Corn has long been a primary food crop in prehistoric North and Central America but, according to a new study, it was also an important part of the South American diet for much longer than previously thought.

PhD student Sonia Zarrillo and archaeology professor Dr. Scott Raymond report that a new technique for examining ancient cooking pots has produced the earliest directly dated examples of domesticated corn (maize) being consumed on the South American continent.

As we learn more and more about the human genome and delve into specifics about what makes certain people healthier than others at the genetic levl, it becomes possible for health care providers, insurers and even employers to use genetic information against individuals even when no health issue exists.

A policy monograph highlighting the need for federal protections against genetic discrimination in employment and insurance practices was released today by the American College of Physicians (ACP). The six policy positions ACP believes should be included in the federal protections are the focus of the policy paper.

“While they’re not quite there, Congress does continue to move closer to passing federal legislation that protects the use of genetic information in employment and insurance coverage decisions,” noted David C. Dale, MD, FACP president of the 125,000 member ACP. “This monograph is important for the ongoing discussion.”

ACP’s first two positions consider insurance providers:

There's no McAlgae drive-through, but coral have their own addiction to 'junk food' and, say researchers, we may be in the position of needing to halt global warming in order to keep that fast food coming. 200 million humans depend on it for their subsistence.

The symbiosis between coral, a primitive animal, and zooxanthellae, tiny one-celled plants, is not only powerful enough to build the largest living organism on the planet, the Great Barrier Reef, but also underpins the economies and living standards of many tropical nations and societies who harvest their food from the reefs or have developing tourism industries.

Enzymes are biological catalysts that are made from a string of amino acids, which fold into specific three-dimensional protein structures. Without them, life would not exist. They are a valuable model for understanding the intricate works of nature. These molecular machines are responsible for initiating chemical reactions within the body. Millions of years of natural selection have fine-tuned the activity of such enzymes, allowing chemical reactions to take place millions of times faster.

In order to create artificial enzymes, a comprehensive understanding of the structure of natural enzymes, their mode of action, as well as advanced protein engineering techniques is needed. A team of scientists from the University of Washington, Seattle, and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, made a crucial breakthrough toward this endeavor.

They have succeeded in creating a new type of enzyme for a reaction for which no naturally occurring enzyme has evolved.

Using classical coding, a single photon will convey only one of two messages - one bit of information. In dense coding, a single photon can convey one of four messages - two bits of information.

University of Illinois researchers say they have broken the record for the most amount of information sent by a single photon using the direction of “wiggling” and “twisting” of a pair of hyper-entangled photons. Doing so, they have beaten a fundamental limit on the channel capacity for dense coding with linear optics.

“Dense coding is arguably the protocol that launched the field of quantum communication,” said Paul Kwiat, a John Bardeen Professor of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Today, however, more than a decade after its initial experimental realization, channel capacity has remained fundamentally limited as conceived for photons using conventional linear elements.”

Chemists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered that a chemical reaction in the atmosphere above major cities long assumed to be unimportant in urban air pollution is in fact a significant contributor to urban ozone—the main component of smog.

Their finding should help air quality experts devise better strategies to reduce ozone for US areas that exceed new standards announced last week by the Environmental Protection Agency and also benefit cities like Mexico City and Beijing that are grappling with major air quality and urban smog problems. More than 100 million people worldwide currently live in cities that fail to meet international standards for air quality.

Graphene, a single-atom-thick sheet of graphite, is a new material which combines aspects of semiconductors and metals.

University of Maryland physicists have shown that in graphene the intrinsic limit to the mobility, a measure of how well a material conducts electricity, is higher than any other known material at room temperature - and 100 times faster than in silicon.

A team of researchers led by physics professor Michael S. Fuhrer of the university's Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials, and the Maryland NanoCenter said the findings are the first measurement of the effect of thermal vibrations on the conduction of electrons in graphene, and show that thermal vibrations have an extraordinarily small effect on the electrons in graphene.

In baseball's golden age, pitchers had a higher mound and threw more complete games but careers were shorter. As salaries continue to rise there is greater concern about protecting the investments. A new study involving several Major League Baseball pitchers indicates that the height of the pitcher’s mound can affect the athlete’s throwing arm motion, which may lead to potential injuries because of stress on the shoulder and elbow.

The study was led by William Raasch, M.D., associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, who also is the head team physician for the Milwaukee Brewers. Major League Baseball funded the study in an effort to help prevent injuries among professional baseball players.

Since robots live in a binary world, it is difficult to program them in a way where they can understand the nuances and inflections of human speech among many different people.

A team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University may have made that unnecessary. They can instruct a robot to find and deliver things using something more direct than speech - a laser pointer.

El-E (pronounced like the name Ellie), a robot designed to help users with limited mobility with everyday tasks, autonomously moves to an item selected with a green laser pointer, picks up the item and then delivers it to the user, another person or a selected location such as a table. El-E, named for her ability to elevate her arm and for the arm's resemblance to an elephant trunk, can grasp and deliver several types of household items including towels, pill bottles and telephones from floors or tables.

In research that could lead to the prevention of up to one-fifth of birth defects in humans caused by genetic mutations, early stage fish embryos injected with a 'genetic patch' were able to develop normally.

Erik C. Madsen, Ph.D. student in the Medical Scientist Training Program at Washington University School of Medicine, made the discovery using a zebrafish model of Menkes disease, a rare, inherited disorder of copper metabolism caused by a mutation in the human version of the ATP7A gene. Zebrafish are vertebrates that develop similarly to humans, and their transparency allows researchers to observe embryonic development.