VIDEO: This animation of visible and infrared images from NOAA's GOES-East satellite shows the movement and strengthening of Gonzalo from a tropical storm on Oct. 13 to a hurricane on Oct.... Click here for more information. Hurricane Gonzalo has made the jump to major hurricane status and on Oct. 15 was a Category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. NOAA's GOES-East satellite provided imagery of the storm. According to the National Hurricane Center, Gonzalo is the ...

Nanomedicines consisting of nanoparticles for targeted drug delivery to specific tissues and cells offer new solutions for cancer diagnosis and therapy. Understanding the interdependency of physiochemical properties of nanomedicines, in correlation to their biological responses and functions, is crucial for their further development of as cancer-fighters. "To develop next generation nanomedicines with superior anti-cancer attributes, we must understand the correlation between their physicochemical properties—specifically, particle size—and their interactions ...

Researchers in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences are pairing chemical analyses with micropaleontology—the study of tiny fossilized organisms—to better understand how global marine life was affected by a rapid warming event more than 55 million years ago. Their findings are the subject of an article in the journal Paleoceanography (John Wiley & Sons, 2014). "Global warming impacts marine life in complex ways, of which the loss of dissolved oxygen [a condition known as hypoxia] is a growing concern" says Zunli Lu, assistant professor of ...

A new study using a reconstruction of North American drought history over the last 1,000 years found that the drought of 1934 was the driest and most widespread of the last millennium. Using a tree-ring-based drought record from the years 1000 to 2005 and modern records, scientists from NASA and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory found the 1934 drought was 30 percent more severe than the runner-up drought (in 1580) and extended across 71.6 percent of western North America. For comparison, the average extent of the 2012 drought was 59.7 percent. "It was the worst by a ...

This week, researchers from University of Hawai'i, Norway, and the UK have shown with innovative experiments that a rise in jellyfish blooms near the ocean's surface may lead to jellyfish falls that are rapidly consumed by voracious deep-sea scavengers. Previous anecdotal studies suggested that deep-sea animals might avoid dead jellyfish, causing dead jellyfish from blooms to accumulate and undergo slow degradation by microbes, depleting oxygen at the seafloor and depriving fish and invertebrate scavengers, including commercially exploited species, of food. Globally ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Imagine that a time machine has transported you to the Australian outback 100,000 years ago. As you emerge, you see a huge kangaroo with a round rabbit-like face foraging in a tall bush nearby. The animal's surprising size makes you gasp aloud but when it hears you, becoming equally unnerved, it doesn't hop or lumber away on all fours and tail like every kangaroo you've seen in the present. It walks on its feet. One at a time. Like you. In a new paper in the journal PLoS ONE, a team of researchers led by Christine Janis, professor ...

Now extinct giant kangaroos most likely could not hop and used a more rigid body posture to move their hindlimbs one at a time, according to a study published October 15, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Christine Janis from Brown University and colleagues. The "short-faced," large-bodied sthenurine kangaroos–a now extinct relative to modern-day kangaroos–first appeared in the middle Miocene and became extinct in the late Pleistocene. The largest of these kangaroos had an estimated body mass of 240 kg, almost three times the size of the largest ...

Turning the street lights off decreased the number of grounded fledglings, according to a study published October 15, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Airam Rodríguez and colleagues from Phillip Island Nature Parks, in Victoria, Australia, and Estación Biológica de Doñana, in Spain. Thousands of birds are attracted to lights–sometimes referred to as light-pollution–every year worldwide during their first flights from their nests to the open ocean, a phenomenon called 'fallout.' Short-tailed shearwater breeding on the coast of ...

People who risk their lives to save strangers may do so without deliberation, according to an analysis of statements from more than 50 recognized civilian heroes, conducted by David Rand from Yale University and colleagues published October 15, 2014 in the open access journal PLOS ONE. Scientists studying human cooperation recruited hundreds of participants to rate 51 statements made during published interviews by recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal, given to civilians who risk their lives to save strangers. Study participants as well as a computer text analysis algorithm ...

Research from the University of Exeter has revealed that the rock goby (Gobius paganellus), an unassuming little fish commonly found in rock pools around Britain, southern Europe, and North Africa, is a master of camouflage and can rapidly change colour to conceal itself against its background. Whether hiding from predators or from families hunting in rock pools, the rock goby can change both its colour and brightness to match its background in just one minute. Dr Martin Stevens from the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus ...

An investigation into how patient outcomes are assessed in clinical trials has revealed a worrying lack of consistency, raising concerns about funding being wasted on the acquisition of poor quality data. Information collected through clinical trials plays a crucial role in improving the standard of patient care. Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs) inform our understanding of how certain treatments and interventions work by evaluating their effectiveness, and any potential side effects, from the patient perspective. Patients in trials are commonly invited to fill in questionnaires ...

NEWPORT, Ore. – Pacific sleeper sharks, a large, slow-moving species thought of as primarily a scavenger or predator of fish, may be preying on something a bit larger – protected Steller sea lions in the Gulf of Alaska. A new study found the first indirect evidence that this cold-blooded shark that can grow to a length of more than 20 feet – longer than a great white shark – may be an opportunistic predator of juvenile Steller sea lions. Results of the study have just been published in the journal Fishery Bulletin. The findings are important, ...

