Irvine, Calif., Dec. 15, 2014 - Dangerously high levels of air pollutants are being released in Mecca during the hajj, the annual holy pilgrimage in which millions of Muslims on foot and in vehicles converge on the Saudi Arabian city, according to findings reported today at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. "Hajj is like nothing else on the planet. You have 3 to 4 million people - a whole good-sized city - coming into an already existing city," said Isobel Simpson, a UC Irvine research chemist in the Nobel Prize-winning Rowland-Blake atmospheric ...

Early discoveries by NASA's newest Mars orbiter are starting to reveal key features about the loss of the planet's atmosphere to space over time. The findings are among the first returns from NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, which entered its science phase on Nov. 16. The observations reveal a new process by which the solar wind can penetrate deep into a planetary atmosphere. They include the first comprehensive measurements of the composition of Mars' upper atmosphere and electrically charged ionosphere. The results also offer an unprecedented ...

A breast cancer specialist and clinical researcher at Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island presented research yesterday at the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium showing that adding either the chemotherapy drug carboplatin or the blood vessel-targeting drug bevacizumab to the standard treatment of chemotherapy before surgery helped women who have the basal-like subtype of triple-negative breast cancer. "We found that adding either carboplatin or bevacizumab to standard preoperative chemotherapy increased pathologic complete response rates for women with basal-like ...

Scientists from the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will present a variety of research at the 2014 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, which runs Monday, Dec. 15 through Friday, Dec. 19 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. Noteworthy PNNL research presentations include the following topics: Even with global warming cold air outbreaks will remain Just because the climate is warming doesn't mean Cold Air Outbreaks are going away, especially in Southwestern Canada and Northwestern United States. Overall, global climate models ...

Leading conservation scientists from around the world have called for a substantial role for nuclear power in future energy-generating scenarios in order to mitigate climate change and protect biodiversity. In an open letter to environmentalists with more than 60 signatories, the scientists ask the environmental community to "weigh up the pros and cons of different energy sources using objective evidence and pragmatic trade-offs, rather than simply relying on idealistic perceptions of what is 'green' ". Organized by ecologists Professor Barry Brook and Professor Corey ...

SALT LAKE CITY, Dec. 15, 2014 - The rate at which carbon emissions warmed Earth's climate almost 56 million years ago resembles modern, human-caused global warming much more than previously believed, but involved two pulses of carbon to the atmosphere, University of Utah researchers and their colleagues found. The findings mean the so-called Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM, can provide clues to the future of modern climate change. The good news: Earth and most species survived. The bad news: It took millennia to recover from the episode, when temperatures rose ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Using a computer algorithm that can sift through mounds of genetic data, researchers from Brown University have identified several networks of genes that, when hit by a mutation, could play a role in the development of multiple types of cancer. The algorithm, called Hotnet2, was used to analyze genetic data from 12 different types of cancer assembled as part of the pan-cancer project of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). The research looked at somatic mutations -- those that occur in cells during one's lifetime -- and not genetic variants ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY - The next time you are in a crowded room, or a meeting, or even at the park with your kids, take a look around. How many people are on their phone? Distractions invade every aspect of our lives. Status updates, text messages, email notifications all threaten to steal our attention away from the moment. While we fight the urge to check the phone, our brains are making constant judgment calls about where to focus attention. The brain must continually filter important information from irrelevant interference. Scientists have hypothesized for decades ...

AMHERST, Mass. - Traditional genomic, proteomic and other screening methods currently used to characterize drug mechanisms are time-consuming and require special equipment, but now researchers led by chemist Vincent Rotello at the University of Massachusetts Amherst offer a multi-channel sensor method using gold nanoparticles that can accurately profile various anti-cancer drugs and their mechanisms in minutes. As Rotello and his doctoral graduate student Le Ngoc, one of the lead authors, explain, to discover a new drug for any disease, researchers must screen billions ...

Researchers have released one of the most comprehensive assessments of the timing and amount of greenhouse gas emissions that each of the world's major economies could produce under different scenarios, i.e. without new climate policies, for the currently discussed pledges, and under a scenario that limits future temperature rise to 2°C. "The pledges made so far lead to earlier emission peaking in many countries, with 1-1.5 °C less total warming than without these policies, but not sufficient to meet the 2oC target. Under the proposed commitments, cumulative CO2 ...

Advocates of biotech crops and those who favor traditional farming practices such as crop diversity often seem worlds apart, but a new study shows that these two approaches can be compatible. An international team led by Chinese scientists and Bruce Tabashnik at the University of Arizona's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences discovered that the diverse patchwork of crops in northern China slowed adaptation to genetically engineered cotton by a wide-ranging insect pest. The results are published in the advance online edition of Nature Biotechnology. Genetically engineered ...

Predictions of Greenland ice loss and its impact on rising sea levels may have been greatly underestimated, according to scientists at the University of Leeds. The finding follows a new study, which is published today in Nature Climate Change, in which the future distribution of lakes that form on the ice sheet surface from melted snow and ice - called supraglacial lakes - have been simulated for the first time. Previously, the impact of supraglacial lakes on Greenland ice loss had been assumed to be small, but the new research has shown that they will migrate farther ...

Sparks literally fly when a sperm and an egg hit it off. The fertilized mammalian egg releases from its surface billions of zinc atoms in "zinc sparks," one wave after another, a Northwestern University-led interdisciplinary research team has found. Using cutting-edge technology they developed, the researchers are the first to capture images of these molecular fireworks and pinpoint the origin of the zinc sparks: tiny zinc-rich packages just below the egg's surface. Zinc fluctuations play a central role in regulating the biochemical processes that ensure a healthy ...

