(Press-News.org) From AGU's blogs: Q&A with journalist-turned-geologist Rex Buchanan
After decades as a science reporter, interim director of the Kansas Geological Survey (KGS) Rex Buchanan now finds himself at the epicenter of a media frenzy. Read parts one and two of a three-part series featuring an interview between Buchanan and University of California, Santa Cruz, science journalism student, Kerry Klein, in The Plainspoken Scientist.
From Eos.org: Changing of the Guard: Satellite Will Warn Earth of Solar Storms
This summer, Earth gets a new guardian--the Deep Space Climate Observatory--to help warn astronauts and operators of critical planetary infrastructure about the Sun's raging magnetic storms.
From AGU's journals: Underground Aquifers Spew More Pollution Into Oceans Than Rivers
When it comes to oceanic pollution, underground seepage from coastal aquifers trumps runoff from rivers, a new study says. Coastal aquifers are pockets of permeable earth - gravel, sand or silt -- that trap water. Much like rivers, these reservoirs absorb ground contaminants, such as fertilizer, subterranean carbon and metals. These chemicals can subsequently leak from the seabed into the ocean, through a process known as submarine groundwater discharge (SGD), but the scale of this seepage remains in question.
Kwon et al. created a mathematical model to estimate SGD of radium-228, a radioactive isotope that serves as readout for terrestrial leaching. Prior models made indirect estimates of SGD by subtracting the recorded levels of radium-228 deposited by rivers, dust blown from land, and diffusive fluxes from coastal sediments from the steady-state of radium-228 found in marine water. This earlier method is more accurate near shore, according to the authors, but becomes problematic for open seas, where accurate recordings at depth are sparse.
To circumvent this issue, the team posits a new model to get accurate recordings at depth based off tactics used to estimate the global mixing of ocean acidification. When combined with radium-228 data, this circulation model inferred SGD for the global ocean, excluding the polar seas due to insufficient available recordings of isotope.
They estimate that SGD from coastal aquifers contributes three to four times more terrestrial contaminants to the ocean than river water. Also, the bulk - 70 percent -- of SGD occurs in the Indo-Pacific Oceans, suggesting these regions are more susceptible to natural and man-made pollutants that are stored in coastal aquifers. The findings may also inform future research and policy decisions with regard to biogeochemical changes, pollution cycles and ecosystem dynamics.
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ATLANTA--Medication used to treat patients with type II diabetes activates sensors on brain cells that increase hunger, causing people taking this drug to gain more body fat, according to researchers at Georgia State University, Oregon Health and Science University, Georgia Regents University and Charlie Norwood Veterans Administration Medical Center.
The study, published on March 18 in The Journal of Neuroscience, describes a new way to affect hunger in the brain and helps to explain why people taking a class of drugs for type II diabetes gain more body fat.
Type II ...
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered a control switch for the unfolded protein response (UPR), a cellular stress relief mechanism drawing major scientific interest because of its role in cancer, diabetes, inflammatory disorders and several neural degenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), otherwise known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
The normal function of the UPR pathway is to protect cells from stress but it can also trigger their death if the ...
An international team of researchers led by the University of Oklahoma has discovered a strong association between the lifestyles of indigenous communities and their gut microbial ecologies (gut microbiome), a study that may have implications for the health of all people.
Under the direction of Cecil Lewis, co-director of the Laboratories of Molecular Anthropology and Microbiome Research in the OU College of Arts and Sciences, the team presents an in-depth analysis of the gut microbiome of the Matses, an Amazonian hunter-gatherer community, which is compared with that ...
Results from the first phase 1 trial of an Ebola vaccine based on the current (2014) strain of the virus are today published in The Lancet. Until now, all tested Ebola virus vaccines have been based on the virus strain from the Zaire outbreak in 1976. The results suggest that the new vaccine is safe, and provokes an immune response in recipients, although further long-term testing will be needed to establish whether it can protect against the Ebola virus.
A team of researchers, led by Professor Fengcai Zhu, from the Jiangsu provincial center for disease prevention and ...
People who have suffered serious head injuries show changes in brain structure resembling those seen in older people, according to a new study.
Researchers at Imperial College London analysed brain scans from over 1,500 healthy people to develop a computer program that could predict a person's age from their brain scan. Then they used the program to estimate the "brain age" of 113 more healthy people and 99 patients who had suffered traumatic brain injuries.
The brain injury patients were estimated to be around five years older on average than their real age.
Head ...
Boston, Mass. - March 25, 2015 - Nonprofit Global Oncology, Inc. (GO) today announced the launch of the Global Cancer Project Map, a first-of-its-kind online resource and virtual information exchange for connecting the global cancer community. Developed by GO in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Center for Global Health, the Map enables worldwide access to cancer projects and expertise to improve cancer practices and patient outcomes, especially in low-resource settings. Find the Global Cancer Project Map here: http://gcpm.globalonc.org.
The Map was ...
25.03.2015: Natural wetlands usually emit methane and sequester carbon dioxide. Anthropogenic interventions, in particular the conversion of wetlands for agriculture, result in a significant increase in CO2 emissions, which overcompensate potential decreases in methane emission. A large international research team now calculated that the conversion of arctic and boreal wetlands into agricultural land would result in an additional cumulative radiative forcing of about 0,1 MilliJoule (mJ) per square meter for the next 100 years. The conversion of temperate wetlands into agricultural ...
AURORA, Colo. (March 25, 2015) - Coordinating patient care between hospital clinicians and primary-care physicians is a significant challenge due to poor communication and gaps in information-sharing strategies, according to a study led by physicians at the School of Medicine of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
The inability to share timely information can increase the risk of missed test results and hospital readmissions, according to the study's corresponding author, Christine D. Jones, MD, assistant professor of medicine and director of the Hospital ...
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- By looking at the molecular aftermath of concussion in an unusual way, a team of researchers at Brown University and the Lifespan health system has developed a candidate panel of blood biomarkers that can accurately signal mild traumatic brain injury within hours using standard, widely available lab arrays. The results appear in a new study in the Journal of Neurotrauma.
Many researchers have reported recent progress in identifying possible blood biomarkers for concussion -- an advance sought because diagnosis is currently limited ...
Singapore, 18 March 2015- A multi-disciplinary team of doctors and scientists from Singapore has characterised the genetic changes associated with the spread of colorectal cancer to the liver. This finding is significant in helping to develop personalised diagnostic tests for patients with colorectal cancer based on the genetic changes present in each individual's colon tumour. The research team comprises representatives from National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS), Singapore General Hospital (SGH), Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School (Duke-NUS), A*STAR's Genome Institute ...
