Latest National Academy of Sciences Stories

As a basketball player scans he court, looking for an opening, his brain captures the position of other players for a few seconds, allowing him to choose the best path to the basket. Without those few seconds captured in memory, he would forget where each player is as his attention shifts. This visual short-term memory is like a "buffer" in a computer, allowing you to retain important pieces of information that will inform your future actions –whether it is on the basketball court, the...

For the first time, researchers at the University of California, San Diego have peered inside a living mouse cell and mapped the processes that power the celebrated health benefits of omega-3 fatty acids. More profoundly, they say their findings suggest it may be possible to manipulate these processes to short-circuit inflammation before it begins, or at least help to resolve inflammation before it becomes detrimental. The work is published in the May 14, 2012 online Early Edition of the...

A new study led by Carrie Schloss, an analyst in environmental and forest sciences at the University of Washington, finds that nine percent of the Western Hemisphere's mammals, and nearly forty percent in particular regions, will fall victim to the changing climate. Some mammals are merely too slow to escape climate change in their natural habitats and are unable to move into different areas. The study seeks to understand if the mammals can actually adapt to these conditions by moving or not....

Researchers have created an ultrasensitive biosensor that could open up new opportunities for early detection of cancer and "personalized medicine" tailored to the specific biochemistry of individual patients. The device, which could be several hundred times more sensitive than other biosensors, combines the attributes of two distinctly different types of sensors, said Muhammad A. Alam, a Purdue University professor of electrical and computer engineering. "Individually, both of these...

University of Utah and Harvard scientists develop way to enforce future greenhouse gas treaty If the world's nations ever sign a treaty to limit emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide gas, there may be a way to help verify compliance: a new method developed by scientists from the University of Utah and Harvard. Using measurements from only three carbon-dioxide (CO2) monitoring stations in the Salt Lake Valley, the method could reliably detect changes in CO2 emissions of 15 percent...

New find from Joint BioEnergy Institute could help reduce biofuel production costs In the search for technology by which economically competitive biofuels can be produced from cellulosic biomass, the combination of sugar-fermenting microbes and ionic liquid solvents looks to be a winner save for one major problem: the ionic liquids used to make cellulosic biomass more digestible for microbes can also be toxic to them. A solution to this conundrum, however, may be in the offing....

Barley grown in Scandinavian countries is adapted in a similar way to reindeer to cope with the extremes of day length at high latitudes. Researchers have found a genetic mutation in some Scandinavian barley varieties that disrupts the circadian clock that barley from southern regions use to time their growing season. Just as reindeer have dropped the clock in adapting to extremely long days, so has Scandinavian barley to grow successfully in that region's short growing season. This new...

Techniques used by researchers from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory to analyze a simple marine worm and its resident bacteria could accelerate efforts to understand more complex microbial communities such as those found in humans. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a multi-institutional research team analyzed the proteins found in a marine worm known as Olavius algarvensis. The worm lacks a digestive system and relies on...

The deletion of part of a gene that plays a role in the synthesis of carnitine – an amino acid derivative that helps the body use fat for energy – may play a role in milder forms of autism, said a group of researchers led by those at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital. "This is a novel inborn error of metabolism," said Dr. Arthur Beaudet, chair of molecular and human genetics at BCM and a physician at Texas Children's Hospital, and the senior author of the report...

The study, published yesterday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), looked at how genes on sex-linked chromosomes are passed down generations and linked to fertility, using the specific example of the W chromosome in female chickens. The results confirm that although these chromosomes have shrunk over millions of years, and have lost many of their original genes, those that remain are extremely important in predicting fertility and are, therefore, unlikely...