and small turtles that are preserved with it in the Two Tree Site fossil deposit. The oldest platypus fossils come from 61 million-year-old rocks in southern South america.
Using data from the Massachusetts Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance system researchers captured the prevalence of secondhandsmoke exposure for workers of varying age ethnicity and occupational group from 2003 to 2010.
For the study Fierer an associate professor of microbial ecology and his colleagues used samples of soil collected from 31 different sites spread out across the prairie's historical range.
It was very hard to find sites that we knew had never been tilled Fierer said.
The new study used cores from Northern California coastal redwoods to trace climate back 50 years.
The new paper uses a painstaking approach that's more like processing ice cores. It uses the molecules captured in the wood to sample the atmosphere of the past.
because this is such a highly invaded site she says. Most of this soil has been processed by earthworms.
The research is a collaboration between the Nerve-Gut Research Laboratory (University of Adelaide) and Ironwood Pharmaceuticals Inc the developers of Linaclotide.
The research is signed by professors Toni Monleã n-Getino and Martã n RÃ os from the Department of Statistics of the University of Barcelona and experts Oriol Vall Carme Puig Ãcar
Professor Martã n RÃ os states that asthma is caused an illness by several factors (genetic propensity environment food etc.
Toni Monleã n Getino and Martã n RÃ os experts from the Multivariate and Computational Statistical Modelling Research Group of the UB and authors of other epidemiological studies
rivals that of professional forestersas global forest and climate experts gather at the Oslo REDD Exchange 2013 to ramp up international efforts to protect carbon-storing forests in the developing world a recent study
Researchers then compared their measurements to those gathered by professional foresters using handheld computers. The results showed strikingly similar results between community members and professional foresters across countries and forest types.
The team led by Carnegie's Greg Asner in close collaboration with officials from the Peruvian Ministry of Environment used the Carnegie Landsat Analysis System-lite (CLASLITE) to detect
It uses algorithms to detect changes to the forest in areas as small as 10 square meters about 100 square feet allowing scientists to find small-scale disturbances that cannot be detected by traditional satellite methods.
Since we can grow it in much closer proximity to our production sites we can further reduce both the environmental impact as well as our logistics costs by a substantial margin.
Dr. Dirk Prã fer describes the research efforts at the MÃ nster-based IME site.
Half were planted at sites north of the A. picea/A. rudis boundary and half south of that boundary.
At both sites the later-blooming A. arifolium offspring were dispersed in a manner that suggested that ants picked up its seeds.
however in the northern site where A. picea have not been displaced. These results suggest that the presence
and elucidate regulatory networks of important biological processes. The sequence is accessible online at the Kiwifruit Genome Database.
Cornell University has television and ISDN radio studios available for media interviews. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Cornell University.
Pollination success of generalist plants tends to be positively related to pollinator diversity so any habitat modifications that increase the number of pollinating species present at a site would tend to be of some inherent value.
The situations described above give the impression that the presence of some exotic flowering plants may be of benefit by encouraging higher numbers of pollinating species to occur at a site.
It's like a dehydrated food web said Jeffres of the harvested rice fields. Just add water.
While much of Rehan's work involves behavioral observation of bees native to the northeast of North america this research taps the computer-heavy bioinformatics side of her research assembling genomic data to elucidate similarities and differences among the various species
Nonetheless Queller and Strasmann's examples are thought-provoking particularly in the age of the Internet
and effective management of a network of protected areas that can sustain the bears in the wild.
at a site in France. Over the 30-year study the researchers measured the amount of N-15 labelled fertilizer N taken up by plants
The Agricultural Landscape of Southern Ãand has been a World Heritage Site since 2000. The grazing pressure on the alvar grasslands of Ãand has increased dramatically in the last fifteen years
and management of the buffer zones affected tigers the researchers used camera traps--motion-sensitive cameras mounted along animal trails--that snapped photos of 17 different adult tigers at sites
#Buying breast milk online is likely to cause illness in infantsresults from a study led by researchers at Nationwide Children's Hospital found more than three-fourths of breast milk samples purchased over the Internet contained bacteria that can cause illness
and in the November issue of Pediatrics is the first to examine the safety of selling breast milk to others over the Internet a trend that has become more frequent in the past several years.
but an earlier study cited 13000 postings were placed on U s. milk sharing websites in 2011.
