(PHILADELPHIA) A novel signaling pathway plays a significant role in the production of aldosterone, a hormone that promotes heart failure after a myocardial infarction, according to a study conducted by Thomas Jefferson University researchers.

The findings, which will be published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that aldosterone production is mediated by a protein called beta-arrestin-1. Beta-arrestin-1 binds to angiotensin II receptors when they are activated by angiotensin II.

Prehistoric farming communities in Europe constructed water wells out of oak timbers - it seems early farmers were skilled carpenters long before metal was discovered or used for tools. 

 These first Central European farmers migrated from the Great Hungarian Plain approximately 7,500 years ago, and left an archaeological trail of settlements, ceramics and stone tools across the fertile regions of the continent, a record named Linear Pottery Culture (Linearbandkeramik - LBK). However, much of the lifestyle of these early settlers is still a mystery, including the climate they lived in and technology or strategies they used to cope with their surroundings. 

Solar panels are easily susceptible to mechanical problems.  Storms, leaves, you name it - but some of that is because they are rigid.  That rigidity also limits their applications.

New flexible, decal-like solar panels that can be peeled off like band-aids and stuck to virtually any surface, from papers to window panes, could make solar power a lot more deployable.  The world's first peel-and-stick thin-film solar cells have been created by researchers at Stanford University and unlike standard thin-film solar cells, their peel-and-stick version does not require any direct fabrication on the final carrier substrate.

When is diversity a bad thing?  When it comes to environmental action, according to a new paper from  the University of East Anglia (UEA). 

Scandinavian countries, low in ethnic and religious diversity, take more collective action than more diverse nations, like the UK, China and the United States. But the UEA paper frames diversity using the more negative term 'fragmentation'.

Americans may love separation of church and state and the mix of multiple religions in the USA but Dr. Elissaios Papyrakis, a senior lecturer in UEA's School of International Development and a senior researcher at Vrije Universiteit
in Holland, found that religious diversity has an even greater detrimental impact on environmental performance than ethnic diversity. 

Human hands and their remarkable dexterity have given us everything from the guitar of Segovia to the art of the Dutch masters but, says David Carrier from the University of Utah, they evolved to be what they are for a more practical reason.  As a weapon. 

Carrier and colleague Michael Morgan publish their hypothesis that human hands evolved their square palms and long thumb to stabilise the fist and produce a compact club for use in combat in The Journal of Experimental Biology.

Outrage about another school shooting does its part to increase vigilance against the odd ones out, the misfits soiling the norm of usual irrationality, the a-socials, the depressed, the autistic, the evil psychopaths.  Gate keeping HR departments homogenize the workforce.  “Professionalism” cleans academia of all that does not perform under the marketing paradigm.

Scientists have found that therizinosaurs defied the sterotype of sensory abilities of plant-eating animals. Their  exceptional sensory abilities - smell, hearing and balance - were well developed and might have affected or benefited from an enlarged forebrain, something typically associated with predators. 

In many modern discussions about bacteria, or germs, we find that novel descriptions are used that are more self-involved than accurate regarding the role of bacteria and microbes.  Certainly there is an increased awareness that many microbes are commensal [or "good"] and are necessary for our well-being, while others are considered "bad" and cause disease.

Evaporative cooling has been used to cool atoms to extraordinarily low temperatures. The process was used in 1995 to create a new state of matter, the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of rubidium atoms (see Nobel laureate Carl Wieman and his Science 2.0 articles here), which was so revolutionary and unnatural that BEC atoms travel at a rate of only three feet per hour.  Now in its 50th year, Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) physicists have met a goal once bordering on the impossible -  they have chilled a gas of molecules to very low temperatures by adapting the familiar process by which a hot cup of coffee cools 

Our eyes are the window to the world, but making sense of the thousands of images that flood us each day is squarely in the purview of the brain - and now researchers say they have created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings.

The result, achieved through computational models of brain imaging data collected while the subjects watched hours of movie clips, is what researchers call "a continuous semantic space."

Some relationships between categories make sense (humans and animals share the same "semantic neighborhood", for example) while others such hallways and buckets are less obvious. But the researchers found that different people share a similar semantic layout.