral reefs would be like in the absence of humans. A number of islands and atolls in the Pacific Ocean remain virtually untouched by human influence, situated hundreds of kilometers from the nearest human populations.

University of Illinois researchers have found that Sulfolobus islandicus can go dormant, ceasing to grow and reproduce, in order to protect themselves from infection by Sulfolobus spindle-shaped virus 9 (SSV9). The dormant microbes are able to recover if the virus goes away within 24 to 48 hours, otherwise they die.

An illuminating study compares the willingness of stage IV cancer patients, and their caregivers; to pay to extend their lives by one year against that of other end-of-life improvements. The research, led by members of the Lien Centre for Palliative Care (LCPC) and collaborators from the National Cancer Centre Singapore, was recently published in the journal, Palliative Medicine.

Egg consumption may reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, according to new research from the University of Eastern Finland. The findings were published in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Researchers of Aalto University in Finland and the German University of Marburg have collaborated in the study of the movement of charges over interfaces of semiconductor materials. The group noticed a new kind of transport phenomenon for charges. In the phenomenon, a pair formed by a negative electron and a positive charge moves onto an interface, after which its 'message' is passed on to the other side of the interface, where it is carried on by a similar pair. The new theoretical result opens up interesting prospects for carrying out logical operations in electronics.

The mortality of alcohol dependent patients in general hospitals is many times higher than that of patients without alcohol dependency. In addition, they die about 7.6 years earlier on average than hospital patients without a history of alcohol addiction. This is what scientists from the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy of the University of Bonn Hospital together with British colleagues discovered using patient data from various general hospitals in Manchester (England).

Clearing grasslands to make way for biofuels may seem counterproductive, but University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers show in a study today (April 2, 2015) that crops, including the corn and soy commonly used for biofuels, expanded onto 7 million acres of new land in the U.S. over a recent four-year period, replacing millions of acres of grasslands.

Giving fewer antibiotic injections to young infants in the developing world with severe infections such as pneumonia and sepsis is just as safe and effective as the standard course of twice daily injections over the course of a week, according to new Johns Hopkins School of Public Health research conducted in Bangladesh.

Purdue researchers have identified a new class of chemical insecticides that could provide a safer, more selective means of controlling mosquitoes that transmit key infectious diseases such as dengue, yellow fever and elephantiasis.

Known as dopamine receptor antagonists, the chemicals beat out the neurotransmitter dopamine to lock into protein receptors that span the mosquito cell membrane. Disrupting the mechanics of dopamine - which plays important roles in cell signaling, movement, development and complex behaviors - eventually leads to the insect's death.

A team of scientists led by the U.S. Geological Survey found that polar bears, increasingly forced on shore due to sea ice loss, may be eating terrestrial foods including berries, birds and eggs, but any nutritional gains are limited to a few individuals and likely cannot compensate for lost opportunities to consume their traditional, lipid-rich prey -- ice seals.

Graphene, a two-dimensional (2D) honeycomb sheet composed of carbon atoms, has attracted intense interests worldwide because of its outstanding properties and promising prospects in both basic and applied science. The great development of graphene is closely related to the unique electronic structure, that is, Dirac cones. The cone which represents linear energy dispersion at Fermi level gives graphene massless fermions, leading to various quantum Hall effects, ultra high carrier mobility, and many other novel phenomena and properties.

For more than 50 years, scientists had tantalizing clues suggesting that a tiny, boreal forest songbird known as the blackpoll warbler departs each fall from New England and eastern Canada to migrate nonstop in a direct line over the Atlantic Ocean toward South America, but proof was hard to come by.

When it comes to survival of the fittest, it's all about your mother - at least in the squirrel world.

New research from the University of Guelph shows that adaptive success in squirrels is often hidden in the genes of their mother.

"Some squirrels are genetically better at being mothers than others," said Andrew McAdam, a professor in U of G's Department of Integrative Biology and co-author of the study published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society.

A better method for predicting the number of hurricanes in an upcoming season has been developed by a team of University of Arizona atmospheric scientists.

The UA team's new model improves the accuracy of seasonal hurricane forecasts for the North Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico by 23 percent. The team's research paper was published online in the journal Weather and Forecasting on March 25.

An international research team has revealed information about how continents were generated on Earth more than 2.5 billion years ago -- and how those processes have continued within the last 70 million years to profoundly affect the planet's life and climate.