The research team from the Center for Biobehavioral Health at The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital purchased breast milk listed for sale on public websites
Individuals posted classified ads on websites describing the breast milk they wanted to sell or why they were seeking breast milk.
Major milk-sharing websites post a lot of guidance about milk collection storage shipping and provider screening.
Two genetic loci Bi and Bt are known to confer bitterness in cucumber. In this study researchers found that the Bt locus was delimited to a 442-kb region on chromosome 5 that harbors 67 predicted genes.
They further investigated the genomic basis of divergence among the cultivated populations for identifying genes controlling important traits.
The event spawned a geomagnetic storm that caused telegraph systems in Europe and North america to fail throwing sparks from pylons and even giving some telegraph operators shocks.
The raw results of the tests are sent by cell phone to a central website. Then calculations are made
In soil or when inserted into a plant stem the chip is fitted with wires that can be hooked up to a card for wireless data transmission
and linked wirelessly to computers for example growers may control the precise moisture of blocks of land based on target goals said Vinay Pagay who helped develop the chip as a doctoral student in Lakso's lab. Ernest
Computer modelling was used to explore the relationship (in both those with and without diabetes) of mortality with the following risk factors:
It appears that the intake of some food groups is more beneficial (fruits legumes nuts seeds pasta poultry vegetable oil) or more detrimental (soft drinks butter margarine cake cookies) with respect to mortality risk
Remember your initial irritation upon encountering the names YAHOO GOOGLE and WIKIPEDIA for the first time; now they are imprinted in your brain.
no more than two hours of television or other screen time; and at least one hour of physical activity.
#Mix of graphene nanoribbons, polymer has potential for cars, soda, beera discovery at Rice university aims to make vehicles that run on compressed natural gas more practical.
By adding modified single-atom-thick graphene nanoribbons (GNRS) to thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) the Rice lab made it 1000 times harder for gas molecules to escape Tour said.
The researchers acknowledged that a solid two-dimensional sheet of graphene might be the perfect barrier to gas
but the production of graphene in such bulk quantities is not yet practical Tour said. But graphene nanoribbons are already there.
Tour's breakthrough unzipping technique for turning multiwalled carbon nanotubes into GNRS first revealed in Nature in 2009 has been licensed for industrial production.
But the overlapping 200-to 300-nanometer-wide ribbons dispersed so well that they were nearly as effective as large-sheet graphene in containing gas molecules.
The GNRS'geometry makes them far better than graphene sheets for processing into composites Tour said.
Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science at Rice.
The Air force Research Laboratory through the University Technology Corp. the Office of Naval Research MURI graphene program and the Air force Office of Scientific research MURI program supported the research.
The CU-Boulder study area included sites in the White river Routt Arapaho Roosevelt and Grand mesa national forests as well as in Rocky mountain national park.
The researchers used a variety of statistical methods to tease out causes for variations in the dataset at 18 sites in Colorado.
That makes it a true one-dimensional material unlike atom-thin sheets of graphene that have a top
and is double that of graphene. Scientists had calculated already it would take an elephant on a pencil to break through a sheet of graphene.*
*It has twice the tensile stiffness of graphene and carbon nanotubes and nearly three times that of diamond.*
*Stretching carbyne as little as 10 percent alters its electronic band gap significantly.**If outfitted with molecular handles at the ends it can also be twisted to alter its band gap.
You could look at it as an ultimately thin graphene ribbon reduced to just one atom
They set out to detail carbyne with computer models using first-principle rules to determine the energetic interactions of atoms Artyukhov said.
Artyukhov said the nominal specific area of carbyne is about five times that of graphene. Researchers are now taking a more rigorous look at the conductivity of carbyne
Calculations were performed on the National Science Foundation-supported Davinci supercomputer administered by Rice's Ken Kennedy Institute for Information technology.
By creating a computer model of that microstructure and studying its response to various conditions We found that there is a mechanism that can in principle close cracks under any applied stress Demkowicz says.
