Latest National Academy of Sciences Stories

As the Earth's climate warms, a melting ice sheet produces a distinct and highly non-uniform pattern of sea-level change, with sea level falling close to the melting ice sheet and rising progressively farther away. The pattern for each ice sheet is unique and is known as its sea level fingerprint. Now, a group of geophysicists from the University of Toronto, Harvard and Rutgers Universities have found a way to identify the sea level fingerprint left by a particular ice sheet, and possibly...

When a plant goes into defense mode in order to protect itself against harsh weather or disease, that’s good for the plant, but bad for the farmer growing the plant. Bad because when a plant acts to defend itself, it turns off its growth mechanism. But now researchers at Michigan State University, as part of an international collaboration, have figured out how plants can make the “decision” between growth and defense, a finding that could help them strike a balance – keep safe from...

Caltech researchers say habitat loss and tropical cooling were to blame for mass extinction The second-largest mass extinction in Earth's history coincided with a short but intense ice age during which enormous glaciers grew and sea levels dropped. Although it has long been agreed that the so-called Late Ordovician mass extinction—which occurred about 450 million years ago—was related to climate change, exactly how the climate change produced the extinction has not been known. Now, a...

The part of the brain we use when engaging in egalitarian behavior may also be linked to a larger sense of morality, researchers have found. Their conclusions, which offer scientific support for Adam Smith's theories of morality, are based on experimental research published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study, coming seven months after the start of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, which has been aimed at addressing income inequality, was...

Molecular mechanisms involved in the switch-on of the temperature sensor TRPM2 by hydrogen peroxide have been clarified Macrophages playing an important role in the immune system eat and fight against pathogens and foreign substances in the very beginning of infection. In this condition, macrophages produce reactive oxygen species for sterilization. However, the relation with the temperature sensor was not previously known. Professor Makoto TOMINAGA from National Institute for...

Using computational methods, Stanford University School of Medicine investigators have strongly implicated a novel gene in the triggering of type-2 diabetes. Their experiments in lab mice and in human blood and tissue samples further showed that this gene not only is associated with the disease, as predicted computationally, but is also likely to play a major causal role. In a study published online April 9 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers combed through...

Discovery of inherited-genetic variations may help assess a patient's risk of life-threatening disease before it strikes An international research team led by Weill Cornell Medical College investigators have discovered two inherited-genetic deletions in the human genome linked to development of aggressive prostate cancer. The findings, published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), indicate a man's risk of developing prostate cancer either triples or...

Researchers from the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Gothenburg have managed for the first time to obtain detailed information about the role of the protein metastasin in the spread of tumor cells. Published recently in the renowned Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the study paves the way for the development of new drugs. Metastasin is a protein with a key role in the spread of tumor cells. Previous research has shown that it is...

Fruit flies offer insights on aging Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have shown in animal models that the loss of memory that comes with aging is not necessarily a permanent thing. In a new study published this week in an advance, online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ron Davis, chair of the Department of Neuroscience at Scripps Florida, and Ayako Tonoki-Yamaguchi, a research associate in Davis's lab, took a...

Radioactive iodine found by Dartmouth researchers in the local New Hampshire environment is a direct consequence of a nuclear reactor's explosion and meltdown half a world away, says Joshua Landis, a research associate in the Department of Earth Science. The failure of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility, following the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami, was the largest nuclear disaster since 1986 at Chernobyl. "We live on a really small planet and this demonstrates that what...