Studying bacteria from the Baltic Sea, UA researchers have discovered an entire array of previously unknown viruses that barely resemble any of the known bacteria-infecting viruses.
Researchers of the University of Arizona’s Tucson Marine Phage Lab have discovered a dozen new types of unknown viruses that infect different strains of marine bacteria. (more…)
Asian Indians are one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the United States, and roughly half a million people of Indian ancestry live in California — more than any other state. Individuals from this group are strongly predisposed to obesity-related conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, due in large part to physical inactivity, diets low in fruit and vegetables, and insulin resistance.
Among other racial and ethnic groups, research has shown that religious practices and religiosity have been associated with obesity and greater body weight, but no one had studied this potential link among Indians. (more…)
A team of researchers at the IRCM, led by Dr. Javier M. Di Noia in the Immunity and Viral Infections research division, discovered a novel research model for the study of auto-immune diseases. The Montréal scientists are the first to find a way to separate two important mechanisms that improve the quality of antibodies. This study was featured in a recent issue of The Journal of Immunology. (more…)
New study shows healthy Red Sea corals carry bacterial communities within
Corals may let certain bacteria get under its skin, according to a new study by researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and soon to be published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The study offers the first direct evidence that Stylophora pistillata, a species of reef-building coral found throughout the Indian and west Pacific Oceans, harbors bacterial denizens deep within its tissues.
“We have evidence that other species of coral also host these bacteria, and that they may play an important role in keeping a coral healthy,” says Amy Apprill, a WHOI assistant scientist who co-directed the study along with KAUST Assistant Professor Christian Voolstra. KAUST post-doctoral scholar Till Bayer was the lead author of the study. (more…)
Low vitamin D blood levels are linked to greater risk of heart disease in whites and Chinese, but not in blacks and Hispanics, according to a study appearing this week in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Growing evidence has suggested that low blood levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin are associated with higher risk of developing coronary heart disease among whites. Few of these studies included substantial numbers of people from other races. (more…)
One-day conference in Beijing kicks off summer training for graduate students studying socio-economic inequality
A team of scholars who are engaged in researching ways to improve human capital and economic opportunity convened the “Conference on the Study of Inequality” on Monday, June 17, at the University of Chicago Center in Beijing.
The conference, which was co-sponsored by the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group, the University of Chicago Center in Beijing and the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University, kicked off a week of events. (more…)
AUSTIN, Texas — For the first time, scientists have documented an acceleration in the melt rate of permafrost, or ground ice, in a section of Antarctica where the ice had been considered stable. The melt rates are comparable with the Arctic, where accelerated melting of permafrost has become a regularly recurring phenomenon, and the change could offer a preview of melting permafrost in other parts of a warming Antarctic continent.
Tracking data from Garwood Valley in the McMurdo Dry Valleys region of Antarctica, Joseph Levy, a research associate at The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics, shows that melt rates accelerated consistently from 2001 to 2012, rising to about 10 times the valley’s historical average for the present geologic epoch, as documented in the July 24 edition of Scientific Reports. (more…)
PASADENA, Calif. — Color and black-and-white images of Earth taken by two NASA interplanetary spacecraft on July 19 show our planet and its moon as bright beacons from millions of miles away in space.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured the color images of Earth and the moon from its perch in the Saturn system nearly 900 million miles (1.5 billion kilometers) away. MESSENGER, the first probe to orbit Mercury, took a black-and-white image from a distance of 61 million miles (98 million kilometers) as part of a campaign to search for natural satellites of the planet. (more…)