A computer simulation of the molecular stucture of a metal alloy showing the boundaries between microcystalline grains (white lines forming hexagons) shows a small crack (dark horizontal bar just right of bottom center) that mends itself as the metal is put under stress.
and we thought of those pixels as little nodes in a network Mander said. We quantified the complexity of the networks that were formed by the pixels
and used that measure of complexity to generate our classification. This new method was 77.5 percent accurate classifying 186 out of 240 specimens correctly.
#White graphene halts rust in high temps: Nano-thin films of hexagonal boron nitride protect materials from oxidizingatomically thin sheets of hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) have the handy benefit of protecting
One or several layers of the material sometimes called white graphene keep materials from oxidizing
They also grew h-BN on graphene and found they could transfer sheets of h-BN to copper and steel with similar results.
However most of this Bt corn has been used for animal feed or processed into corn meal starch or other products.
Due to pressure from activist groups some grocery stores have refused to carry Bt sweet corn. However a new study published in the Journal of Economic Entomology suggests that Bt sweet corn is better for the environment
because it requires fewer pesticide applications than conventional corn. Our data suggest that using Bt sweet corn will dramatically reduce the use of traditional insecticides the authors wrote.
Based on the performance of Bt field corn growers should realize increased profits and there will be less risk to nontarget organisms including natural enemies that help suppress pest densities.
The study Multi-State Trials of Bt Sweet corn Varieties for Control of the Corn earworm (Lepidoptera:
Noctuidae) analyzed the performance of Bt sweet corn comparing its rate of infestation and marketability to genetically identical varieties that lacked Bt proteins.
In 2010 and 2011 sweet corn trials were conducted in New york Minnesota Maryland Ohio and Georgia locations that differ in climate management practices and pest pressure.
The authors found that for pest management of the corn earworm Bt sweet corn consistently performed better than its non-Bt counterparts even those that were sprayed with conventional insecticides.
Across multiple states and multiple years Bt sweet corn performed better and required fewer sprays to meet market standards said Cornell entomology professor Anthony Shelton.
One of the most spectacular examples occurred in New york plots in 2010: the Bt sweet corn had 99 to 100 percent marketable ears without any sprays
and even with eight conventional insecticide sprays the non-Bt corn had only 18 percent marketable ears.
This wasn't much better than the 6 percent marketable ears produced in the plots that received no sprays at all.
The authors predict that growers could realize increased profits with Bt sweet corn because of lower inputs and higher marketability while simultaneously conserving populations of beneficial insects that keep damaging pests at bay.
The use of Bt vegetables could significantly reduce the use of conventional insecticides and in turn reduce occupational and environmental risks that arise from intensive insecticide use Shelton said.
and'fetal programming'in the mother's womb that can permanently affect the eating behaviour of children.
The forest has been studied well in the past--it was the site of the NASA-led BOREAS project in the 1990s a study that provided scientists with a lot of
The tree ring data included tree core samples collected in three different years between 2001 and 2012 in a region called the Northern Old Black spruce site.
We see a five-year lag between depressed growth in the tree core data and increase of deaths in mortality data said Bond-Lamberty.
Using novel chemical informatics strategies Ray's lab screened half a million compounds against the DEET receptor to identify substitutes.
A computer algorithm the team developed identified which compounds are predicted not only to be strong repellents but also found naturally in fruits plants or animals.
The algorithm predicted nearly 200 natural DEET substitutes; of which the researchers tested ten compounds. Of these eight were strong repellents on flies
In the future using this algorithm we could find chemicals that activate DEET receptors but are substantially different with far better properties than DEET.
and used this information to screen more than 240000 different odorant-like volatile compounds. For each receptor they came up with 500 new odorants that were predicted to interact most strongly with it.
#New fossils push the origin of flowering plants back by 100 million years to the early Triassicdrilling cores from Switzerland have revealed the oldest known fossils of the direct ancestors of flowering plants.
Peter Hochuli and Susanne Feist-Burkhardt from Paleontological Institute and Museum University of ZÃ rich studied two drilling cores from Weiach and Leuggern northern Switzerland and found
In a previous study from 2004 Hochuli and Feist-Burkhardt documented different but clearly related flowering-plant-like pollen from the Middle Triassic in cores from the Barents sea south of Spitsbergen.
The samples from the present study were found 3000 km south of the previous site.
and the associated advancement of the growing season for plants at the study site and so we set out to test that hypothesis Post said.
