A high-flying K-12 education effort by the University of Colorado at Boulder will feature two science investigations launching on a NASA space shuttle this week and continuing on for extended stays aboard the International Space Station.
Scientists at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute and Duke University Medical Center have pinpointed a fungal gene that appears to play an important role in the development and virulence of Alternaria brassicicola, a destructive fungal pathogen that results in considerable leaf loss in many economically important crops worldwide, including canola, cabbage and broccoli.
The abusive boss has been well-documented in movies (“Nine to Five”), television (Fox’s “My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss”) and even the Internet. Now, a Florida State University professor and two of his doctoral students in Tallahassee, Fla. have conducted a study that shines some light on the magnitude of the problem and documents its effects on employee health and job performance.
Teenagers who take a daily multivitamin supplement have a healthier diet and lifestyle than those who don’t take vitamins, reports a study in the December Journal of the American Dietetic Association.
A new study sheds light on some very fast snails and their success at long-distance colonization. Introduced into the rivers of the Martinique islands less than twelve years ago, the freshwater snails have already colonized the watersheds, an astounding feat considering that the snails need to rely on passive dispersal by birds, cars and cattle to jump over the dry land that separates the riverways.
Why and how do males and females of the same species often look so different? Armin Mocsek (Indiana University) has shown that in a certain group of insects, sex-differences in appearance are not the product of growing structures in a sex-specific manner, as previously assumed, but rather are generated by the sex-specific loss, or removal, of structures initially grown alike by both males and females.
Diversified social roles for men, women and children may have given Homo sapiens an advantage over Neanderthals, says a new study in the December 2006 issue of Current Anthropology. The study argues that division of economic labor by sex and age emerged relatively recently in human evolutionary history and facilitated the spread of modern humans throughout Eurasia.
Worker bees, wasps and ants are often considered neuter. But in many species they are females with ovaries, who although unable to mate, can lay unfertilized eggs which turn into males if reared. For some species, such as bumble bees, this is the source of many of the males in the species. But in others, like the honeybee, workers “police” each other — killing eggs laid by workers or confronting egg-laying workers.
A study led by the University of Manchester’s Division of Psychiatry has found that schizophrenia patients respond just as well — and perhaps even better — to older psychiatric drugs as newer, costlier alternatives.
Marijuana is not a “gateway” drug that predicts or eventually leads to substance abuse, suggests a 12-year University of Pittsburgh study. The study, which found that young men who chose to initiate their drug use with marijuana were no more likely to go on to abuse drugs or alcohol than those who smoked or drank first, calls into question the long-held belief that has shaped prevention efforts and governmental policy for six decades.