Rio Summit must address population growth
Age of man casts shadow over Earth SummitCrowded Earth: how many is too many?U.N. finally draws link between population bomb and climate changeRise of migrants is damaging planet: British think-tankWorld urgently needs renewable energyPARIS: A top scientific academy has called on June"s Rio Summit to tackle population growth and voracious consumption that are placing Earth"s resources under intolerable strain.
"The 21st century is a critical period for people and the planet," the Royal Society, the world"s oldest science academy, said in a report ahead of the June 20-22 UN gathering.
Demography, it said, can no longer be sidelined or treated as separate from the environment or the economy. The world now has a very clear choice," said leading British scientist Sir John Sulston, who led the report.
Patterns of resource use unbalanced
"We can choose to rebalance the use of resources to a more egalitarian pattern of consumption, to reframe our economic values to truly reflect what our consumption means for our planet and to help...
‘Heat training’ reduces coral bleaching
Colourful corals to light up cancer fightTemperature rules Australian coral growthCorals hybridising to surviveJapan's biggest coral reef artificially restoredSunscreen may be killing coralsADELAIDE: Corals in the Pacific Ocean can survive double the heat stress if they"ve been overheated before, which may help them resist future warming.
This could help scientists to identify and protect coral reefs most likely to survive climate change, according to new research published recently in the journal PLoS ONE.
"We think that thermal history matters for corals, and that other reefs around the world, including those on the Great Barrier Reef, which have historically experienced more heat stress will be more likely to resist bleaching during future warm water events," said study author Jessica Carilli from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) in Sydney.
The big bleach
Corals form a partnership with single-celled algae that can photosynthesise and serve the coral as an energy source. When the...
Eating meat contributed to human evolution
Theropod dinosaurs - not so carnivorous? Chimps swap meat for sexMother's diet can determine sex of foetusDon't want twins? Don't drink milkSoy and fish lower cancer riskABERYSTWYTH: Adopting a meat eating diet may have contributed to the evolutionary success of our ancestors by allowing them to have more children.
Our large brain, long life span and high fertility are key elements that made humans an evolutionary success. In a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE last week, researchers have now shown that by becoming carnivores, our ancestors were able to give birth to a greater number of offspring.
"Eating meat enabled the breast-feeding periods to be reduced and thereby the time between births to be shortened," said lead author Elia Psouni from Lund University in Sweden. "This must have had a crucial impact on human evolution."
Impact of weaning time
Past research has tried to explain the relatively short breast-feeding period of humans based on social and behavioral theories of parenting and...
How optical illusions trick the brain
Schizophrenics less fooled by visual illusions'Eye flicker' explains optical illusionBowerbirds impress with a house of illusionsOut-of-body experiences created in the labStudy creates an illusion of body-swappingSYDNEY: New research throws light on the tricks the brain plays on its owner as it struggles to make sense of the visual and other sensory signals it constantly receives.
People rely on their eyes for most things they do - yet the information provided by our visual sensing system is often distorted, unreliable and subject to illusion.
"We tend to regard what we see as "the real world"," said Isabelle Mareschal, a researcher with the Australian Centre of Excellence in Vision Science and lead author of the paper published yesterday in the American journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. "In fact a lot of it is distortion, and it is occurring in the early processing of the brain, before consciousness takes over."
The tilt illusions
A common example of this - often exploited by artists and...
For proteins, a small step from good to bad
Gene for Alzheimer's discoveredNew proteins might be supernaturalFirst proven diagnostic test for Alzheimer'sSynchotron exposes cancer proteins' bond Silk moth's antenna inspires better nanoporesSYDNEY: A snapshot of an elusive protein intermediate has given researchers a glimpse of how good proteins can turn bad. This may provide important clues towards the causes of diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
By studying the molecular configuration of a protein’s rare transitional state, a University of Toronto team showed how the precursors of normal proteins can also form toxic amyloid plaques, associated with neurodegenerative diseases.
“Intermediates serve as branching points between productive protein folding on the one hand and misfolding and aggregation into amyloid fibrils on the other hand and constitute a key factor in the early stages of amyloid diseases,” said Philipp Neudecker, a post-doctoral fellow and lead author of the study published this week in the journal Science.
How...