Electronic Components

Walking an extra two minutes each hour may offset hazards of sitting too long -- ScienceDaily Numerous studies have shown that sitting for extended periods of time each day leads to increased risk for early death, as well as heart disease, diabetes and other health conditions. Considering that 80 percent of Americans fall short of completing the recommended amount of exercise, 2.5 hours of moderate activity each week, it seems unrealistic to expect that people will replace sitting with even more exercise. With this in mind, scientists at the University of Utah School of Medicine investigated the health benefits of a more achievable goal, trading sitting for lighter activities for short periods of time. They used observational data from National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to examine whether longer durations of low intensity activities (e.g. standing), and light intensity activities (e.g. casual walking, light gardening, cleaning) extends the life span of people who...

Gravity data show that Antarctic ice sheet is melting increasingly faster -- ScienceDaily The researchers "weighed" Antarctica's ice sheet using gravitational satellite data and found that from 2003 to 2014, the ice sheet lost 92 billion tons of ice per year, the researchers report in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. If stacked on the island of Manhattan, that amount of ice would be more than a mile high -- more than five times the height of the Empire State Building. The vast majority of that loss was from West Antarctica, which is the smaller of the continent's two main regions and abuts the Antarctic Peninsula that winds up toward South America. Since 2008, ice loss from West Antarctica's unstable glaciers doubled from an average annual loss of 121 billion tons of ice to twice that by 2014, the researchers found. The ice sheet on East Antarctica, the continent's much larger and overall more stable region, thickened during that same time, but...

How some beetles produce a scalding defensive spray -- ScienceDaily Researchers had been baffled by the half-inch beetles' ability to produce this noxious spray while avoiding any physical damage. But now that conundrum has been solved, thanks to research by a team at MIT, the University of Arizona, and Brookhaven National Laboratory. The findings are published this week in the journal Science by MIT graduate student Eric Arndt, professor of materials science and engineering Christine Ortiz, Wah-Keat Lee of Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Wendy Moore of the University of Arizona. "Their defensive mechanism is highly effective," Arndt says, making bombardier beetles "invulnerable to most vertebrates, and invertebrates" -- except for a few very specialized predators that have developed countermeasures against the noxious spray. The liquid these beetles eject is called benzoquinone, and is actually a fairly common defensive agent among insects, Arndt says. But...

New origin theory for cells that gave rise to vertebrates -- ScienceDaily Now Northwestern University scientists propose a new model for how neural crest cells, and thus vertebrates, arose more than 500 million years ago. The researchers report that, unlike other early embryonic cells that have their potential progressively restricted as an embryo develops, neural crest cells retain the molecular underpinnings that control pluripotency -- the ability to give rise to all the cell types that make up the body. "This study provides deep new insights into the evolutionary origins of humans and other vertebrates," said evolutionary molecular biologist Carole LaBonne, who led the research. "It also provides critical new information about the molecular circuitry of stem cells, including cancer stem cells." Regenerative medicine scientists now have an updated framework for future studies aiming to harness the power of stem cells to treat human diseases and congenital defects...

Engineering a better solar cell: Defects in popular perovskites pinpointed -- ScienceDaily These superefficient crystal structures have taken the scientific community by storm in the past few years because they can be processed very inexpensively and can be used in applications ranging from solar cells to light-emitting diodes (LEDs) found in phones and computer monitors. A new study published online April 30 in the journal Science by University of Washington and University of Oxford researchers demonstrates that perovskite materials, generally believed to be uniform in composition, actually contain flaws that can be engineered to improve solar devices even further. "Perovskites are the fastest-growing class of photovoltaic material over the past four years," said lead author Dane deQuilettes, a UW doctoral student working with David Ginger, professor of chemistry and associate director of the UW's Clean Energy Institute. "In that short amount of time, the ability o...

Pesticides alter bees' brains, making them unable to live and reproduce adequately -- ScienceDaily To make their discovery, Connolly and colleagues fed bees a sugar solution with very low neonicotinoid pesticide levels typically found in flowers (2.5 parts per billion) and tracked the toxins to the bee brain. They found that pesticide levels in the bees' brains were sufficient to cause the learning cells to run out of energy. Additionally, the brain cells were even vulnerable to this effect at just one tenth of the level present. When the ability of the bee's brain to learn is limited, the bee is unable to master key skills such as recognizing the presence of nectar and pollen from the smell emitted from flowers. In addition, scientists fed bumblebee colonies this same very low level of pesticide in a remote site in the Scottish Highlands where they were unlikely to be exposed to any other pesticides. They found that just a few of the exposed colonies performed well, coloni...

New tool can switch behavior -- such as voracious eating -- 'on' and 'off' -- ScienceDaily When this complex signaling system goes awry, the results can lead to a plethora of diseases, including schizophrenia, depression, Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, eating disorders, and epilepsy. Cell surface receptors also play roles in cancers, diabetes, digestive conditions, and other diseases. This new technique could be modified to study them, as well. This is the first technology to stem from the initial set of NIH BRAIN Initiative grants to create new cutting-edge research tools to improve our understanding of the brain. "This new chemogenetic tool will show us how brain circuits can be more effectively targeted to treat human disease, " said Bryan L. Roth, MD, PhD, the Michael Hooker Distinguished Professor of Protein Therapeutics and Translational Proteomics at the UNC School of Medicine. "The problem facing medical science is that although...

Light -- not pain-killing drugs -- used to activate brain's opioid receptors -- ScienceDaily In a test tube, the scientists melded the light-sensing protein rhodopsin to key parts of opioid receptors to activate receptor pathways using light. They also influenced the behavior of mice by injecting the receptors into the brain, using light instead of drugs to stimulate a reward response. Their findings are published online April 30 in the journal Neuron . The eventual hope is to develop ways to use light to relieve pain, a line of discovery that also could lead to better pain-killing drugs with fewer side effects. "It's conceivable that with much more research we could develop ways to use light to relieve pain without a patient needing to take a pain-killing drug with side effects," said first author Edward R. Siuda, a graduate student in the laboratory of Michael R. Bruchas, PhD, an assistant professor of anesthesiology and of neurobiology. But before that's possib...

Wild bearded capuchin monkeys really know how to crack a nut -- ScienceDaily The monkeys are known to use stone "hammers" to crack nuts. The new study shows that the monkeys are quite careful about the amount of force delivered to those nuts. They adjust the force applied with each strike based on the condition of the nutshell, making it less likely that they'll end up smashing the tasty kernel inside. "Wild bearded capuchin monkeys dynamically modulate their strikes based on the outcome of the preceding strike while using stone hammers to crack nuts," says Madhur Mangalam of the University of Georgia at Athens. "Until now, this level of dexterity was not suspected of any monkey." Mangalam's graduate advisor, Dorothy Fragaszy, and her colleagues have studied nut-cracking in wild bearded capuchin monkeys since 2005, when they established the EthoCebus research project. They were especially curious how the monkeys managed to crack such hard nuts. The...