A new study, published online in the journal Age and Ageing today, shows that the homebound status of adults over the age of 65 in the aftermath of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake is still a serious public health concern. Of 2,327 older adults surveyed, approximately 20% were found to be homebound. A team of researchers led by Naoki Kondo of the University of Tokyo's School of Public Health studied data from the city of Rikuzentakata, an area that was seriously damaged by the disaster. Of its total population of 23,302 before the events of 2011, 1,773 people died ...

New Rochelle, October 14, 2014 –Big Data analytics are helping to provide answers to many complex problems in science and society, but they have not contributed to a better understanding climate science, despite an abundance of climate data. When it comes to analyzing the climate system, Big Data methods alone are not enough and sound scientific theory must guide data modeling techniques and results interpretation, according to an insightful article in Big Data, the highly innovative, peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available ...

ATHENS, Ohio (Oct. 14, 2014)—It's been millions of years since T. rex took its last breath, but a team led by Ohio University scientists is breathing life back into dinosaurs using high-powered computer simulations to model airflow through dinosaur snouts. The research has important implications for how dinosaurs used their noses to not only breathe but to enhance the sense of smell and cool their brains. "Dinosaurs were pretty 'nosy' animals," said Ohio University doctoral student Jason Bourke, lead author of the new study published today in the Anatomical Record. ...

In 2012, the "Mars One" project, led by a Dutch nonprofit, announced plans to establish the first human colony on the Red Planet by 2025. The mission would initially send four astronauts on a one-way trip to Mars, where they would spend the rest of their lives building the first permanent human settlement. It's a bold vision — particularly since Mars One claims that the entire mission can be built upon technologies that already exist. As its website states, establishing humans on Mars would be "the next giant leap for mankind." But engineers at MIT say the project ...

This week, an international team of researchers, led by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing, published in the journal Nature Genetics a brief genomic history of tomato breeding, based on sequencing of 360 varieties of the tomato plant. The C.M. Rick Tomato Genetics Resource Center at UC Davis played an important role in this study by providing seed of both cultivated tomato varieties and related wild species. This study, which builds on the first tomato genome sequence completed just two years ago, shows in great detail how the processes of early ...

Researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have chemically modified an anti-diabetic agent so as to make its action dependent on light. The resulting prototype compound, termed JB253, induces release of insulin only when pancreas cells are exposed to blue light. Synthetic, light-sensitive, molecular switches can be utilized to control biochemical signaling processes in living cells. In a new study, a research team led by LMU Professor Dirk Trauner (Chemical Biology and Genetics) and his colleague Johannes Broichhagen, in collaboration with Prof. Guy ...

Imagine the world waking up one morning to discover that all compasses pointed south instead of north. It's not as bizarre as it sounds. Earth's magnetic field has flipped – though not overnight – many times throughout the planet's history. Its dipole magnetic field, like that of a bar magnet, remains about the same intensity for thousands to millions of years, but for incompletely known reasons it occasionally weakens and, presumably over a few thousand years, reverses direction. Now, a new study by a team of scientists from Italy, France, Columbia University ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Scientists have sequenced the house fly genome for the first time, revealing robust immune genes, as one might expect from an insect that thrives in pathogen-rich dung piles and garbage heaps. The research, published Oct. 14 in the journal Genome Biology, will increase understanding of house fly genetics and biology and of how flies quickly adapt to resist insecticides, which could lead to novel control methods. Adult house flies (Musca domestica) carry and transmit more than 100 human and animal diseases, including salmonellosis, anthrax, typhoid ...

NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Ana on Monday, Oct. 13 after it formed in the Central Pacific Ocean. Ana formed on Oct. 13 at 5 p.m. EDT (11 a.m. HST) as Tropical Depression 2-C, about 920 miles (1,480 km) east-southeast of Hilo, Hawaii. By 9 p.m. EDT that day, the depression had strengthened into Tropical Depression Ana. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Ana on Monday, Oct. 13 at 11:11 UTC (7:11 a.m. EDT) and the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument gathered infrared data that showed some strong thunderstorms and cold cloud ...

WASHINGTON, DC— The 1934 drought was by far the most intense and far-reaching drought of the last 1,000 years in North America, and was caused in part by an atmospheric phenomenon that may have also led to the current drought in California, according to a new study. New research finds that the extent of the 1934 drought was approximately seven times larger than droughts of comparable intensity that struck North America between 1000 A.D. and 2005, and nearly 30 percent worse than the next most severe drought that struck the continent in 1580. "We noticed that ...

One of the planet's leading questions is how to produce enough food to feed the world in an increasingly variable climate. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations predicts that food production must rise 70% over the next 40 years to feed a growing global population, and plants are one major component of the necessary rise in food production. Plants—grains, cereals, fruits, vegetables, and more—feed humans directly and indirectly by supporting livestock. Current research must tap into our knowledge of how plants work to develop more efficient ...

From AGU's blogs: Health check reveals how glacier is declining due to warming climate http://blogs.agu.org/geospace/2014/10/13/health-check-reveals-glacier-declining-due-warming-climate/ Researchers from the British Geological Survey have taken the very first comprehensive health check of a rapidly melting glacier. Their latest study reveals that their icy patient, the Falljökull glacier in southeast Iceland, has been dramatically declining as it tries to adjust to recent changes in the climate. The new findings on Falljökull show unhealthy changes in the ...

URBANA, Ill. – For about a decade, Chinese consumers weren't getting what they paid for when they purchased Wuchang, a special brand of gourmet rice that has a peculiar scent. The quality was being diluted when less expensive rice was aromatized, added to the packages of the high-quality rice, and sold at the premium price. Researchers at the University of Illinois studied how the tampering scandal affected the public's perception of risk and their subsequent behavior. Because public anxiety over the fake rice issue was more pronounced in urban districts, the researchers ...

