Inflammatory bowel diseases, such as Crohn’s disease and Ulcerative Colitis, severely impair the lives of more than four million people worldwide. The development of effective therapies against these diseases requires an understanding of their underlying molecular mechanisms. Researchers from the Universities of Cologne and Mainz in Germany, the Mouse Biology Unit of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Italy and their collaborators, have now deciphered a molecular signal that triggers chronic intestinal inflammation.

More than three-quarters of the particulate pollution known as black carbon transported at high altitudes over the West Coast during spring is from Asian sources, according to a research team led by Professor V. Ramanathan at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.

Though the transported black carbon, most of which is soot, is an extremely small component of air pollution at land surface levels, the phenomenon has a significant heating effect on the atmosphere at altitudes above two kilometers (6,562 feet).

As the soot heats the atmosphere, however, it also dims the surface of the ocean by absorbing solar radiation, said Ramanathan, a climate scientist at Scripps, and Odelle Hadley, a graduate student at the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at Scripps.

Despite advances in experimental nuclear physics, the most detailed probing of atomic nuclei still requires heavy doses of advanced nuclear theory. The problem is that using theory to make meaningful predictions requires massive datasets that tax even high-powered supercomputers.

In a March 16 Physical Review Letters article, researchers from Michigan State and Central Michigan universities report dramatic success in stripping away much of this stubborn complexity. The advance, which slashes computational time from days or weeks to minutes or hours, may help address one of the most important questions in nuclear physics today: what is the structure of heavy atomic nuclei?

Certain children who wear a special kind of no-line bifocal lenses show signs of slower progression of myopia than those who wear more conventional lenses according to a new study published in Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science (IOVS).

The study found that among children with two myopic parents, myopia progression was slower in children wearing progressive-addition lenses (PALs) when compared to those wearing single-vision lenses (SVLs). Knowing parental myopia may be helpful when deciding which myopic children are likely to benefit from special lenses.

Research by the World Health Organization (WHO) has suggested that the course and symptomatic expression of schizophrenia is relatively more benign in developing societies. However, a new study from Current Anthropology challenges this assumption, comparing biological and cultural indicators of schizophrenia in urban, Western societies with study data from the island of Palau, which has one of the highest rates of schizophrenia diagnosis in the world today.

“A 1% average worldwide population prevalence of schizophrenia is routinely interpreted in the medical literature as implying a uniform distribution,” write Roger J. Sullivan (California State University, Sacramento), John S. Allen (University of Southern California), and Karen L. Nero (University of Canterbury, New Zealand).

It has long been recognized that birds possess the ability to use the Earth’s magnetic field for their navigation, although just how this is done has not yet been clarified. However, the discovery of iron-containing structures in the beaks of homing pigeons in a new study (1) by Gerta Fleissner and her colleagues at the University of Frankfurt offers a promising insight into this complex topic. The article will be published online mid-March in Springer’s journal Naturwissenschaften.

In histological and physicochemical examinations in collaboration with HASYLAB, the synchrotron laboratories based in Hamburg, Germany, iron-containing subcellular particles of maghemite and magnetite were found in sensory dendrites² of the skin lining the upper beak of homing pigeons.