Travel Through Time

Researchers at the University at Buffalo and the University of Utah are beginning a clinical trial to test whether aspirin can improve a woman’s chances of becoming pregnant and of maintaining a pregnancy to term.

UB’s portion of the study is funded by a $2.8 million grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Development.

The trial is aimed at women who have miscarried a pregnancy in the past year.

“In women who have had their first miscarriage, the reasons for losing that pregnancy are in many instances unknown,” said Jean Wactawski-Wende, Ph.D., UB associate professor of social and preventive medicine and principal investigator of the UB clinical center.

The belief that the Clovis People were the first to populate North America some 11,500 years ago has been widely challenged in recent years, and a Texas A&M University anthropologist has found evidence he says could be the final nail in the coffin for the Clovis first model.

Michael Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M, is the lead author of the paper “Redefining the Age of Clovis: Implications for the Peopling of the Americas,” that appears in the Feb. 23 (Friday) issue of Science.

Some birds recognise the idea of ‘future’ and plan accordingly, researchers at the University of Cambridge have discovered. According to their findings, published today in the journal Nature , western scrub-jays will store food items they believe will be in short supply in the future.

Planning for the future is a complex skill that was previously believed to be unique to humans. Other animals were perceived to be incapable of dissociating themselves from the present and any current motivation. Sometimes animals may appear to recognise future needs, but they are only exhibiting behaviours that are either instinctual (e.g. nest building) or prompted by immediate needs like hunger (e.g. food hoarding).

Imagine peering down from aboard an airplane flying at 35,000 feet and spotting changes in the thickness of a paper back book on a picnic blanket in New York City’s Central Park. If you believe this impossible, NASA satellites are doing the equivalent of just that. From nearly 400 miles above the Earth, satellites have detected subtle rises and falls in the surface of fast-moving ice streams on the Antarctic ice sheet, a capability that also offers scientists an extraordinary view of interconnected waterways deep below that surface. 

Plant-based omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) may have a protective effect on bone health, according to a team of Penn State researchers who carried out the first controlled diet study of these fatty acids contained in such foods as flaxseed and walnuts.

Normally, most of the omega-3 fatty acids in the diet are plant-derived and come mainly from soybean and canola oil. Other sources are flaxseed, flaxseed oil, walnuts and walnut oil. Smaller amounts also come from marine sources, mainly fish, but also algae. Omega-3s are thought to have an anti-inflammatory effect and may play an important part in heart and bone health.