two closely related bird species, the collared flycatcher and the pied flycatcher, can reproduce with each other, but the females are more strongly attracted to a male of their own species. This has been shown by an international research team directed by Anna Qvarnström at Uppsala University in today’s Net edition of Science. They demonstrate that the gene for this sexual preference is found on the sex chromosome that is inherited from the father and that only females have a copy of. The discovery sheds new light on how new species are formed.

The formation of new species takes millions of years. It often happens when a population (group of individuals) is divided and separated geographically and then adapts to disparate environments over thousands of generations.

Urologists at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital are studying whether a neo-bladder construct grown from a patient’s own cells can improve bladder function for adult spinal cord injury patients.

Jefferson is only one of six sites in the U.S. enrolling participants in this clinical trial for the lab-grown neo-bladder construct that will involve a total of 10 patients.

“It’s never been done in adults before,” said primary investigator Patrick Shenot, M.D., instructor in Urology, Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, noting that a similar study is being conducted with children with spina bifida.

In a report this week in Cell, researchers have identified a biological basis for why events that happen during heightened states of emotion such as fear, anger and joy are more memorable than less dramatic occurrences: a hormone released during emotional arousal “primes” nerve cells to remember events by increasing their chemical sensitivity at sites where nerves rewire to form new memory circuits.

'Word of mouth' advertising is valuable because marketing groups know that opinions of friends and associates count more than the paid endorsements of strangers. But what kind of opinions matter most? It turns out the negative ones do, even if someone had privately had a positive impression prior to the negative input.

“Consumer attitudes toward products and services are frequently influenced by others around them. Social networks, such as those found on Myspace and Facebook suggest that these influences will continue to be significant drivers of individual consumer attitudes as society becomes more inter-connected,” explain Adam Duhachek, Shuoyang Zhang, and Shanker Krishnan of Indiana University in a Journal of Consumer Research report.

I have mixed feelings about the proliferation of the term "Open Notebook Science". I started using the term a year ago to describe our UsefulChem project because it had no hits on Google and so it offered an opportunity to start with a fresh definition. There are currently over 43 000 hits for that term and it is nice to see that the first hit is still the post with the original definition. The first part of the term, "Open Notebook", is meant to be taken literally. It refers to the ultimate information source used by a researcher to record their work.

Moving away from home and adapting to a new social environment are just two of the many challenges that new students face as they enter university. An innovative new study conducted at the University of Alberta has found that these challenges can actually have a negative effect on a student's health.

The researchers found that female students who lived away from home were three times more likely to report symptoms of binge eating compared to those students living with parents during their first year of university studies.

Also, students who felt dissatisfied with their bodies were three times as likely to report symptoms of binge eating when entering their first year of studies.

The theory of loss aversion is used in many contexts to explain why potential loss has a greater mitigating influence on behavior than potential gain.

In trading situations, consumers will most likely opt to keep what they have, tending to place a larger value on the items already in their possession (also known as the “endowment effect”). However, these theories generally assume that consumers like what they have enough to want to keep it. What happens when we’re in possession of something we hate?

A new study appearing in the Journal of Consumer Research uses experimental results to show a situation in which the endowment effect is reversed. The authors differentiate between two types of loss aversion:

A tiny galaxy,SDSSJ0737+3216 (lens redshift 0.3223, source redshift 0.5812), nearly halfway across the universe and the smallest in size and mass known to exist at that distance, has been identified by an international team of scientists.

The scientists used data collected by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

 

It was 50 years ago this week that the Russians launched Sputnik, the first man made satellite to orbit the earth. It changed the world.  In fact, there are few, if any events of the last 50 years that had such a global impact on just about every aspect of humanity. 

Consumers are told that leaving electrical devices in standby mode wastes large amounts of energy and makes a significant contribution to carbon dioxide emissions. Should 'standby mode' be regulated by governments?

Not according to results of a study published in the International Journal of Environment and Sustainable Development.

Sound counter-intuitive? Their reasoning is that as electrical devices get more efficient, the amount of energy saved through stricter regulation becomes ever smaller and effort should instead be spent improving the overall efficiency of devices in operation.