Producing clean water in an emergency

Cold Spring Harbor, NY -- A team of neuroscientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and UC San Diego (UCSD) has collected evidence suggesting that a previously overlooked portion of the brain could be a prime locus of human depression. In two rat models of human depression, the scientists have demonstrated that neurons in a tiny area in the central brain called the lateral habenula (LHb) are hyperactive. Specifically, as the team reports today online ahead of print in the journal Nature, excitatory synaptic inputs onto ...

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered the first direct evidence for a superfluid, a bizarre, friction-free state of matter, at the core of a neutron star. Superfluids created in laboratories on Earth exhibit remarkable properties, such as the ability to climb upward and escape airtight containers. The finding has important implications for understanding nuclear interactions in matter at the highest known densities. Neutron stars contain the densest known matter that is directly observable. One teaspoon of neutron star material weighs six billion tons. The pressure ...

When people are feeling badly about themselves, they're more likely to show bias against people who are different. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, examines how that works. "This is one of the oldest accounts of why people stereotype and have prejudice: It makes us feel better about ourselves," says Jeffrey Sherman of the University of California, Davis, who wrote the study with Thomas Allen. "When we feel bad about ourselves, we can denigrate other people, and that makes us feel better about ourselves." Sherman ...

HOUSTON -- (Feb. 23, 2011) -- A lab at Rice University has stepped forward with an efficient method to disperse nanotubes in a way that preserves their unique properties -- and adds more. The new technique allows inorganic metal complexes with different functionalities to remain in close contact with single-walled carbon nanotubes while keeping them separated in a solution. That separation is critical to manufacturers who want to spin fiber from nanotubes, or mix them into composite materials for strength or to take advantage of their electrical properties. For starters, ...

An article by Stevens Institute of Technology researchers featured as the cover page of Applied Physics Letters Volume 98, Issue 7 represents a step forward in techniques for the arrangement of nanowires. Professors Dr. Chang-Hwan Choi and Dr. Eui-Hyeok (EH) Yang, and graduate students Wei Xu, Rajesh Leeladhar, and Yao-Tsan Tsai, focuses on nanowires, structures that are mere nanometers in diameter but have enormous potential in nanotechnology to create tiny circuits that would make possible nanoelectronics, nanophotonics, and nanobiotechnology. Such devices could forever ...

WOODS HOLE, Mass. -- An assessment of coastal change over the past 150 years has found 68 percent of beaches in the New England and Mid-Atlantic region are eroding, according to a U.S. Geological Survey report released today. Scientists studied more than 650 miles of the New England and Mid-Atlantic coasts and found the average rate of coastal change – taking into account beaches that are both eroding and prograding -- was negative 1.6 feet per year. Of those beaches eroding, the most extreme case exceeded 60 feet per year. The past 25 to 30 years saw a small reduction ...

In an effort to develop therapeutic remedies for multiple sclerosis, scientists debate two possible interventional approaches - but they're on opposite sides of the spectrum. Researchers at Wayne State University's School of Medicine, however, have reached a definitive conclusion as to which approach is correct, putting an end to a long-disputed issue. Harley Tse, Ph.D., associate professor of immunology and microbiology at WSU's School of Medicine and resident of West Bloomfield, Mich., whose study was published in the January 2011 edition of the Journal of Neuroimmunology, ...

In a recent issue of the scientific journal Zootaxa, researchers from Madagascar and the United States described a new species of forest-dwelling rail. The new bird was named Mentocrex beankaensis, with the genus Mentocrex being endemic to Madagascar and the new species beankaensis being coined after the type locality, the Beanka Forest in western central Madagascar. This species was distinguished from another in the same genus, known from the eastern portion of the island, based on aspects of size, plumage, and DNA. The project resulting in this description was the ...

A team involving University of Tennessee, Knoxville, researchers has conducted the first-ever genetic sequencing of a harmful algal bloom (HAB) species, cracking the genome of the micro-organism responsible for the Eastern Seaboard's notorious brown tides. Brown tides decimated the scallop industries of New York and New Jersey in the 1980s and 1990s and continue to plague the waters off North America and South Africa. The tides are not poisonous to humans, but the chronic blooms are toxic to marine life and block sunlight from reaching undersea vegetation, reducing the ...

A group of researchers have studied the history of drought in the Pacific Northwest during the last 6,000 years, a time that spans the mid-Holocene geological epoch to the present. The goal of the research was to improve the understanding of drought history because the instrumental record of drought only goes back a few hundred years and at relatively few locations. Their work extended the drought history of the Pacific Northwest back much longer than the tree ring record, which provides information in the region over the past 1,500 years. The team's research also indicates ...