Facial attraction -- choice of sexual partner shaped the human face
...esult, a simple ratio of measures could be used to calculate facial attractiveness in a biological and mathematical way. Dr Eleanor Weston, palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum said, The evolution of facial appearance is central to understanding what makes men and women attractive to each other. We ...Space-borne sensors help Africa tackle water shortage problems
...d loss of forest and agricultural areas as well as calculate the risk of erosion, change in water availability and percentage of surface water, which will allow for early flood warnings. The land cover change maps will help the government look at past trends in terms of deforestation, reclaimed land and new......gnized that one way to test the association was to calculate how energy was deposited by different kinds of radiation. A high-energy particle, for example, moves through the nucleus in a straight line and may strike DNA at any point along the way; the pattern of hits along the track should be essentially rando...Gold nanoparticles may pan out as tool for cancer diagnosis
...different markers. Two of the markers were used to calculate the invasiveness of the cancer cell, while one mar...lly among the different cancer types - was used to calculate the degree to which the other markers were expressed, or present. Irudayaraj said his gold nanorods ...Study sheds light on why humans walk on two legs
...c, kinematic and kinetic data that allowed them to calculate which method of locomotion used less energy and why. The team gathered the same information for four adult humans walking on a treadmill. The researchers found that human walking used about 75 percent less energy and burned 75 percent fewer calorie...Fat horses face health problems
...ents were also taken to allow the research team to calculate body weight and body mass index (BMI). These measurements include girth circumference, neck circumference, body length, and height. Each horse was checked for signs of laminitis and blood was drawn to assess glucose and insulin levels as well as o...Personalized approach to ovarian stimulation achieves high ART pregnancy rates
...when clinicians used the formula (or algorithm) to calculate the best starting dose for each patient, both the number of oocytes retrieved and pregnancy rates rose. Professor Franois Olivennes told the 23rd annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology today (Monday 2 July) that...Mathematics reveals genetic pattern of tumor growth
...tion rate serves as the control knob. Then, we can calculate mathematically how long it takes a tumor with given parameters to reach a certain size, Komarova said. We found that at early stages of tumor growth, instability is advantageous, and later on it becomes an impediment. This explains why many tumors ex...Study helps preserve Arctic whale, Eskimo subsistence hunt
...hese groups, Bickham said. Researchers typically calculate genetic variation by sampling geographically-separated populations of animals, which was not possible with the bowhead. Instead, the team developed a novel technique for studying migratory animals, which contrasts minute genetic differences via a ser...Migration alert -- How tumor cells home in on the lymphatic system
...oenvironment and developed computational models to calculate the gradients of the signaling molecule. The study provides the first evidence that tumor cells can both produce and use the same signaling molecule, and it highlights the significance of the biophysical environment in the vicinity of a tumor, par...Jaap Sinninghe Damst awarded the Vernadsky Medal for innovative use of biomarkers
...resent in the lake sediments at different times to calculate how much rain fell at that time. "This seems to be working pretty well and it's really quite interesting to see that at 14,000 years ago there was an increase in rainfall. In the younger Dryas period, conditions returned to mimicking the last glacial...From ink to optics, study of particle mixtures yields fundamental insights
... colloidal system. With the newfound ability to calculate accurate phase diagrams, researchers may be able t...milar simulations of small numbers of particles to calculate the behavior of entire systems will allow researchers to explore a wide variety of fundamental and a...Brain, size and gender surprises in latest fossil tying humans, apes and monkeys
...a computerized X-ray technique that can be used to calculate the approximate dimensions of the brain the cranium once encased. Based on previous fossils collected at the same dig site in a quarry outside Cairo, scientists had hypothesized that this early monkey already would have had a relatively large brain...New technique will produce a better chromosome map
...ges to analyze, computer algorithms can accurately calculate the number, shape and location of the chromosome bands. "Two researchers might see the same image differently," said graduate research assistant Mert Dikmen, who uses computer vision technologies under the supervision of Beckman Institute professor...Is climate change likely to increase disease in corals?
... the University of Miami. They used the dataset to calculate w eekly sea surface temperature anomalies (WSSTAs), instances in which temperature was higher by 1C or more from mean records for that week, for 48 reefs within the Great Barrier Reef. To evaluate the extent of white syndrome and coral cover, the res...Satellites shed light on global warming
... its pulses' journey down to under a nanosecond to calculate the distance to the planet below to a maximum accuracy of two centimetres. ESA has had radar altimeters in orbit since July 1991, when ERS-1 was launched, which was followed by ERS-2 in 1995 and Envisat in 2002 and will continue to launch radar altim...How much nitrogen is too much for corn?
...of the natural amount of nitrogen in soil, growers calculate their optimum nitrogen rates, the concentration of nitrogen that must be present in fertilizer in order to achieve expected crop yields. Under- and over-applying nitrogen fertilizer to corn crops often leads to adverse economic consequences for corn ...Biologists call for better choice of model organisms in 'evo-devo'
...make better use of the techniques that allow us to calculate how much an organisms genome has changed over time, when making assessments about how much an animal resembles its ancestor, because this information can be helpful in estimating how much an organisms phenotype has changed." Dr Wills added: "Establ...Phthalates now linked to fat, related health risks
...had fasting glucose and insulin levels required to calculate insulin resistance. The analysis found that, as expected, several phthalate metabolites showed a positive correlation with abdominal obesity. Indeed, men with the highest levels of phthalates in their urine had more belly fat and insulin resistance....... The two measurements of breast density needed to calculate that change may better predict a woman's risk of breast cancer than a single measurement. High breast density is a strong predictor of breast cancer risk, but researchers did not know whether changes in breast density over time would affect this r...