ScienceDaily Top Science Headlines -- for Saturday, October 15, 2011

ScienceDaily Top Science Headlines

for Saturday, October 15, 2011

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How the zebra gets its stripes: A simple genetic circuit (October 14, 2011) -- Developmental processes that create stripes and other patterns are complex and difficult to untangle. To sort it out, a team of scientists has designed a simple genetic circuit that creates a striped pattern that they can control by tweaking a single gene. This genetic loop is made two linked modules that sense how crowded a group of cells has become and responds by controlling their movements. ... > full story

Breastfeeding reduces the risk of allergies, study suggests (October 14, 2011) -- Today, about one in four European children suffer from allergy, which makes this disease the non-infectious epidemic of the 21st century. Evidence suggests that lifestyle factors and nutritional patterns, such as breastfeeding, help to reduce the early symptoms of allergy. ... > full story

Polar bears ill from accumulated environmental toxins (October 14, 2011) -- Industrial chemicals are being transported from the industrialized world to the Arctic via air and sea currents. Here, the cocktail of environmental toxins is absorbed by the sea's food chains, of which the polar bear is the top predator. ... > full story

Women's heart disease tied to small blood vessels (October 14, 2011) -- After a heart attack, women's hearts are more likely to maintain their systolic function -- their ability to contract and pump blood from the chambers into the arteries. According to researchers, this suggests that heart disease manifests differently in women, affecting the microvasculature (small blood vessels) instead of the macrovasculature (major blood vessels) as it does in men. ... > full story

New study finds 400,000 farmers in southern Africa using 'fertilizer trees' to improve food security (October 14, 2011) -- On a continent battered by weather extremes, famine and record food prices, new research documents an exciting new trend in which hundreds of thousands of poor farmers in Southern Africa are now significantly boosting yields and incomes simply by using fast growing trees and shrubs to naturally fertilize their fields. ... > full story

Differing structures underlie differing brain rhythms in healthy and ill, virtual modeling reveals (October 14, 2011) -- Virtual brains modeling epilepsy and schizophrenia display less complexity among functional connections, and other differences compared to healthy brain models, researchers report. The researchers worked backward from brain rhythms -- the oscillating patterns of electrical activity in the brain recorded on electroencephalograms -- from both healthy and ill individuals. ... > full story

'Robot biologist' solves complex problem from scratch (October 14, 2011) -- Scientists have taken a major step toward developing robot biologists. They have shown that their system, the Automated Biology Explorer, can solve a complicated biology problem from scratch. ... > full story

Gender differences in blood pressure appears as early as adolescence, with girls faring worse (October 14, 2011) -- The female hormone estrogen is known to offer protection for the heart, but obesity may be taking away that edge in adolescent girls. New research finds that although obesity does not help teens of either gender, it has a greater impact on girls' blood pressure than it does on boys'. ... > full story

Researchers discover material with graphene-like properties (October 14, 2011) -- After the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to two scientists in 2010 who had studied the material graphene, this substance has received a lot of attention. Scientists have now developed and analyzed a material which possesses physical properties similar to graphene. ... > full story

MRIs could become powerful tools for monitoring cholesteral therapy (October 14, 2011) -- MRI scanning could become a powerful new tool for assessing how well cholesterol drugs are working, according to a cardiologist studying patients taking cholesterol medications. ... > full story

Redox flow batteries, a promising technology for renewable energies integration (October 14, 2011) -- Today there is a wide variety of energy storage technologies at very different stages of development. Among them, the Redox Flow Battery (RFB) is an innovative solution based on the use of liquid electrolytes stored in tanks and pumped through a reactor to produce energy. Researchers are currently working in the development of high performance RFBs. ... > full story

Minority children less likely to receive CT scans following head trauma (October 14, 2011) -- African-American and Hispanic children are less likely to receive a cranial computed tomography scan in an emergency department following minor head trauma than white children, according to new research. ... > full story