Feed: SCIENCE NEWS FROM SCIGURU.COM

Environmental pollutants, eating habits, lack of exercise and genetic traits have all been raised as possible causes of earlier puberty onset in girls in recent years.

Now we may now know why: It's the calories, as reported by Ei Terasawa, Joe Kurian, Ricki Colman and colleagues at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Their findings, the first to document a connection between diet, growth and puberty in nonhuman primates, appear today in the journal Endocrinology.

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A ladybird’s colour indicates how well-fed and how toxic it is, according to an international team of scientists.

Research led by the Universities of Exeter and Liverpool directly shows that differences between animals’ warning signals reveal how poisonous individuals are to predators.

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Boise State biologists have uncovered why the chemical defenses in birch, a common type of tree found in North America, are toxic to snowshoe hares.

The snowshoe hare, also commonly called the snowshoe rabbit, is found throughout North America and plays an integral role in the food chain. Understanding the mechanism by which chemical defenses in trees and plants deter snowshoe hares and other herbivores can help explain diet selection and habitat use.

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The body’s control mechanisms for delivering zinc to cells could be key to improving treatment for some types of aggressive breast cancer.

New research by King’s College London and Cardiff University has identified the switch which releases zinc into cells, with important implications for a number of diseases.

Zinc has long been known to play a vital part in human health. Too much zinc, or too little, can cause cell death. A growing body of evidence links zinc to disease states including neurodegeneration, inflammation, diabetes and cancer.

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Infectious disease has joined poaching and habitat loss as a major threat to the survival of African great apes as they have become restricted to ever-smaller populations. Despite the work of dedicated conservationists, efforts to save our closest living relatives from ecological extinction are largely failing, and new scientific approaches are necessary to analyze major threats and find innovative solutions.

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With no lab tests to guide the clinician, psychiatric diagnostics is challenging and controversial. Antisocial personality disorder is defined as “a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood,” according to the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) of the American Psychiatric Association.

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Looking for an item in a large department store or mall can be like searching for a needle in a haystack, but that could change thanks to a hybrid location-identification system that uses radio frequency transmitters and overhead LED lights, suggested by a team of researchers from Penn State and Hallym University in South Korea.

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In the U.S., there are nearly three million youth soccer players, and half of them are female. New research presented today at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) found that despite reporting appropriate body perception and attitudes toward eating, elite youth soccer athletes (club level or higher) face an increased risk for delayed or irregular menstruation. In addition, female soccer players are more likely to suffer a stress fracture or ligament injury.

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New research presented at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) highlights the benefits of total knee replacement (TKR) in elderly patients with osteoarthritis, including a lower probability of heart failure and mortality.

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When it comes to diets, cookies and cake are off the menu. Now, in a surprising discovery, researchers from Tel Aviv University have found that dessert, as part of a balanced 600-calorie breakfast that also includes proteins and carbohydrates, can help dieters to lose more weight — and keep it off in the long run.

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Biologists have found new evidence of why mice, people and other vertebrate animals carry thousands of varieties of genes to make immune-system proteins named MHCs--even though some of those genes make vertebrate animals susceptible to infections and to autoimmune diseases.

"Major histocompatibility complex" (MHC) proteins are found on the surfaces of most cells in vertebrate animals. They distinguish proteins like themselves from foreign proteins, and trigger an immune response against these foreign invaders.

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In the UK, the exercise electrocardiogram (ECG) is the most common initial test for the evaluation of stable chest pain and has been used widely for almost half a century. However, recent NICE guidelines recommend that it should not be used to diagnose or exclude stable angina in patient assessments. New research published in the BMJ Open finds that the test has other uses that transcend its technical contribution to diagnosis.

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The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, has completed the genome sequence of a Denisovan, a representative of an Asian group of extinct humans related to Neandertals.

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Scientists have identified a critical protein involved in the biomineralization of tooth enamel, the hardest and most highly mineralized substance in our body.  They found that the protein called Foxo1 involved in regulating gene expression is essential for enamel biomineralization. 

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Research by a University of Leicester sociologist shows that racist jokes can reinforce serious meanings about race issues – and suggests that we should be paying attention to this as well as the offence these jokes can cause.

In The Rhetoric of Racist Humour, published by Ashgate, Dr Simon Weaver makes the claim that the language of humour and jokes is structured and functions as rhetoric; that is, it uses non-literal imagery to convince us to agree with the joke-teller’s message.

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The love song of an extinct cricket that lived 165 million years ago has been brought back to life by scientists at the University of Bristol. The song – possibly the most ancient known musical song documented to date – was reconstructed from microscopic wing features on a fossil discovered in North East China. It allows us to listen to one of the sounds that would have been heard by dinosaurs and other creatures roaming Jurassic forests at night.

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Cambridge scientists have, for the first time, created cerebral cortex cells – those that make up the brain’s grey matter – from a small sample of human skin.  The researchers’ findings, which were funded by Alzheimer’s Research UK and the Wellcome Trust, were published today in Nature Neuroscience.

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Autism and related disorders that profoundly affect behavior and development are diagnosed more often today than ever before.

But despite its rising profile in the media and in the minds of parents, still little is known about what causes autism. Confronted by this stubborn mystery, Lauren Weiss, PhD, a researcher with the UCSF Institute for Human Genetics and Department of Psychiatry, is nonetheless optimistic.

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Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have, for the first time, described the genetic basis of endometriosis, a condition affecting millions of women that is marked by chronic pelvic pain and infertility. The researchers’ discovery of a new gene mutation provides hope for new screening methods.

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In a study of the harsh but beautiful White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, University of Pennsylvania researchers have uncovered a unifying mechanism to explain dune patterns. The new work represents a contribution to basic science, but the findings may also hold implications for identifying when dune landscapes like those in Nebraska’s Sand Hills may reach a “tipping point” under climate change, going from valuable grazing land to barren desert.

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