Mounting evidence suggests that the concentration of Aß rises in people’s cerebrospinal fluid if they don’t sleep enough. However, scientists are unsure why that is. Do people make more of the peptide, or do they degrade less of it? A pilot study led by Brendan Lucey and Randall Bateman at the Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, now implies that enhanced production is to blame. Read more.
A mass extinction event that wiped out the majority of the world’s creatures was made worse because the Earth’s ocean had almost no oxygen for thousands of years afterward. Scientists report in the journal Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems that they studied rock formations to determine how much dissolved oxygen was in Earth’s prehistoric ocean about 200 million years ago. Their results suggest that life would have taken a long time to rebound after a mass extinction event commonly known as the end-Triassic extinction — which happened at the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods — because of the low oxygen level. Read more.
A recent study shows that increased carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere is leading to higher rates of photosynthesis in vegetation. “There’s more photosynthesis going on than in the past and there’s more biomass,” the study’s lead author, Ralph Keeling, told the Washington Post. Keeling is a professor of geochemistry at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and program director of the Scripps CO2 Program.
“The accumulation of biomass is important, because it’s carbon that otherwise would have been in the air that got taken out and is slowing down the growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide,” Keeling says. Read more.
You can split sunlight into a vibrant array of colors by sending it through a prism, as fans of physics (or Pink Floyd) know well, or by bouncing it off a mirror through a refractive medium like water. In an exciting but less colorful way a team of researchers from the University of Chicago recently demonstrated that you can split neon gas into the specific varieties or isotopes of neon that compose the gas in an analogous way. This could be a more cost- and energy-efficient method for enriching isotopes a key component in many medical technologies energy systems and other applications. Read more.
When it comes to feeding time sea slugs are the pirates of the underwater world - attacking prey that have just eaten, in order to plunder their target's meal, new research has found. University of Portsmouth scientists are the first to have observed this cunning and brutal feeding strategy in the natural world and have named the behaviour “kleptopredation.” Read more.