Tag Archives: harvard university

A Tale of Turkey Tail: The Part of the Bird Best Left Uneaten

ANN ARBOR — While most Americans look forward to eating turkey on Thanksgiving, Pacific Islanders in the U.S. and on the islands are most likely to eat a part of the bird few other Americans are familiar with: its tail.

“Turkey tail is marketed selectively to Pacific Island communities throughout the U.S. and in Pacific Island territories, as well as independent nations,” said University of Michigan researcher Sela Panapasa. “Actually it’s not the tail but a gland that attaches the tail to the turkey’s body. It’s filled with oil that the turkey uses to preen its feathers.” (more…)

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In Blown-Down Forests, a Story of Survival

To preserve forest health, the best management decision may be to do nothing

In newscasts after intense wind and ice storms, damaged trees stand out: snapped limbs, uprooted trunks, entire forests blown nearly flat.

In a storm’s wake, landowners, municipalities and state agencies are faced with important financial and environmental decisions.

A study by Harvard University researchers, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and published in the journal Ecology, yields a surprising result: when it comes to the health of forests, native plants and wildlife, the best management decision may be to do nothing. (more…)

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Dwarf Species of Fanged Dinosaur Emerges from Southern Africa

A new species of plant-eating dinosaur with tiny, 1-inch-long jaws has come to light in South African rocks dating to the early dinosaur era, some 200 million years ago.

This “punk-sized” herbivore is one of a menagerie of bizarre, tiny, fanged plant-eaters called heterodontosaurs, or “different toothed reptiles,” which were among the first dinosaurs to spread across the planet. (more…)

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Sticky Paper Offers Cheap, Easy Solution for Paper-Based Diagnostics

A current focus in global health research is to make medical tests that are not just cheap, but virtually free. One such strategy is to start with paper – one of humanity’s oldest technologies – and build a device like a home-based pregnancy test that might work for malaria, diabetes or other diseases.

A University of Washington bioengineer recently developed a way to make regular paper stick to medically interesting molecules. The work produced a chemical trick to make paper-based diagnostics using plain paper, the kind found at office supply stores around the world. (more…)

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Bacteria May Signal Pancreatic Cancer Risk

Pancreatic cancer is highly lethal and difficult to detect early. In a new study, researchers report that people who had high levels of antibodies for an infectious oral bacterium turned out to have double the risk for developing the cancer. High antibody levels for harmless oral bacteria, meanwhile, predicted a reduced pancreatic cancer risk.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A new study finds significant associations between antibodies for multiple oral bacteria and the risk of pancreatic cancer, adding support for the emerging idea that the ostensibly distant medical conditions are related.

The study of blood samples from more than 800 European adults, published in the journal Gut, found that high antibody levels for one of the more infectious periodontal bacterium strains of Porphyromonas gingivalis were associated with a two-fold risk for pancreatic cancer. Meanwhile, study subjects with high levels of antibodies for some kinds of harmless “commensal” oral bacteria were associated with a 45-percent lower risk of pancreatic cancer. (more…)

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Global Science: U.S. is Still in The Game

ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Globalization is a benefit to U.S. scientific achievement, not a threat. That’s the conclusion of a new book that weighs the evidence from a number of recent surveys to answer its title question: “Is American Science in Decline?”

American science is in good health, according to the book’s authors, sociologists Yu Xie of the University of Michigan and Alexandra Achen Killewald of Harvard University.

Although there are areas of concern, they maintain that traditional American values will help the nation maintain its strength in science for the foreseeable future, and that globalization will promote efficiency in science through knowledge sharing. (more…)

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Crisis in Academic Publishing

“In almost every country in the world, research is supported by public funds. When researchers publish their results in academic journals, they do so for free. The results are also reviewed by peers for free. And journals often require researchers to give up their rights to these articles. Then, major publishers or learned societies sell their journals at exorbitant prices to libraries… which are also financed by public funds! It’s a vicious circle in which taxpayers pay for the production and access to researchers while publishers and societies make profits of 30-45% before taxes. It’s outrageous!” exclaimed Jean-Claude Guédon. This professor of comparative literature at the Université de Montréal is far from being the only one to protest. In recent months, more than 11,000 researchers worldwide have expressed their dissatisfaction through a petition calling for a boycott of Elsevier. This academic publishing giant earned profits of more than US $1.1 billion in 2011.

This movement, which many observers have called the “Academic Spring,” was born as a result of Elsevier’s support of the Research Work Act. This U.S. bill would ban open access to academic publications subsidized by the state. “It’s all anecdotal but at least has the benefit of reminding people about the importance of open access,” Guédon said. (more…)

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Study Finds Surprising Arctic Methane Emission Source

The fragile and rapidly changing Arctic region is home to large reservoirs of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. As Earth’s climate warms, the methane, frozen in reservoirs stored in Arctic tundra soils or marine sediments, is vulnerable to being released into the atmosphere, where it can add to global warming. Now a multi-institutional study by Eric Kort of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has uncovered a surprising and potentially important new source of Arctic methane: the ocean itself. (more…)

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