A researcher has discovered a critical reason why women experience fertility problems as they get older. The solution could be simple — putrescine water.

Putrescine is naturally produced in mammals by an enzyme called ornithine decarboxylase (ODC) and is easily absorbed and cleared by the body. In female mammals, ODC levels are known to rise during ovulation, when the egg cell matures and is released from the ovary.  Dr. Johné Liu, a senior scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and professor at the University of Ottawa, has shown that ODC levels rise very little in older females. He has also shown that inhibiting ODC levels in young mice leads to an increase in egg cells with chromosomal defects. 

You can see the color white and you can hear white noise but you can also smell a white odor, says new research. 

When we see white, we are seeing a mixture of light waves of different wavelengths. The hum we call white noise is a combination of assorted sound frequencies but in both cases a stimulus must meet two conditions: The mix that produces them must span the range of our perception and each component must be present at the exact same intensity.

Both of these conditions can be met with odors, so as to produce a white smell - it just involves technical difficulties, like getting the intensities of all the scents to be identical. 

The best way to get precise information regarding the inner structure of atoms and molecules is to excite them by means of resonant laser light but this laser light can lead to measurable modifications within the atom's electron shell, above a certain intensity. The act of getting the information changes the study.

Scientists of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) say they have now shown experimentally how to prevent such "light shifts" and that this confirms the advantages of "hyper" Ramsey excitation that had already been predicted theoretically.

Some people take risks with investments while others on safety with their money and in other business activities. Researchers have looked at the attitudes towards risk in a group of 56 subjects and found that in people who preferred safety, certain regions of the brain show a higher level of activation when they are confronted with quite unforeseeable situations.  

And now the news from Alpha Centauri…(Oh, I’ve waited for so long to utter those words! News. From Alpha Centauri. Wow!)

I feel stuck, stuck in the continued reflection of what DSM labels mean to individuals and how they conceive their identities. Perhaps this is because so much of what I read on the internet in our online community is about identity and labels. It seems many of us are focused on what it means to be autistic and who controls the right to label and define.

How some dahlias, white, yellow, red or purple, get their color is well known, but the  molecular mechanism behind the black dahlia has been a mystery. A new study shows that the distinctive black-red coloring is based on an increased accumulation of anthocyanins as a result of drastically reduced concentrations of flavones.

Dahlia variabilis hort. is a popular garden flower. Continuous dahlia breeding worldwide has led to the availability of a huge number of cultivars, 20,000 varieties, many of them showing red hues. However, black hues of dahlia flowers occur rarely, in comparison.