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, along with data from other large radio telescopes, have discovered that our nearest galactic neighbors, the dwarf spheroidal galaxies, are devoid of star-forming gas, and that our Milky Way Galaxy is to blame. These new radio observations, which are the highest sensitivity of their kind ever undertaken, reveal that within a well-defined boundary around our Galaxy, dwarf galaxies are completely devoid of hydrogen gas; beyond this point, dwarf galaxies are teeming with star-forming ...

"If you have a coin and flip it just once, what does that tell you about the odds of heads versus tails?" asks Heather Knutson, assistant professor of planetary science at Caltech. "It tells you almost nothing. It's the same with planetary systems," she says. For as long as astronomers have been looking to the skies, we have had just one planetary system—our own—to study in depth. That means we have only gotten to know a handful of possible outcomes of the planet formation process, and we cannot say much about whether the features observed in our solar system ...

For those most severely affected, treating epilepsy means drilling through the skull deep into the brain to destroy the small area where the seizures originate – invasive, dangerous and with a long recovery period. Five years ago, a team of Vanderbilt engineers wondered: Is it possible to address epileptic seizures in a less invasive way? They decided it would be possible. Because the area of the brain involved is the hippocampus, which is located at the bottom of the brain, they could develop a robotic device that pokes through the cheek and enters the brain from ...

Having had children – particularly early in life – and a dysfunctional romantic relationship are the two most frequently cited reasons when low-income mothers are asked about why they find themselves in poverty. So say American researchers Kristin Mickelson of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University, and Emily Hazlett of Kent State University and the Northeast Ohio Medical University, in a new article published in Springer's journal Sex Roles. The researchers believe that how a woman answers the question of "why me?" when thinking ...

Modern-day puffins and auks have long been recognized as environmental indicator species for ongoing faunal shifts, and fossil records now indicate that ancient relatives were similarly informative. Researchers have found that puffins and auks may have been at their most diverse and widespread levels during a relatively warm period of Earth's history. The results also explain how past extinctions have shaped the geographic distribution and population size of existing species. Authors Adam Smith of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in Durham, N.C., and ...

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – A new analysis of global energy use, economics and the climate shows that without new climate policies, expanding the current bounty of inexpensive natural gas alone would not slow the growth of global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide over the long term, according to a study appearing today in Nature. Because natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide of coal, many people hoped the recent natural gas boom could help slow climate change—and according to government analyses, natural gas did contribute partially to a decline in U.S. carbon ...

This market effect erases the advantage of lower emissions from the natural gas itself, according to an unprecedented international comparison of computer simulations. "The upshot is that abundant natural gas alone will not rescue us from climate change," says the lead author Haewon McJeon of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Especially in the US advances such as hydraulic fracturing – pumping liquids into stone to break it up and release the gas, known as fracking – and horizontal drilling have led to bountiful natural ...

UCLA researchers have discovered that some scar-forming cells in the heart, known as fibroblasts, have the ability to become endothelial cells — the cells that form blood vessels. The finding could point the way toward a new strategy for treating people who have suffered a heart attack, because increasing the number of blood vessels in the heart boosts its ability to heal after injury. In studies involving mice, the UCLA team also found that a drug could enhance this phenomenon and improve the repair process after a heart attack. The research is published in the ...

New York, NY—October 15, 2014—Researchers from Columbia Engineering and the Georgia Institute of Technology report today that they have made the first experimental observation of piezoelectricity and the piezotronic effect in an atomically thin material, molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), resulting in a unique electric generator and mechanosensation devices that are optically transparent, extremely light, and very bendable and stretchable. In a paper published online October 15, 2014, in Nature, research groups from the two institutions demonstrate the mechanical ...

CHAPEL HILL – Researchers from the UNC School of Medicine have discovered that cells called fibroblasts, which normally give rise to scar tissue after a heart attack, can be turned into endothelial cells, which generate blood vessels to supply oxygen and nutrients to the injured regions of the heart, thus greatly reducing the damage done following heart attack. This switch is driven by p53, the well-documented tumor-suppressing protein. The UNC researchers showed that increasing the level of p53 in scar-forming cells significantly reduced scarring and improved heart ...

Removing a child's tonsils is one of the most common surgeries performed in the United States, with approximately 500,000 children undergoing the procedure each year. New research finds that children from lower-income families are more likely to have complications following the surgery. In the first study of its kind to analyze post-operative complications requiring a doctor's visit within the first 14 days after tonsillectomy, researchers saw a significant disparity based on income status, race and ethnicity. "Surprisingly, despite all children having a relatively ...

WORCESTER, MA – An international group of scientists led by Gang Han, PhD, at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, has combined a new type of nanoparticle with an FDA-approved photodynamic therapy to effectively kill deep-set cancer cells in vivo with minimal damage to surrounding tissue and fewer side effects than chemotherapy. This promising new treatment strategy could expand the current use of photodynamic therapies to access deep-set cancer tumors. "We are very excited at the potential for clinical practice using our enhanced red-emission nanoparticles ...

Montréal, October 15, 2014 – An important scientific breakthrough by a team of IRCM researchers led by Michel Cayouette, PhD, is being published today by The Journal of Neuroscience. The Montréal scientists discovered that a protein found in the retina plays an essential role in the function and survival of light-sensing cells that are required for vision. These findings could have a significant impact on our understanding of retinal degenerative diseases that cause blindness. The researchers studied a process called compartmentalization, which establishes ...