ScienceDaily Environment Headlines -- for Saturday, July 2, 2011

ScienceDaily Environment Headlines

for Saturday, July 2, 2011

Welcome to another edition of ScienceDaily's email newsletter. You can change your subscription options or unsubscribe at any time.

Foods with baked milk may help build tolerance in children with dairy allergies, study suggests (July 1, 2011) -- Introducing increasing amounts of foods that contain baked milk into the diets of children who have milk allergies helped a majority of them outgrow their allergies, according to a new study. ... > full story

Auto-pilots need a birds-eye view: Pigeons can inform navigation technology design (July 1, 2011) -- New research on how birds can fly so quickly and accurately through dense forests may lead to new developments in robotics and auto-pilots. Scientists trained pigeons to fly through an artificial forest with a tiny camera attached to their heads, literally giving a birds-eye view. ... > full story

NASA's Aura Satellite measures pollution from New Mexico, Arizona fires (July 1, 2011) -- NASA's Aura Satellite has provided a view of nitrogen dioxide levels coming from the fires in New Mexico and Arizona. Detecting nitrogen dioxide is important because it reacts with sunlight to create low-level ozone or smog and poor air quality. ... > full story

Loudest animal is recorded for the first time (July 1, 2011) -- The loudest animal on Earth, relative to its body size, is a tiny water boatman, scientists have shown. The sound is within human hearing range and at 99.2 decibels it represents the equivalent of listening to an orchestra play loudly while sitting in the front row. ... > full story

Variation in susceptibility to a virus is the key to understanding infection biology (July 1, 2011) -- A new study shows that differences in the vulnerability of animals to a virus are crucial to understanding patterns of infection, and that variation in susceptibility to two marginally different viruses increases the number of infections when the two virus variants are present in the same animal. ... > full story

At the feet of the pharaohs: Capturing the majesty of Luxor in 3-D (July 1, 2011) -- For a while, it seemed the revolution in Egypt would end his mission before it had even begun. Thomas A. DeFanti, an expert in data visualization, had been planning for months to capture spectacular 3-D surround images of Egypt's temples at Luxor on his way to Saudi Arabia early in April. It would be a proof-of-concept expedition to see if the 3-D CAVEcam -- two Lumix GF1 cameras carefully calibrated to take simultaneous right and left images -- would be functional in the super bright, hot and dusty conditions of the Nile River Valley. But for DeFanti, an avid traveler and lover of photography, it would also be a way to bring the splendors of one of the primary world heritage sites back to his state-of-the-art visualization facility in California. ... > full story

Preventing diabetes damage: Zinc's effects on a kinky, two-faced cohort (July 1, 2011) -- In type 2 diabetes, a protein called amylin forms dense clumps that shut down insulin-producing cells, wreaking havoc on the control of blood sugar. But zinc has a knack for preventing amylin from misbehaving. ... > full story

Scientists use 'optogenetics' to control reward-seeking behavior (July 1, 2011) -- The findings suggest that therapeutics targeting the path between two critical brain regions, the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens, represent potential treatments for addiction and other neuropsychiatric diseases. ... > full story

La Niña's exit leaves climate forecasts in limbo (July 1, 2011) -- It's what Bill Patzert, a climatologist and oceanographer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, likes to call a "La Nada" -- that puzzling period between cycles of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation climate pattern in the Pacific Ocean when sea surface heights in the equatorial Pacific are near average. ... > full story

Social networking -- 400 years ago (July 1, 2011) -- Renaissance specialists in the UK have discovered that the art of social networking pre-dates the Twitter and Facebook generations by more than 400 years. ... > full story

New approach to link genome-wide association signals to biological function (July 1, 2011) -- Researchers have identified a new strategy to improve the outcome of genome-wide association (GWA) studies. This will lead to a better understanding of the function of affected genes and the biological pathways involved, potentially translating these findings into clinical benefits. It is estimated that this approach, which finds the open chromatin regions in human cells, could be used in one in four GWA studies. ... > full story

Plastic found in nine percent of 'garbage patch' fishes: Tens of thousands of tons of debris annually ingested (July 1, 2011) -- The first scientific results from an ambitious voyage led by a group of graduate students from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego offer a stark view of human pollution and its infiltration of an area of the ocean that has been labeled as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch." ... > full story