Third substantial solar flare in 2 days

Invasive seaweed shelters native crustacean On the tidal mudflats of Georgia and South Carolina, the red Japanese seaweed Gracilaria vermiculophylla is gaining a foothold where no native seaweeds live. Only debris and straggles of dead marsh grass used to break the expanse of mud at low tide. Crabs, shrimp, and small crustaceans mob the seaweed in abundance. What makes it so popular? Not its food value. On mudflats near Savannah, Ga., Wright and colleagues found that the tiny native crustacean Gammarus mucronatus (one of the 9,500 species of amphipod, which includes sand ...

New maps of Saturn's moon Titan reveal large patches of trace gases shining brightly near the north and south poles. These regions are curiously shifted off the poles, to the east or west, so that dawn is breaking over the southern region while dusk is falling over the northern one. The pair of patches was spotted by a NASA-led international team of researchers investigating the chemical make-up of Titan's atmosphere. "This is an unexpected and potentially groundbreaking discovery," said Martin Cordiner, an astrochemist working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center ...

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch, and Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University have identified small molecules that can represent a new class of anticancer drugs with a novel target for the treatment of lung cancer. These findings are detailed in Nature Communications. A PCT patent (WO 2013028543 A1) was jointly documented by these two Institutes for the invention. Survival outcomes remain poor for lung cancer patients in large part because of lung cancer's resistance to conventional therapies. Programmed cell death, ...

While space debris was the uncontrolled adversary in the award-winning space thriller film "Gravity," space debris, also known as "space junk," is an ongoing real-life concern for teams managing satellites orbiting Earth, including NOAA-NASA's Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership, or Suomi NPP, satellite. It is not unusual for satellites that have the capability of maneuvering to be repositioned to avoid debris or to maintain the proper orbit. On an otherwise quiet Sunday on September 28, the Suomi NPP mission team was monitoring a possible close approach of a debris ...

Many cancer patients use dietary supplements such as vitamins, minerals and herbs or other botanicals but often don't tell their doctor. This gap in communication can happen when patients believe that their doctors are indifferent or negative toward their use of these supplements. As a result, patients may find information about dietary supplements from unreliable sources, exposing themselves to unneeded risks. Since information on these dietary supplements is limited, researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch describe a practical patient-centered approach ...

AMES, Iowa – News of a school shooting or a homicide involving a teenage suspect always leads to the question of why? It is human nature to want an explanation or someone to blame, and policymakers try to pinpoint a cause in an effort to prevent it from happening again. But too often, the speculation or rush to judgment clouds reality, said Matt DeLisi, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at Iowa State University. "Anytime you have violence, such as a school shooting, people gravitate to single-item explanations that cite mental illness, guns, bullying ...

CHICAGO --- A nano-sized discovery by Northwestern Medicine® scientists helps explain how bipolar disorder affects the brain and could one day lead to new drug therapies to treat the mental illness. Scientists used a new super-resolution imaging method -- the same method recognized with the 2014 Nobel Prize in chemistry -- to peer deep into brain tissue from mice with bipolar-like behaviors. In the synapses (where communication between brain cells occurs), they discovered tiny "nanodomain" structures with concentrated levels of ANK3 -- the gene most strongly associated ...

VIDEO: This rainfall analysis showed that Gonzalo generated several areas over the Atlantic Ocean where rainfall totals topped 12 inches (red). Fay's maximum rainfall appeared between 4 and 8 inches (green).... Click here for more information. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite can estimate rainfall rates from its orbit in space and that data is used to create a rainfall analysis and calculate total rainfall for weather events in the tropics. NASA used ...

Tropical Storm Ana was being battered by wind shear when NASA's Terra satellite passed overhead and saw the bulk of showers and thunderstorms pushed north and east of the center. NASA's Terra satellite flew over Tropical Storm Ana as it was moving past Hawaii on Oct. 21 at 21:30 UTC (5:30 p.m. EDT) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument took a visible picture of the storm. The MODIS image showed that the strong southwesterly wind shear that was affecting the storm on Oct. 20 continued through Oct. 21 as the bulk of clouds and showers ...

WORCESTER, MA –Using an innovative exome sequencing strategy, a team of international scientists led by John Landers, PhD, at the University of Massachusetts Medical School has shown that TUBA4A, the gene encoding the Tubulin Alpha 4A protein, is associated with familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a fatal neurological disorder also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. Details of the study were published today in Neuron. Exome sequencing, in contrast to whole genome sequencing, relies on sequencing only the protein-coding genes in a genome and has been an effective ...