From AGU's blogs: Landslide-induced sediment production after the Sabah earthquake in Malaysia The Mw=6.0 5 June 2015 Sabah earthquake in Malaysia, which killed 18 people in rockfalls on Mount Kinabalu, generated landslides that have released large volumes of sediment. The heavy tropical rainfall in Sabah means that this sediment is now starting to enter the river systems in the form of mudflows and sediment-rich flash floods. Dave Petley explores the aftermath of the Sabah earthquake in a new post on The Landslide Blog. From Eos.org: Improving predictions of Arctic ...

A new study of an otherworldly creature from half a billion years ago - a worm-like animal with legs, spikes and a head difficult to distinguish from its tail - has definitively identified its head for the first time, and revealed a previously unknown ring of teeth and a pair of simple eyes. The results, published today in the journal Nature, have helped scientists reconstruct what the common ancestor of everything from tiny roundworms to huge lobsters might have looked like. Researchers from the University of Cambridge, the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of ...

LA JOLLA--Telomeres, specialized ends of our chromosomes that dictate how long cells can continue to duplicate themselves, have long been studied for their links to the aging process and cancer. Now, a discovery at the Salk Institute shows that telomeres may be more central than previously thought to a self-destruct program in cells that prevents tumors, a function that could potentially be exploited to improve cancer therapies. When cells replicate in a process called mitosis, their telomeres get a little shorter each time. Eventually, after many cell divisions, telomeres ...

The prospect of finding ocean-bearing exoplanets has been boosted, thanks to a pioneering new study. An international team of scientists, including from the University of Exeter, has discovered an immense cloud of hydrogen escaping from a Neptune-sized exoplanet. Such a phenomena not only helps explain the formation of hot and rocky 'super-earths', but also may potentially act as a signal for detecting extrasolar oceans. Scientists also believe they can use the discovery to envisage the future of Earth's atmosphere, four billion years from today. The ground-breaking ...

DETROIT - Urban gardens are becoming more commonplace across Detroit and other major urban cities throughout the United States. These gardens offer a source of free or inexpensive healthy food for the public and educate community members about food production and rehabilitating the local ecosystem. The revolution of urban agriculture has the potential to address many economic, environmental and personal health issues. With urban agriculture gaining popularity for improving local and sustainable food systems, the question of food safety has become a growing concern. To ...

The Impact Factors and journal metrics for the range of molecular bioscience journals published by Portland Press, the knowledge hub for life sciences, have been announced. The 2015 Release of Journal Citation Reports® (Source: 2014 Web of ScienceTM Data) shows an increase in article influence scores indicating that the research being published and cited in Portland Press journals carries influence scores above the average in its field. The announcement of these metrics comes in the middle of an exciting year for Portland Press. Having just migrated all its journals ...

The initial results of a study suggested that children born by cesarean section were 21 percent more likely to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder but that association did not hold up in further analysis of sibling pairs, implying the initial association was not causal and was more likely due to unknown genetic or environmental factors, according to an article published online by JAMA Psychiatry. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is thought to affect about 0.62 percent of children worldwide, although estimates in the United States have been closer to 1.5 percent. ...

The notion that geography often shapes economic and political destiny has long informed the work of economists and political scholars. Now a study led by medical scientists at Johns Hopkins reveals how geography also appears to affect the very survival of people with end-stage kidney disease in need of dialysis. "If you are a person with kidney failure in Texas you're in trouble, but if you're in New England you're golden, and that's profoundly troubling because the quality of care shouldn't be predicated on your ZIP code," says senior investigator Mahmoud Malas, M.D., ...

(BOSTON) - Antibiotics are the mainstay in the treatment of bacterial infections, and together with vaccines, have enabled the near eradication of infectious diseases like tuberculosis, at least in developed countries. However, the overuse of antibiotics has also led to an alarming rise in resistant bacteria that can outsmart antibiotics using different mechanisms. Some pathogenic bacteria are thus becoming almost untreatable, not only in underdeveloped countries but also in modern hospital settings. While some researchers seek to develop antibiotics with new mechanisms ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A new study performed by researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center shows that when it comes to overuse injuries in high school sports, girls are at a much higher risk than boys. Overuse injuries include stress fractures, tendonitis and joint pain, and occur when athletes are required to perform the same motion repeatedly. The study published in April in the Journal of Pediatrics. Dr. Thomas Best analyzed 3,000 male and female injury cases over a seven year period across 20 high school sports such as soccer, volleyball, gymnastics ...

PITTSBURGH, June 24 -- Moving closer to the possibility of "materials that compute" and wearing your computer on your sleeve, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering have designed a responsive hybrid material that is fueled by an oscillatory chemical reaction and can perform computations based on changes in the environment or movement, and potentially even respond to human vital signs. The material system is sufficiently small and flexible that it could ultimately be integrated into a fabric or introduced as an inset into a shoe. Anna ...

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have, for the first time, uncovered the complex interdependence and orchestration of metabolic reactions, gene regulation, and environmental cues of clostridial metabolism, providing new insights for advanced biofuel development. "This work advances our fundamental understanding of the complex, system-level process of clostridial acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) fermentation," explained Ting Lu, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Illinois. "Simultaneously, it provides a powerful tool for guiding strain ...

