A new regional study shows that land-use policies in Peru have been key to tempering rain forest degradation and destruction in that country. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology led an international effort to analyze seven years of high-resolution satellite data covering most (79%) of the Peruvian Amazon for their findings. The work is published in the August 9, 2007, on-line edition of Science Express.

The scientists found that the government’s program of designating specific regions for legal logging, combined with protection of other forests, and the establishment of territories for indigenous peoples helped keep large-scale rain forest damage in check between the years 1999 and 2005.

Modern communication technologies offer many new opportunities for reaching out to people. Can it also help patients with mental disorders?

Maybe. A group of investigators of the University of Heidelberg has published a controlled study on a new method of group therapy treatment based on internet chat in the July issue of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.

Following traditional impatient treatment, this study investigated the effectiveness of group therapy delivered through internet chat.

Nectar-feeding bats burn sugar faster than any other mammal on Earth – and three times faster than even top-class athletes – ecologists have discovered. The findings, published in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ecology, illustrate that because they live life on an energetic knife edge, these bats are very vulnerable to any changes in their environment that interrupt their fuel supply for even a short period.

Working with a captive breeding colony in Germany, Dr Christian Voigt of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin and Professor John Speakman of the University of Aberdeen fed long-tongued bats (Glossophaga soricina) sugar labelled with non-radioactive carbon-13 and then measured the amount of carbon-13 in the bats’ exhaled breath.

A two-dimensional “paper” made out of titanium-dioxide – also known as TiO2, titania and titanium white – nanowires has been developed. The nanowires have a diameter of 60 nanometers (a nanometer equals one billionth of meter ) and are 30 to 40 millimeters long. The nanowires can withstand temperatures up to 700 degrees Celsius and could provide solutions for a variety of applications, including chemical and water filtration, solar cells, drug delivery and non-woven textiles stable at high-temperature.

“It is unprecedented to have such a pure fiber,” said James Throckmorton, president of Intellectual Property Partners LLC, which acquired the technology from Z. Ryan Tian, an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Arkansas.

Heart disease hits people with diabetes twice as often as people without diabetes. In those with diabetes, cardiovascular complications occur at an earlier age and often result in premature death, making heart disease the major killer of diabetic people. But why is heart disease so prevalent among diabetics?

To help answer that question, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have been analyzing the fat (lipid) composition of heart tissue from laboratory mice with diabetes. They have found that heart cells of diabetic mice lose an important lipid from cellular components that generate energy for the heart, and their latest research shows this happens at the very earliest stages of diabetes.

More than a mile beneath the Atlantic’s surface, roughly halfway between New York and Portugal, seawater rushing through the narrow gullies of an underwater mountain range much as winds gust between a city’s tall buildings is generating one of the most turbulent areas ever observed in the deep ocean.

In fact, the turbulence packs an energy wallop equal to about five million watts -- comparable to output from a small nuclear reactor, according to a landmark study led by Florida State University researcher Louis St. Laurent.

The study -- an international collaboration of scientists from the United States and France -- documents for the first time the turbulent conditions in an undersea mountain range known as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

In a study published in the August 17 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Amanda J. Law, Associate Professor at the University of Oxford and colleagues at NIH describe for the first time a genetic variation that causes a gene to be overexpressed in the human brain. These results may provide a new way to design better drugs to treat schizophrenia.

“Although the exact causes of schizophrenia are yet to be determined, scientists agree that the disease is in part due to genetic variations,” Law says. “These variations are not simple to understand because they don’t directly disturb the function of proteins.

Many people with long-standing high blood pressure develop heart failure. But some don't. Daniel P. Kelly, M.D., and colleagues at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and other institutions are trying to figure out what could explain that difference.

Their latest research reveals that impaired energy production in heart muscle may underlie heart failure in some hypertensive patients. The researchers assert that a molecular factor involved in maintaining the heart's energy supply could become a key to new approaches to prevent or treat heart failure.

The molecular factor, a protein called estrogen-related receptor alpha (ERR alpha), helps the heart keep up with energy-draining conditions like high blood pressure, which makes the heart work harder to pump blood.

Concentrated chemicals derived from green tea dramatically boosted production of a group of key detoxification enzymes in people with low levels of these beneficial proteins, according to researchers at Arizona Cancer Center.