ITHACA, N.Y. - According to a recent study, the size of a common ground-nesting bee - an important crop pollinator - has grown smaller in heavily farmed landscapes.

The link between intensive agriculture and the size of Andrena nasonii bees has important implications for how farmers might diversify these landscapes to benefit bees. It also points out yet another potential threat to pollinators, along with mites, pesticides and loss of habitat.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) have revisited the all-sky survey carried out by the ROSAT satellite, to create a new image of the sky in at X-ray wavelengths. Along with this a revised and extended version of the catalogue of bright and faint point-like sources will be released. The now published "2RXS catalogue" provides the deepest and cleanest X-ray all-sky survey to date, which will only be superseded with the launch of the next generation X-ray survey satellite, eROSITA, currently being completed at MPE.

Humans have put yeast to work for thousands of years to make bread, beer, and wine. Wild strains of yeast are also found in the natural fermentations that are essential for chocolate and coffee production. But, as new genetic evidence reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on March 24 shows, the yeasts associated with coffee and cacao beans have had a rather unique history.

In comparison to the yeasts found in vineyards around the world, the new work shows that those associated with coffee and cacao beans show much greater diversity. The findings suggest that those differences may play an important role in the characteristics of chocolate and coffee from different parts of the world.

Routine mammography--widely recommended for breast cancer screening--may also be a useful tool to identify women at risk for heart disease, potentially allowing for earlier intervention, according to a study scheduled for presentation at the American College of Cardiology's 65th Annual Scientific Session.

New lip-reading technology developed at the University of East Anglia (UEA) could help in solving crimes and provide communication assistance for people with hearing and speech impairments.

The visual speech recognition technology, created by Dr Helen L. Bear and Prof Richard Harvey of UEA's School of Computing Sciences, can be applied "any place where the audio isn't good enough to determine what people are saying," Dr Bear said.

As organic chemistry evolved, techniques for catalyzing hydrocarbons advanced and one by one a method was created for their manipulation. Ethane, propane, butane, pentane -- all the alkanes followed a similar pattern and their reactions had predictable results. Only one alkane-methane- refused to follow suit and this confounded chemists for decades. Methane had been just too difficult to work with; its C-H bond could not be manipulated. Using a new hybrid breed of computational and experimental chemistry, an international team of chemists, led by IBS Center for Catalytic Hydrocarbon Functionalizations Associate Director Mu-Hyun Baik, was able to solve a puzzle that has been dubbed a "Holy Grail reaction" and devise a method for catalyzing reactions with methane.