LOS ALAMOS, N.M., February 16, 2015--A paper in the latest issue of the journal Nature suggests a common ancestor of apes and humans, Chororapithecus abyssinicus, evolved in Africa, not Eurasia, two million years earlier than previously thought.

"Our new research supports early divergence: 10 million years ago for the human-gorilla split and 8 million years ago for our split from chimpanzees," said Los Alamos National Laboratory geologist and senior team member Giday WoldeGabriel. "That's at least 2 million years earlier than previous estimates, which were based on genetic science that lacked fossil evidence."

Ask a biofuel researcher to name the single greatest technical barrier to cost-effective ethanol, and you're likely to receive a one-word response: lignin.

Cellulosic ethanol--fuel derived from woody plants and waste biomass--has the potential to become an affordable, renewable transportation fuel that rivals gasoline, but lignin, one of the most ubiquitous components of the plant cell wall, gets in the way.

Experts estimate that illegal cartels of businesses harm consumers to the tune of many billions of dollars annually as they secretly collude to set prices, allocate territory, and distort market competition for their own financial benefit. In a new Significance article, Carsten Crede, of the Centre for Competition Policy and the School of Economics at the University of East Anglia, outlines the pros and cons of cartel screens, which are statistical tools to help spot bad business behavior.

Crede notes that cartel screens do not definitively prove bad behavior, but they flag where authorities should take a closer look.

WASHINGTON (Feb. 16, 2016) -- Viewing graphic anti-smoking images on cigarette packs triggers activity in brain areas involved in emotion, decision-making and memory as observed via brain scans. Researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center and Truth Initiative reported their findings online this week in Addictive Behaviors Reports.

The brain scanning study, the first to be conducted in young adult smokers, suggest these images could effectively warn smokers about cigarettes' health consequences, says the study's co-lead author, Darren Mays, PhD, MPH, an assistant professor of oncology at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center in Washington, DC.

Breast cancers which are particularly complex and diverse, as judged by a test used in ecology to analyse species of animals and plants, are particularly likely to progress and lead to death, a new study shows.

The test could be used in the clinic to assess how likely women's breast cancers are to be aggressive, and to help tailor treatment accordingly.

Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, developed a test called the Ecosystem Diversity Index which combines methods used by ecologists with a powerful cancer imaging technique to pick out cancerous cells from normal cells in tumours.

PHILADELPHIA - It turns out that the type, how frequent, and where new mutations occur in the human genome depends on which DNA building blocks are nearby, found researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in an advanced online study published this week in Nature Genetics.