This week from AGU: Natural arches, Italian earthquake, Canadian rivers & research papers
2015-08-12
(Press-News.org) GeoSpace
Natural arches hum their health and scientists are listening
For the first time, scientists have found a way to detect if the breathtaking natural arches of Utah's Canyonlands and Arches national parks are suffering from internal damage that could lead to their collapse, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters.
16th century Italian earthquake changed river's course
In 1570, a 5.8-magnitude earthquake struck the northern Italian city of Ferrara, causing dozens of deaths, major damage to the city and thousands to flee. A new study in Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth finds that the 16th century earthquake and subsequent aftershocks were the last step in a tectonic process that occurred over thousands of years and changed the course of the Po River.
Eos.org
Small rivers could have big impact on Arctic Ocean
The Mackenzie River carries the bulk of freshwater flow from North America's tundra to the North Atlantic. But what about the effects of smaller rivers from Canada's Arctic islands?
New research papers
Differences in size spectra of electrified storms over land and ocean, Geophysical Research Letters
Cross-scale impact of climate temporal variability on ecosystem water and carbon fluxes, Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences
Toward an object-oriented assessment of high-resolution forecasts of long-lived convective precipitation in the central U.S, Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems
Evaluation of the impact of AIRS profiles on prediction of Indian Summer Monsoon using WRF Variational data assimilation system, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres
INFORMATION:
Find research spotlights from AGU journals and sign up for weekly E-Alerts, including research spotlights, on eos.org. Register for access to AGU journal papers in the AGU newsroom.
The American Geophysical Union is dedicated to advancing the Earth and space sciences for the benefit of humanity through its scholarly publications, conferences, and outreach programs. AGU is a not-for-profit, professional, scientific organization representing more than 60,000 members in 139 countries. Join our conversation on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media channels.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2015-08-12
Fast Facts:
Study reveals pediatric pulmonary hypertension hospitalizations on the rise, resulting in skyrocketing costs.
Findings uncover need to initiate a national registry to track individual patients over time and to provide a foundation for clinical trials to test new and better treatments.
Study finds pulmonary hypertension hospitalizations now higher in children without congenital heart disease.
A review of 15 years' worth of data in a national pediatric medical database has documented a substantial increase in the rate of hospitalizations for children ...
2015-08-12
KU Leuven biologists have discovered a molecular on-off switch that controls how a mouse brain responds to vision loss. When the switch is on, the loss of sight in one eye will be compensated by the other eye, but also by tactile input from the whiskers. When the switch is off, only the other eye will take over. These findings may help improve patient susceptibility to sensory prosthetics such as cochlear implants or bionic eyes.
Our brain adjusts to changes of all kind. This brain plasticity is useful for neural development and learning, but also comes into play when ...
2015-08-12
Online social networking generates vast quantities of data that might be useful to the service providers, advertising agencies, and even the users themselves. Writing in the International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems this month, researchers in India describe an approach to establishing new connections in a network using what they refer to as a "firefly swarm approach"
Ebin Deni Raj and Dhinesh Babu of the School of Information Technology and Engineering, VIT University, in Tamil Nadu, explain that the emergence of social computing, especially ...
2015-08-12
Scientists, for the first time, have identified a mechanism in the muscle cells of the uterus that could point to how contractions in childbirth grow stronger.
It is understood that the hormone oxytocin plays a significant role in stimulating contractions during labour, which helps to move a baby down the birth canal. It is not known, however, how these contractions increase and sustain their strength during hours of labour.
A team at Liverpool investigated how uterine contractions grow stronger when the human body's 'biological rules' dictates that contractions ...
2015-08-12
SEATTLE, WA, AUGUST 12, 2015 - If a defensive coordinator of a National Football League (NFL) team could predict with high accuracy whether their team's opponent will call a pass or run play during a game, he would become a rock star in the league and soon be a head coach candidate.
William Burton, an industrial engineering student who is minoring in statistics at North Carolina State University (NCSU), and collaborator Michael Dickey, a statistics major who graduated from NCSU in May, have built a statistical model that predicts the play-calling tendency of NFL teams ...
2015-08-12
SEATTLE, WA, AUGUST 12, 2015 - The growing popularity and use of social media around the world is presenting new opportunities for statisticians to glean insightful information from the infinite stream of posts, tweets and other online communications that will help improve public safety.
Two such examples--one that enhances systems to track foodborne illness outbreaks and another designed to improve disaster-response activities--were presented this week at the 2015 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM 2015) in Seattle.
Tracking Foodborne Illness Outbreaks:
In a presentation ...
2015-08-12
SEATTLE, WA, AUGUST 12, 2015 - Panelists talked about various aspects of value-added models, commonly referred to as VAMs, while the discussant posed a new question about the use of evaluation models during a panel discussion on the hot-button topic today at the 2015 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM 2015) in Seattle.
The panel discussion, titled "Value-Added Models: A Primer and Discussion," featured four experts in the areas of statistics, education research and VAMs. They are:
Jennifer E. Broatch, assistant professor of statistics at Arizona State University
Jennifer ...
2015-08-12
New UBC research into brain cancer suggests treatments should target the cells around a tumor to stop it from spreading.
UBC research team Christian Naus, Wun Chey Sin and John Bechberger study glioma, the most aggressive form of adult brain cancer. Glioma has a low five-year survival rate of 30 per cent because it is difficult to completely remove cancer cells without compromising brain functions and chemotherapy and radiotherapy do not prevent the regrowth of remaining cancer cells.
With this new research, the team reveals an alternative route to rein in the glioma ...
2015-08-12
Researchers at New Zealand's University of Otago have discovered why heart disease is the number-one killer of people with diabetes, a breakthrough finding opening the way for new treatments to combat the disease in diabetic patients by targeting a key protein called Beclin-1.
Diabetes affects more than 365 million people worldwide with rates expected to double by 2030. Recent studies show that at least 60% of people with the disease die because of cardiovascular complications.
Why diabetes takes such a toll on heart health has long remained a mystery. Now, in a new ...
2015-08-12
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved the first new drug to fight tuberculosis (TB) in more than 40 years, but treatment still takes six months, 200 pills and leaves 40 percent of patients uncured. Thus, new targets are needed. Today in ACS Central Science, researchers report they have identified one such target -- a gene that allows the disease to camp out in human immune cells, and is thus essential for the organism's proliferation.
TB kills about 1.3 million people around the world every year. The microorganism that causes the disease, Mycobacterium ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] This week from AGU: Natural arches, Italian earthquake, Canadian rivers & research papers
