Likely in Biological News

Changing climate likely to make 'super weed' even more powerful

Researchers at the University of Delaware have discovered a new reason why the tall, tasseled reed Phragmites australis is one of the most invasive plants in the United States. The UD research team found that Phragmites delivers a one-two chemical knock-out punch to snuff out its victims, a...

Study finds homicidal poisoning rising, more likely in infants and elderly

Athens, Ga. Homicidal poisonings are rare but on the riseand infants are the most common victimsaccording to a new University of Georgia study that aims to raise awareness of this often overlooked crime. Greene Shepherd, clinical professor in the UGA College of Pharmacy, and recent graduate B...

Consumers more likely to identify healthy food using traffic light nutrition labels

Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Consumers are five times more likely to identify healthy food when they see colour-coded traffic light nutrition labels than when labels present the information numerically by showing what percentage of the recommended daily nutrient intake each portion provides, new re...

Older men more likely than women to die after pneumonia

PITTSBURGH, April 29 Differing biological response to infection between men and women may explain higher death rates among older men who are hospitalized with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). The findings, published online in the Critical Care Medicine journal, may have important implication...

Wetlands likely source of methane from ancient warming event

An expansion of wetlands and not a large-scale melting of frozen methane deposits is the likely cause of a spike in atmospheric methane gas that took place some 11,600 years ago, according to an international research team led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. The finding ...

Cretaceous octopus with ink and suckers -- the world's least likely fossils?

New finds of 95 million year old fossils reveal much earlier origins of modern octopuses. These are among the rarest and unlikeliest of fossils. The chances of an octopus corpse surviving long enough to be fossilized are so small that prior to this discovery only a single fossil species was known,...

Mammals that hibernate or burrow less likely to go extinct

The best way to survive the ill-effects of climate change and pollution may be to simply sleep through it. According to a new study published in The American Naturalist , mammals that hibernate or that hide in burrows are less likely to turn up on an endangered species list. The study's autho...

Dog owners more likely to share germs with pets by not washing hands than by sleeping with dog

MANHATTAN, KAN. -- Dog owners who sleep with their pet or permit licks on the face are in good company. Surveys show that more than half of owners bond with their pets in these ways. Research done by a veterinarian at Kansas State University found that these dog owners are no more likely to sha...

Men with wives, significant others more likely to be screened for prostate cancer

PHILADELPHIA Although the link between early screening and prostate cancer survival is well established, men are less likely to go for early screening unless they have a wife or significant other living with them, according to a study published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention ,...

Marine debris will likely worsen in the 21st century

WASHINGTON -- Current measures to prevent and reduce marine debris are inadequate, and the problem will likely worsen, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Research Council. The United States and the international maritime community should adopt a goal of "zero discharge" ...

Premature children 4 times more likely to have behavioral disorders

Children born prematurely are four times more likely to have emotional problems or behavioural disorders, according to research led by the University of Warwick. A team led by the University's Department of Psychology and Warwick Medical School examined the behaviour of 200 six-year-old childre...

Gene is likely cause of stroke-inducing vascular malformations

UCSF scientists have discovered that a gene controlling whether blood vessels differentiate into arteries or veins during embryonic development is linked to a vascular disorder in the brain that causes stroke. The UCSF studies were done in mice, and the new findings are the first to provide inf...

Thawing permafrost likely to boost global warming

The thawing of permafrost in northern latitudes, which greatly increases microbial decomposition of carbon compounds in soil, will dominate other effects of warming in the region and could become a major force promoting the release of carbon dioxide and thus further warming, according to a new ass...

Extinction most likely for rare trees in the Amazon rainforest

Common tree species in the Amazon will survive even grim scenarios of deforestation and road-building, but rare trees could suffer extinction rates of up to 50 percent, predict Smithsonian scientists and colleagues in the Aug. 12 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science...

U of M research finds teens who have TV in their bedroom are less likely to engage in healthy habits

University of Minnesota School of Public Health researchers have found that older adolescents who have a bedroom television are less likely to engage in healthy activities such as exercising, eating fruits or vegetables, and enjoying family meals. They also consumed larger quantities of sweetened ...

Baby boys are more likely to die than baby girls

Male infants in developed nations are more likely to die than female infants, a fact that is partially responsible for mens shorter lifespans, reveals a new study by researchers from University of Pennsylvania and University of Southern California. The paper, which will be published online in t...

Unfavorable ocean conditions likely cause of low 2007 salmon returns along West Coast

NOAA scientists are reviewing unusual environmental conditions in the Pacific Ocean as the likely culprit for the dramatically low returns of Chinook and coho salmon to rivers and streams along the West Coast of the United States in 2007. Researchers from NOAAs Northwest and Southwest Fisheries...

New study shows low-fat diets more likely to reduce risk of heart disease than low-carb diets

Low-fat diets are more effective in preserving and promoting a healthy cardiovascular system than low-carbohydrate, Atkins-like diets, according to a new study by researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. The study, published in the February edition of the scientific journal...

Journal Sleep: Insomniacs are more likely to report a family history of the sleep disorder

WESTCHESTER, Ill. Individuals with either current or past insomnia are more likely to report a family history of insomnia than are those who have never had the sleep disorder, according to a study published in the December 1 issue of the journal SLEEP. The study, authored by Simon Beaulieu-Bon...

Girls who begin dieting twice as likely to start smoking

GAINESVILLE, Fla. Starting to diet seems to double the odds a teenage girl will begin smoking, a University of Florida study has found. UF researchers, who analyzed the dieting and smoking practices of 8,000 adolescents, did not find the same link in boys, who were also less likely than girls ...