Kerby added that archeological evidence suggests that caribou have used this area as a calving site for over 3000 years.
In addition to analyzing their own data Post and Kerby also used information from a 1970s study of caribou calving and calf survival at the same site by Danish biologists Henning Thing and Bjarne Clausen.
and therefore useful as thermal interface material for conducting heat away from future high-powered integrated circuits.
The compliance of the nanotubes allows them to connect to a silicon integrated circuit on one side
The claim that intake of antioxidants especially in tablet form promotes any aspect of human health lacks scientific support says Ristow.
Impurities and defects on the dust grains produce catalytic sites for the formation of hydrogen molecules which are ejected subsequently creating miniature rocket engines also called Purcell thrusters after Nobel laureate Edwin Purcell who studied grain alignment.
It seems that especially temperature reconstructions derived from extreme sites such as high mountain zones and high latitudes do not always correctly reflect the climate of the different geographical regions.
and telecommunications industries Guan explains. By examining cross-sections of AZ91D samples post-melt the researchers found that the greater the degree of overlap between the tracks the fewer the number of small cracks that developed during solidification (see image.
and matures leaves and fruit while also wreaking havoc with hormonal networks that are key to the trees'ability to fend of infections.
and resolution of time-lapse photography with the use of a novel robotic camera mount and software--enabling the detailed visualization of plant movements across a wide panoramic view.
The new technique is demonstrated in the September issue of Applications in Plant sciences. The beauty of time-lapse is that we can make observations in the plant's time scale.
and stitched together with software developed by Sargent and colleagues (available through http://wiki. gigapan. org/creating-time-machines).
This term refers to the cribellum a web producing organ which unlike normal spinnerets produces extremely fine fibers
To add to its mystery P. otwayensis weaves highly stereotyped ladder-shaped webs where they stand facing down after sunset waiting for preys
A single thick and shiny silk thread is used then by the spiders to provide a zip-line like connection between the external webs and the security of the enigmatic retreat in the hollows of ancient myrtle beech and mountain ash tree.
and found catching ladders and supporting webs of juveniles inside of itcomments the lead author of the study Peter Michalik Zoological Institute
and placed at the site of a bicycle accident. But the bike is a clean pristine version--not the one that was mangled Cann said.
Besides funeral home websites that allow virtual visitors to sign guest books online mourning has evolved to include Facebook's R i. P. permanent memorials as well as virtual tombstones
which allow people to use their smartphones to scan headstone codes and launch websites with an interactive life story for those who visit the grave in person or online.
While spontaneous public memorials with flowers and teddy bears sprang up in Newtown Conn. after the mass murders at a school as well as after the Boston Marathon bombings
The researchers analysed high-resolution global satellite data describing the distribution of tree cover in the period 2000-2005 linking this to global data for terrain (slope) climate human activity and a number of political and socioeconomic factors.
even if you hope to excel in one sport and playing different sports definitely helps with that said Rosenbaum who has been a team physician for the U s. Soccer Federation's under-20
Eric Zirnstein University of Alabama physics graduate student and NASA Earth and Space science Fellow in Heliophysics and May UAH doctoral graduate Brian Fayock who now does data analysis for NASA are comparing data
With most of its sensors still working it utilizes computer power that's dwarfed by today's smartphones to send sometimes surprising data packets back to Earth-first recording them on its ancient 8-track digital tape machines before assembling them
However until recently scientists believed that growing the high density of tiny graphene cylinders needed for many microelectronics applications would be difficult.
But using a powerful new type of confocal laser-scanning microscope the 4pi the scientists discovered that the bordered pits are filled with a mesh membrane of nanofibrils
Fluids ooze in through the mesh-like membrane around the torus and out the other side.
#African caterpillars resistant to GM maizelike many other transgenic crops Bt maize synthesises its own pesticide:
Notwithstanding the success of these strategies IRD scientists and their South african partners have revealed now that a major pest of maize the moth Busseola fusca has developed an unusual defense mechanism against Bt toxin in South africa.
and should go beyond the simple implementation of refuges for Bt-susceptible moths. Bt maize and resistance developmentgenetically engineered maize is created by introducing a gene into the plant genome that expresses a toxic protein from a bacterium i e.
Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt. Both the leaves and stems of Bt maize produce this toxin which destroys the gut of any moth larvae eating the plant.
