ScienceDaily: Top Science News

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• Eating seven or more portions of fruit and vegetables a day reduces your risk of death by 42 percent
• Arctic melt season lengthening, ocean rapidly warming
• Ancient whodunit may be solved: Methane-producing microbes did it!
• Self-healing engineered muscle grown in the laboratory
• Experimental cancer drug reverses schizophrenia in adolescent mice
• Computer maps 21 distinct emotional expressions — even 'happily disgusted'
• Warming climate may spread drying to a third of earth: Heat, not just rainfall, plays into new projections
• Temperature fluctuations: Atlantic Ocean dances with the sun and volcanoes
• Breakthrough in creating invisibility cloaks, stealth technology
• Changing climate creates pervasive risks, but opportunities exist for effective responses: IPCC report
• Using tobacco to thwart infectious disease?

Eating seven or more portions of fruit and vegetables a day reduces your risk of death by 42 percent Posted: 31 Mar 2014 04:40 PM PDT Eating seven or more portions of fruit and vegetables a day reduces your risk of death at any point in time by 42 percent compared to eating less than one portion, reports a new study. This is the first study to link fruit and vegetable consumption with all-cause, cancer and heart disease deaths in a nationally-representative population, the first to quantify health benefits per-portion, and the first to identify the types of fruit and vegetable with the most benefit.

Arctic melt season lengthening, ocean rapidly warming Posted: 31 Mar 2014 03:06 PM PDT The length of the melt season for Arctic sea ice is growing by several days each decade, and an earlier start to the melt season is allowing the Arctic Ocean to absorb enough additional solar radiation in some places to melt as much as four feet of the Arctic ice cap's thickness, according to a new study.

Ancient whodunit may be solved: Methane-producing microbes did it! Posted: 31 Mar 2014 12:36 PM PDT Methane-producing microbes may be responsible for the largest mass extinction in Earth's history. Fossil remains show that sometime around 252 million years ago, about 90 percent of all species on Earth were suddenly wiped out -- by far the largest of this planet's five known mass extinctions. It turns out that Methanosarcina had acquired a particularly fast means of making methane, and the team's detailed mapping of the organism's history now shows that this transfer happened at about the time of the end-Permian extinction.

Self-healing engineered muscle grown in the laboratory Posted: 31 Mar 2014 12:36 PM PDT Living skeletal muscle that contracts powerfully and rapidly, integrates quickly into mice, and for the first time, demonstrates the ability to heal itself both inside the laboratory and inside an animal has been grown in the lab by biomedical engineers. "The muscle we have made represents an important advance for the field," an author said. "It's the first time engineered muscle has been created that contracts as strongly as native neonatal skeletal muscle."

Experimental cancer drug reverses schizophrenia in adolescent mice Posted: 31 Mar 2014 12:35 PM PDT An experimental anticancer compound appears to have reversed behaviors associated with schizophrenia and restored some lost brain cell function in adolescent mice with a rodent version of the devastating mental illness. The drug is one of a class of compounds known as PAK inhibitors, which have been shown in animal experiments to confer some protection from brain damage due to Fragile X syndrome, an inherited disease in humans marked by mental retardation.

Computer maps 21 distinct emotional expressions — even 'happily disgusted' Posted: 31 Mar 2014 12:35 PM PDT Researchers have found a way for computers to recognize 21 distinct facial expressions — even expressions for complex or seemingly contradictory emotions such as "happily disgusted" or "sadly angry." The study more than triples the number of documented facial expressions that researchers can now use for cognitive analysis.

Warming climate may spread drying to a third of earth: Heat, not just rainfall, plays into new projections Posted: 31 Mar 2014 11:41 AM PDT A new study estimates that 12 percent of land will be subject to drought by 2100 through rainfall changes alone; but the drying will spread to 30 percent of land if higher evaporation rates are considered. An increase in evaporative drying means that even regions expected to get more rain, including important wheat, corn and rice belts in the western United States and southeastern China, will be at risk of drought.

Temperature fluctuations: Atlantic Ocean dances with the sun and volcanoes Posted: 31 Mar 2014 08:45 AM PDT Natural fluctuations in the ocean temperature in the North Atlantic have a significant impact on the climate in the northern hemisphere. These fluctuations are the result of a complex dance between the forces of nature, but researchers can now show that solar activity and the impact of volcanic eruptions have led this dance during the last two centuries.

Breakthrough in creating invisibility cloaks, stealth technology Posted: 31 Mar 2014 08:44 AM PDT Scientists have managed to create artificial nanostructures called metamaterials that can 'bend light.' But the challenge has been making enough of the material to turn invisibility cloaks into a practical reality. New research, however, may have just cracked that barrier.

Changing climate creates pervasive risks, but opportunities exist for effective responses: IPCC report Posted: 31 Mar 2014 07:06 AM PDT The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a report that says the effects of climate change are already occurring on all continents and across the oceans. The world, in many cases, is ill-prepared for risks from a changing climate. The report also concludes that there are opportunities to respond to such risks, though the risks will be difficult to manage with high levels of warming.

Using tobacco to thwart infectious disease? Posted: 27 Mar 2014 07:23 PM PDT A new generation of potentially safer and more cost-effective therapeutics against West Nile virus, and other pathogens has been developed by an international research group. The therapeutics, known as monoclonal antibodies and their derivatives, were shown to neutralize and protect mice against a lethal dose challenge of West Nile virus -- even as late as four days after the initial infection.

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