You're likely to order more calories at a 'healthy' restaurant

An important new study from the Journal of Consumer Research explains the American obesity paradox: the parallel rise in obesity rates and the popularity of healthier food. In a series of four studies, the researchers reveal that we over-generalize healthy claims. In fact, consumers chose beverage...

Rising skin cancer rates are more likely to affect wealthy people, says 12-year review

Skin cancer levels have shown a significant increase in Northern Ireland since the early 1990s and are more likely to affect men, older people and those living in more affluent areas, according to a study just published in the June issue of British Journal of Dermatology. Researchers who looked ...

College students who pull 'all-nighters' and get no sleep more likely to have a lower GPA

A common practice among many college students involves "pulling all-nighters", or a single night of total sleep deprivation, a practice associated with lower grade-point averages compared to those who make time for sleep, according to a research abstract that will be presented Wednesday at SLEEP 2...

Better health twice as likely for nonsmokers who live and work with smoking restrictions

In the first study of its kind to evaluate how smoking restrictions in the workplace and at home affect health status, researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health found that nonsmokers who live under both a total household and total workplace smoking ban are over two and a half times more li...

Global 'sunscreen' has likely thinned, report NASA scientists

A new NASA study has found that an important counter-balance to the warming of our planet by greenhouse gases ?sunlight blocked by dust, pollution and other aerosol particles ?appears to have lost ground. The thinning of Earth’s "sunscreen" of aerosols since the early 1990s could have given an ex...

Procedure predicts embryos most likely to result in pregnancy

To address the high rate of multiple births resulting from in-vitro-fertilization (IVF), researchers at Yale School of Medicine and McGill University have developed a procedure that estimates the reproductive potential of individual embryos, possibly leading to a decrease in multiple-infant births ...

Older fathers more likely to have autistic children

Children of men age 40 and older have a significantly increased risk of having autism spectrum disorders compared with those whose fathers are younger than 30 years, according to an article in the September issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Autism is cha...

Minorities, uninsured less likely to receive care at high-volume hospitals

Compared to white patients, black, Asian and Hispanic patients and those who are uninsured are less likely to undergo complex surgery at high-volume hospitals, which have been associated with better outcomes, according to a study in the October 25 issue of JAMA. Efforts to improve the quality of...

Tamed 11,400 years ago, figs were likely first domesticated crop

Archaeobotanists have found evidence that the dawn of agriculture may have come with the domestication of fig trees in the Near East some 11,400 years ago, roughly a thousand years before such staples as wheat, barley, and legumes were domesticated in the region. The discovery dates domesticated fi...

Farm kids almost twice as likely to die from injury as children overall

A new retrospective study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal shows that young farm children, particularly boys, are about twice as likely as the total population of young Canadian children to die from an injury. Brison and colleagues collected and analyzed Canadian data on fatal agricult...

Coffee makes us more likely to say 'yes'

If you're looking for a way to make someone say 'yes', coffee can help. Moderate amounts of caffeine can have an impact on the extent to which we can be persuaded, finds research published today in the European Journal of Social Psychology. The Australian researchers from the University of Queen...

Parts of the Caribbean and Central America are likely to have less summer rain

Parts of the Caribbean and Central America are likely to experience a significant summer drying trend by the middle of this century, UCLA atmospheric scientists will report in the April 18 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Their research is based on an analysis of 1...

Next good dinosaur news likely to come from small packages

Dinosaurs seem bigger than life ?big bones, big mysteries. So it's a delicious irony that the next big answers about dinosaurs may come from small ?very small ?remains. "Molecules are fossils, too," said Michigan State University zoologist Peggy Ostrom. "We've shown that proteins survive in very...

Low oxygen likely made Great Dying worse, greatly delayed recovery

The biggest mass extinction in Earth history some 251 million years ago was preceded by elevated extinction rates before the main event and was followed by a delayed recovery that lasted for millions of years. New research by two University of Washington scientists suggests that a sharp decline in ...

Navigating in the ocean of molecules

...he fact that chemically similar compounds are very likely to display similar biological activity. "These ...molecules that do not arise in nature but are very likely to display similar activity to related natural mol...the branches. As a result, these branches are very likely to bear fruit: active substances are probably also...

Scientists find universal rules for food-web stability

...ave also identified additional stabilizing and destabilizing factors within ecosystems. Ecosystems with high densities of predator-prey links are less likely to be stable, while a strong dependence of predation on predator density destabilizes the system. On the other hand, a strong dependence of predation ...

AGU journal highlights -- Aug. 6, 2009

...e about 3 times less. The authors' estimate for methane is similar to basin-wide studies of the Pacific Ocean, suggesting that IPCC overestimates were likely generated by an overly coarse sampling method. Title: Methane and nitrous oxide emissions from the ocean: A reassessment using basin-wide observa...

Symposium to discuss geoengineering to fight climate change at the ESA Annual Meeting

...caused by carbon dioxide from the increasingly carbon-rich atmosphere dissolving into seawater. In fact, Miller says, ocean fertilization schemes will likely exacerbate this problem. "Any large-scale fertilization could cause risks to ocean ecosystems as great as those of global warming itself," he says....

More than half of Texas physicians do not always recommend HPV vaccine to girls

... HPV vaccine to girls, 68.4 percent said they were likely to recommend the vaccine to boys and 41.7 percent ... vs. non-academic practice were more than twice as likely to recommend the vaccine. Those who considered pro...portant source of information were almost twice as likely to recommend the vaccine than those who did not co...

Women often opt to surgically remove their breasts, ovaries to reduce cancer risk

...psy after undergoing risk evaluation were twice as likely to choose a risk-reducing mastectomy. Forty percen...ers. "We found that older women were much less likely to have a mastectomy, but were more likely to have their ovaries removed," said Evans. Mo...