The technique is effective and unlike wide spectrum pesticides it only targets larvae of moths.
However sooner or later insect species may be able to develop a mechanism of resistance against any pesticides.
Bt maize is not fundamentally different in this regard and in order to delay the evolution of resistance in pest populations the concept of maintaining refuges for Bt susceptible moths was developed.
Non-Bt maize fields are protecting Bt maize fieldsthe refuge strategy consists of planting a small proportion of land with non-Bt maize;
the aim being to maintain pockets of insects that remain susceptible to the toxin. In line with other known cases of Bt-resistance resistance in Busseola fusca was expected to involve modification of the cells in the gut wall
which prevents the toxin from binding. Crucially this type of adaptation is inherited recessively: both parents must be resistant to produce fully resistant offspring.
Since the probability of resistant individuals arising in the field is low any resistant insects surviving on Bt maize will mate with one of the many Bt-susceptible individuals originating from the refuge area
and their progeny will not survive in the Bt-maize field. This tactic has been successful especially in North america where the first Bt maize has been planted
since 1995 with resistance yet to develop among lepidopteran pests. The exception to the rulehowever about seven years after Bt maize was introduced to South africa in the late 1990's scientists observed resistant Busseola fusca caterpillars
and more importantly these resistant insects seemed to reproduce and spread rapidly. To explain this phenomenon scientists in South africa together with IRD researchers crossed resistant South african moths with susceptible moths imported from Kenya where Bt maize is commercialized not yet.
The offspring developed perfectly on Bt maize and were as resistant as the South african resistant parents.
Unlike everything known so far this resistance evolved in the field was inherited as a dominant trait.
A likely new resistance mechanismthis result shows for the first time that resistance to Bt maize can be inherited in a dominant rather than recessive way.
Implicationsin South africa most farmers are still cultivating single-toxin Bt maize. In many cases they need to apply at least one pesticide spray which makes planting of Bt varieties less attractive.
As a result of the study the planting of refuges needs to be reconsidered in South africa and a possibility exists that the refuge strategy may totally change in the future.
In the medium term single-toxin Bt maize is being replaced progressively by a stacked variety producing two different toxins
The researchers reported that trees in the calcium-treated watershed produced 21 percent more wood and 11 percent more leaves than their counterparts in an adjacent control site.
The research supported by a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) grant took place at Moor House National Nature Reserve high up in the North Pennines a long-term ecological monitoring site for the UK Environmental Change Network.
The newly set up experimental site manipulated both temperature and the composition and diversity of vegetation at the same time allowing the team to study the combined effects of these global change phenomena for the first time.
Temperatures were increased by around 1°C using open-topped passive warming chambers specially built on site
They are looking at six sites on a gradient from downtown Chicago to 40 miles west of the city.
The sites all have the same ideal soil conditions allowing the researchers to take soil factors out of the equation.
We are monitoring concentrations of carbon dioxide ozone temperature humidity wind and other factors across all of the sites.
They are finding that crop yields are highly variable at the different sites with some crops growing better closer to the city center
and logged sites but what surprised us was just how resilient some species were even in sites almost unrecognisable as rainforest.'
'Only by viewing forest sites along a gradient of logging disturbance ranging from pristine to heavily degraded were the team able to detect a gradual decline of some key bat species. The research confirmed the most vulnerable bats were those that tend to live in the cavities of old growth trees.
By linking bat captures with vegetation measurements from nearby plots the researchers were able to reveal how these animals declined as successive rounds of logging took their toll on forest structure and crucially the availability of tree cavities.
The Finnish Environment Institute will use it in an EU project on the global effects of the smartphone business The study will examine which part of the value added is produced in developing countries
and their owners from which the researchers built a computer simulation which modelled the speed at
Computer models that calculate the global balance of atmospheric carbon dioxide also must factor in sinks that offset carbon such as tropical forests.
--or at any rate they gather up the bacteria carry them to new sites and harvest them prudently.
Farmers save roughly half the bacteria available to them forgoing considerable food to save some for dispersal at a new site.
--if the amoebas are dispersed to a site without a good source--farmers produce more spores than nonfarmers
because they are able to make their new site productive. What happens when farmers and nonfarmers are in direct competition?
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011