UPTON, NY-Lignin is a natural component of plant cell walls, the scaffolding that surrounds each cell and plays a pivotal role in plants' ability to grow against gravity and reach heights ranging from stubbly grasses to the sky-scraping splendor of redwoods. But lignin is a problem for scientists interested in converting plant biomass to biofuels and other sustainable bio-based products. Lignin makes it hard to break down the plant matter so its carbon-rich building blocks can be converted into forms suitable for generating energy or running automobiles.

A simple solution might be to engineer plants with less lignin. But previous attempts to do this have often resulted in weaker plants and stunted growth-essentially putting the brakes on biomass production.

Biologists from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) have discovered that the evolutionary history of a hormone responsible for sexual maturity in humans is written in the genes of the humble starfish.

The onset of puberty and sexual development in humans is triggered by the release of a brain hormone known as gonadotropin-releasing hormone or GnRH. Scientists at QMUL's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, working in collaboration with teams at the University of Warwick and KU Leuven in Belgium, have found that the history of this important sex hormone is a tale of loss.

In Vancouver, heat exposure and social vulnerability can be a lethal combination.

New research from the University of British Columbia shows a higher risk of mortality during extreme heat events in neighbourhoods that tend to get hotter and where people tend to be poorer.

"Climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of extreme hot weather events," said Sarah Henderson, senior author on the study and an assistant professor in UBC's school of population and public health and a research scientist at the BC Centre for Disease Control. "Being able to map and target the most vulnerable areas will be highly beneficial for public health intervention."

Realistic workloads and ongoing emotional support are essential if social workers are to manage stress and perform their job effectively, according to new research by the University of East Anglia (UEA).

The study by the Centre for Research on Children and Families (CRCF) examined the relationship between emotional intelligence - the ability to identify and manage emotions in oneself and others - stress, burnout and social work practice. It also assessed whether emotional intelligence training for social workers would reduce their burnout rates over time.

Listeners can hear a difference between standard audio and better than CD quality, known as high resolution audio, according to a new study from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).

The study compared data from over 12,000 different trials from 18 studies where participants were asked to discriminate between samples of music in different formats.

Dr Joshua Reiss from QMUL's Centre for Digital Music in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science said: "Audio purists and industry should welcome these findings -- our study finds high resolution audio has a small but important advantage in its quality of reproduction over standard audio content."

Researchers have developed systematic search methods to discover one of the world's biggest helium gas fields, associated with volcanoes in the Tanzanian Rift Valley. This is the first time that helium has been found intentionally -previous finds were by accident- and opens the way for further large finds. This work is reported at the Goldschmidt conference in Yokohama, Japan.

As my blogging here has been erratic in the last couple of weeks, I feel I need to explain to my 23 readers (what citation is this BTW?) what I have been up to. So this post does not contain any physics, and is rather about how a physicist fights for some space and time for himself and his family, decoupled from his daily occupations, and hopefully lowers his stress level. 
I left my home in Venice on June 15th at four in the morning with my fiancee and my two kids (Filippo, 17 and Ilaria, 13 years old), headed  to Elafonisos, a tiny island in southern Greece. Our Volotea flight was due to leave the Marco Polo airport at 6.30AM -an early and cheap flight I had picked to ensure we would get to destination at a reasonable time. 

Eating a powdered food supplement based on a molecule produced by bacteria in the gut, reduces cravings for high-calorie foods such as chocolate, cake and pizza, according to a small pilot study which asked 20 volunteers to consume a milkshake that either contained an ingredient called inulin-propionate ester, or a type of fiber called inulin.

Previous studies have found that bacteria in the gut release a compound called propionate when they digest the fiber inulin, which can signal to the brain to reduce appetite. However the inulin-propionate ester supplement releases much more propionate in the intestines than inulin alone.

MIAMI--As Louisiana's wetlands continue to disappear at an alarming rate, a new study has pinpointed the man-made structures that disrupt the natural water flow and threaten these important ecosystems. The findings have important implications for New Orleans and other coastal cities that rely on coastal wetlands to serve as buffer from destructive extreme weather events.

Scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science found that man-made canals limit the natural tidal inundation process in roughly 45 percent of the state's coastline, and disruptions from levees accounted for 15 percent.

BINGHAMTON, NY - Government agencies are having difficulty tracking potential terrorist attacks, since terrorists have developed new ways to communicate besides social media. A new framework developed by researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York is able to predict future terrorist attacks by recognizing patterns in past attacks.