Methane, a greenhouse gas with an impact over 20 times greater than CO2, is constantly seeping out of large methane hydrate reservoirs in the ocean floors but 80 percent of it is immediately consumed by syntrophic ("feeding together") microorganisms.

These microorganisms dramatically reduce the oceanic emission of methane into the atmosphere by oxidizing methane anaerobically, providing an important component of the global carbon cycle and a major sink for methane on Earth.

Scientists of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena succeeded in capturing these syntrophic microorganisms, something various international research groups have been working on since 1999.

Scientists with UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center and the Department of Urology have showed that lowering intake of the type of fat common in a Western diet helps prevent prostate cancer in mice, the first finding of its kind in a mouse model that closely mimics human cancer, researchers said.

The study, which appears in the April 15, 2008 issue of the journal Cancer Research, focused on fat from corn oil, which is made up primarily of omega-6 fatty acids, or the polyunsaturated fat commonly found in the Western diet. Omega-6 fats are found in high levels in baked and fried goods, said William Aronson, a Jonsson Cancer Center researcher and the study’s senior author.

Researchers fed one group of mice a diet with about 40 percent of calories coming from fat, a percentage typical in men eating a Western diet. The other group received 12 percent of their calories from fat, a figure considered to be a very low fat diet. Researchers found there was a 27 percent reduced incidence of prostate cancer in the low-fat diet group. Aronson also studied cells in the prostate that were precancerous, or would soon become cancer, and found that the cells in the mice eating the low-fat diet were growing much more slowly than those in the high-fat group.

We all know that children who are popular do well socially. A new study has found that teenagers who feel good about themselves and are comfortable with their peers can also be socially successful without being popular in the traditional sense.

These findings come from researchers at the University of Virginia and are published in the May/June 2008 issue of the journal Child Development.

Researchers studied 164 adolescents from racially, ethnically, and socio-economically diverse backgrounds. The teens were interviewed at age 13 and then again at 14. The researchers also interviewed the adolescents’ same-sex close friends.

A study investigating aging in mice has found that hormonal changes that occur when mice eat significantly less may help explain an already established phenomenon: a low calorie diet can extend the lifespan of rodents, a benefit that even regular exercise does not achieve.

“We know that being lean rather than obese is protective from many diseases, but key rodent studies tell us that being lean from eating less, as opposed to exercising more, has greater benefit for living longer. This study was designed to understand better why that is,” said Derek M. Huffman, the study’s lead author.

The study applies only to rodents, which are different in some key ways from humans, cautions Huffman.

Patients suffering from “hemineglect” ignore things presented to their left side. However, sometimes these ignored stimuli may be processed without awareness.

In a paper published in Cortex Issue 6, Sackur and colleagues reported that unconscious processing in hemineglect is not limited to low level features of the stimuli. They showed that the brain may extract the meaning of symbols that the patient has not consciously perceived. Thus, digits or number words presented on the left side were not detected by hemineglect patients, but still their numerical value influenced the way these patients performed on a numerical task presented shortly thereafter.

If you take a top-of-the-line express train in America, nothing more modern than an electric shaver can even be plugged in much less have any practical use while onboard. 10 times as long as plane flights, more expensive and no computer use? Why aren't trains more popular here again?

Not the case in Europe. They are using technology from the European Space Agency to allow internet addicts to get their fix even in mass transit. Thalys is launching full commercial operations for a wireless broadband internet service on board high speed trains, the result of their project "Broadband to trains."

It enables the international railway company to deliver true broadband internet access to passengers travelling between Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and Cologne.