When someone you know is wearing an unfamiliar hat, you might not recognize them. Georgia Institute of Technology researchers are using just such a disguise to sneak biomaterials containing peptide signaling molecules into living animals. When the disguised peptides are needed to launch biological processes, the researchers shine ultraviolet light onto the molecules through the skin, causing the "hat" structures to come off. That allows cells and other molecules to recognize and interact with the peptides on the surface of the material. This light-activated triggering ...

BOSTON - December 15, 2014 - In a study published today by Nature, researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center used a microscopic worm (C. elegans) to identify a new path that could lead to drugs to slow aging and the chronic diseases that often accompany it--and might even lead to better cosmetics. The Joslin team looked at how treatments known to boost longevity in the one-millimeter long C. elegans (including calorie restriction and treatment with the drug rapamycin) affected the expression of genes that produce collagen and other proteins that make up the extra-cellular ...

New research into an Icelandic eruption has shed light on how the Earth's crust forms, according to a paper published today in Nature. When the Bárðarbunga volcano, which is buried beneath Iceland's Vatnajökull ice cap, reawakened in August 2014, scientists had a rare opportunity to monitor how the magma flowed through cracks in the rock away from the volcano. The molten rock forms vertical sheet-like features known as dykes, which force the surrounding rock apart. Study co-author Professor Andy Hooper from the Centre for Observation and Modelling ...

The carbon in the atmosphere, ocean, surface life, and other shallow, near surface reservoirs accounts for only about 10% of Earth's carbon. Where is the other 90%? What is it doing? Does it matter? The Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), an ambitious 10-year (2009-2019) program of exploration and experimentation, pursues the mysterious 90% while building a new scientific field with a network of scientists from more than 40 countries. Recent results from DCO researchers are filling in the global carbon puzzle with findings that extend our understanding of the origins and limits ...

Researchers at Yale and Boston University and their Russian collaborators have found that occasional heroin use by HIV-positive patients may be particularly harmful to the immune system and worsens HIV disease, compared to persistent or no heroin use. The findings are published in the journal AIDS and Behavior. "We expected that HIV-positive patients who abused heroin on an ongoing basis would have the greatest decreases in their CD4 count, but this preliminary study showed that those who abused heroin intermittently had lower CD4 cell counts, indicating a weakened ...

The introduction of neutral umpires in Test cricket led to a drop in the number of LBW decisions going in favour of home teams, a study has revealed. The findings from research by economists, published by the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, come amidst renewed debate on whether neutral umpiring is still required in Test matches following the introduction of the Decision Review System (DRS). Economists Dr Abhinav Sacheti and Professor David Paton from Nottingham University Business School and Dr Ian Gregory-Smith from the University of Sheffield analysed Leg ...

This news release is available in Japanese. New research published in the journal genesis, by Kenneth Baughman, Dr. Eiichi Shoguchi, Professor Noriyuki Satoh of the Marine Genomics Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, and collaborators from Australia, reports an intact Hox cluster in the Crown of Thorns starfish, Acanthaster planci. This surprising result contrasts with the relatively disorganized Hox cluster found in sea urchins, which are also echinoderms, classification of animals including starfish, sea lilies, and sea cucumbers. ...

SALT LAKE CITY, Dec. 15, 2014 -- Because of undetected toxicity problems, about a third of prescription drugs approved in the U.S. are withdrawn from the market or require added warning labels limiting their use. An exceptionally sensitive toxicity test invented at the University of Utah could make it possible to uncover more of these dangerous side effects early in pharmaceutical development so that fewer patients are given unsafe drugs. To prove the point, the U researchers ran their test on Paxil, an antidepressant that thousands of pregnant women used in the years ...

The same species of monkeys located in separate geographic regions use their alarm calls differently to warn of approaching predators, a linguistic analysis by a team of scientists reveals. The study, which appears in the journal Linguistics and Philosophy, reveals that monkey calls have a more sophisticated structure than was commonly thought. "Our findings show that Campbell's monkeys have a distinction between roots and suffixes, and that their combination allows the monkeys to describe both the nature of a threat and its degree of danger," explains the study's lead ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- A new study from MIT implicates a family of RNA-binding proteins in the regulation of cancer, particularly in a subtype of breast cancer. These proteins, known as Musashi proteins, can force cells into a state associated with increased proliferation. Biologists have previously found that this kind of transformation, which often occurs in cancer cells as well as during embryonic development, is controlled by transcription factors -- proteins that turn genes on and off. However, the new MIT research reveals that RNA-binding proteins also play an important ...

In 1912, three species in the parasitic wasp genus Ophion were described by two different entomologists, increasing the number of known species in North America to eleven. It has long been known that the actual diversity is much higher; however, it took 102 years for any additional species to be described. "The main reason for this is that everyone has assumed that Ophion are just too difficult to tell apart. Museum collections are full of unidentified Ophion, but nobody has wanted to face the challenge of sorting them out" said Marla Schwarzfeld, an entomologist who ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., December 15 -- Scientists at The Forsyth Institute and Tufts University have succeeded in describing and validating a unique system of oral vaccine delivery using a common bacteria found in the mouth. Findings published today by Elsevier in Microbes and Infection identify Streptococcus mitis as a successful vector for oral mucosal immunization, and further research will determine its potential clinical use in tuberculosis vaccine development. "Although injected vaccines are traditionally viewed as effective means of immunization to protect internal organs, ...