A Mount Sinai-led research team has discovered a new kind of stem cell that can become either a liver cell or a cell that lines liver blood vessels, according to a study published today in the journal Stem Cell Reports. The existence of such a cell type contradicts current theory on how organs arise from cell layers in the embryo, and may hold clues to origins of, and future treatment for, liver cancer. Thanks to stem cells, humans develop from a single cell into a complex being made up of more than 200 cell types. The original, single human stem cell, the fertilized embryo, ...

Montreal, October 14, 2014 – High doses of fish oil supplements, rich in omega-3 fatty acids, do not reduce atrial fibrillation, a common type of irregular heartbeat in which the heart can beat as fast as 150 beats a minute. The results of the AFFORD trial led by the Montreal Heart Institute were published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology on October 7th. For the trial, 337 patients with atrial fibrillation not receiving conventional antiarrhythmic therapy were randomly assigned to 4 grams of fish oil a day or to placebo for up to 16 months. 64.1 ...

Can you ditch the strips and dump the dentist for whiter teeth? From "The Dr. Oz Show" to YouTube videos, experts say you can reclaim those pearly whites simply by mixing fruit, such as strawberries, with some baking soda, and applying the all-natural concoction to your teeth. It's cheap, easy, and oh-so-organic. But does it work? Unfortunately not, says an University of Iowa dental researcher, who compared a homemade strawberry-baking soda recipe with other remedies, such as over-the-counter products, professional whitening, and prescribed whitening products. The ...

Almost exactly three years ago, the United Nations called on governments and industry to ensure that the world's population would have access to broadband Internet by 2015. Broadband, a relatively fast and always-on Internet connection service, is one of the most economically significant and fastest growing sectors of the Internet. "Over the past few years, a growing importance has been placed on broadband, and national plans have emerged to ensure coverage," said Fabian Bustamante, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University's ...

Alexandria, Va. — Hawaii's Kilauea volcano is famously effusive: Low-viscosity lava has been oozing out of the main caldera and two active rift zones along the southern shore of the Big Island since 1983. But scientists suspect that Kilauea's eruptions haven't always been so mild. In the past 2,500 years, at least two cycles of explosive eruptions lasting several centuries each have rocked the island. The switch from effusive to explosive is likely to occur again, scientists say, but probably not anytime soon. Read more about what ash deposits left by previous eruptions ...

Responding to the large number of people with serious mental illnesses in the criminal justice system will require more than mental health services, according to a new report. In many ways, the criminal justice system is the largest provider of mental health services in the country. Estimates vary, but previous research has found that about 14 percent of persons in the criminal justice system have a serious mental illness, and that number is as high as 31 percent for female inmates. Researchers are defining serious mental illnesses to include such things as schizophrenia, ...

WORCESTER, MA – A team of scientists led by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine (UMMSM) have identified what is likely a key genetic pathway underlying bipolar (manic depressive) disorder, a breakthrough that could lead to better drugs for treating bipolar affective disorder, as well as depression and other related mood disorders. The new findings, published online this week in Nature Molecular Psychiatry, show that a rare genetic dwarfism called Ellis van-Creveld (EvC) syndrome ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – As more and more high schools around the country drop home economics classes due to budget cuts or changes in educational priorities, many high school students are left without basic skills, such as preparing meals and sewing. Now, researchers have found that a significant gap exists in the amount of "common" clothes repair skills possessed by members of the baby boomer generation and millennials. Pamela Norum, a professor in the Department of Textile and Apparel Management in the MU College of Human Environmental Sciences, found that many more of ...

NASA's MAVEN spacecraft has provided scientists their first look at a storm of energetic solar particles at Mars and produced unprecedented ultraviolet images of the tenuous oxygen, hydrogen and carbon coronas surrounding the Red Planet, said University of Colorado Boulder Professor Bruce Jakosky, the mission's principal investigator. In addition, the new observations allowed scientists to make a comprehensive map of highly variable ozone in the Martian atmosphere underlying the coronas, he said. The spacecraft entered Mars' orbit Sept. 21 and is in the process of lowering ...

HEIDELBERG, 14 October 2014 – Researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered a link between a protective mechanism used by cells and the activation of muscle stem cells. Cells use autophagy to recycle cellular "building blocks" and generate energy during times of nutrient deprivation. The scientists report in The EMBO Journal that when this protective mechanism is operational it also seems to assist in the activation of stem cells. "Our study reveals that when stem cells emerge from a quiescent state there is a rapid and dramatic change in ...

Humans have a focus on the short term. We are more interested in a potential benefit if we can get it now. The ability to delay gratification has been studied in children with the "marshmallow test": a child can have one treat now, or two if he or she can wait a few minutes without gobbling the first treat. Psychologists and economists have shown that similar trends can be observed and measured in many spheres of life. They call the tendency for the perceived value of a delayed benefit to diminish "delay discounting." Now researchers at Marcus Autism Center are studying ...

Cyclone Hudhud made landfall in east-central India on Oct. 12 and caused a lot of damage and several fatalities as it moved inland and weakened to a remnant low pressure area. NASA saw those remnants on Oct. 14. When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Indochina, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument provided picture proof that the remnants of Typhoon Hudhud were still over India, Nepal, and China. Aqua passed over the region on Oct. 14 at 08:05 UTC (4:05 a.m. EDT). Infrared satellite imagery and multispectral satellite imagery indicated ...