Alexandria, VA - Humans depend on copper for everything from electrical wiring to water pipes. To meet demand, the metal has been largely mined from Porphyry Copper Deposits (PCDs). For decades, scientists generally agreed upon the geological processes behind PCD formation; now EARTH Magazine examines two new studies that suggest alternatives to these long-held understandings. From enriched pulses of magmatic fluids creating copper concentrations, to remelted crust allowing deeper PCDs to rise up to shallower depths, these conclusions may better inform geologists about ...

Amsterdam, NL, June 24, 2015 - Despite an urgent need for new medications, clinical trials in Parkinson's disease (PD) have a relatively low rate of success. The reasons for this are complex, prompting a group of investigators from PD advocacy groups to conduct a survey of the principle stakeholders, PD scientists, patients, and caregivers, to determine some of the underlying barriers. Their results are published in the Journal of Parkinson's Disease. "With development of a new drug estimated to cost between $1 and $3 billion and taking as long as 15 years, the successful ...

Cultural "lore" outweighs criminal law when Indigenous drivers in regional and remote communities get behind the wheel drunk, a new study by Queensland University of Technology has found. Michelle Fitts, from QUT's Centre for Accident Research & Road Safety-Queensland (CARRS-Q), said the decision to drink drive was not necessarily made in disregard for criminal law but rather to meet cultural obligations. As part of her Ph.D., Fitts explored the motivations that influence Indigenous people to drink drive in regional and remote communities through one-on-one interviews ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new technique for "scheduling" energy in electric grids that moves away from centralized management by tapping into the distributed computing power of energy devices. The approach advances the smart grid concept by coordinating the energy being produced and stored by both conventional and renewable sources. Currently, power infrastructure uses a centralized scheduling approach to forecast and coordinate the energy produced at the thousands of large power plants around the country. But as renewable energy ...

Research has shown that New Zealand blackcurrants are good for keeping us mentally young and agile, a finding that could have potential in managing the mental decline associated with aging populations, or helping people with brain disorders such as Parkinson's disease or depression. The research, conducted by scientists at Plant & Food Research (New Zealand) in collaboration with Northumbria University (UK), showed that compounds found in New Zealand blackcurrants increased mental performance indicators, such as accuracy, attention and mood. The study also showed that ...

Although minority children are frequently reported to be overrepresented in special education classrooms, a team of researchers suggests that minority children are less likely than otherwise similar white children to receive help for disabilities. The previously reported overrepresentation is most likely due to a greater exposure to environmental and economic risk factors, said Paul Morgan, associate professor of education, Penn State. "The general limitation of the available studies is that they haven't been able to correct for minority children's unfortunate, but ...

Scientists at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet have managed to build a fully functional neuron by using organic bioelectronics. This artificial neuron contain no "living" parts, but is capable of mimicking the function of a human nerve cell and communicate in the same way as our own neurons do. Neurons are isolated from each other and communicate with the help of chemical signals, commonly called neurotransmitters or signal substances. Inside a neuron, these chemical signals are converted to an electrical action potential, which travels along the axon of the neuron until ...

New research published in Liver Transplantation, a journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and the International Liver Transplantation Society, reports that younger patients, those who are married, and those with Child-Pugh C disease--the most severe measure of liver disease--are more likely immigrants, divorced patients and those at the lowest income levels were less likely to have a potential live donor volunteer for liver donation. With a limited supply of deceased donor organs, livers from living donors provide a much needed, life-saving ...

If it were up to Internet-savvy Americans, more of them would be emailing or sending Facebook messages to their doctors to chat about their health. That's the result of a national survey led by Joy Lee of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US. The findings¹ appear in the Journal of General Internal Medicine², published by Springer. Surveys were sent to more than 4,500 customers of a retail pharmacy. The replies of the 2,252 respondents were included in the analysis. Respondents tended to be well educated, in good health, and frequent users ...

(Boston)--Medical students showed a greater acceptance of using approaches in genomic medicine, a key element in the practice of precision medicine, to treat patients as compared to physicians currently in practice according to a Brief Communication in the journal Medical Science Educator. The promise of genomic medicine, where personalized prevention and treatment becomes the health care norm, is poised to become a widespread reality. "The ability to take advantage of this approach to patient care will rest heavily on having appropriately trained physicians," explained ...

This news release is available in German. Supermassive black holes pull in gas with great force from their surroundings. As the gas rotates around the black hole, it becomes progressively hotter through friction and begins to radiate. This is how the brightest objects in the universe, active galactic nuclei (AGN), are formed. They often shine brighter than the hundreds of billions of stars in their galaxy. In the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way there is also such a black hole that, according to some studies, shone as an AGN a few millions of years ago. ETH ...

June 24 -- More Americans are using soft contact lenses -- especially daily disposable lenses -- and taking advantage of new designs targeting vision problems that were difficult to correct with previous contact lenses, reports the July issue of Optometry and Vision Science, official journal of the American Academy of Optometry. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer. Recent prescribing trends reflect ongoing advances in contact lens materials and capabilities, according to the survey study by Nathan Efron, Ph.D., DSc, of Queensland University of Technology, Australia, ...

Researchers have found that smoking may increase the risk of dying early in premenopausal women with breast cancer. In a prospective study of 848 women with breast cancer who were followed for a median of 6.7 years, premenopausal women who smoked for more than 21.5 years had a 3.1-times higher risk of dying from any cause as well as a 3.4-times higher risk of dying from breast cancer. These links were not apparent among post-menopausal women. There was also some suggestion that the increased risks seen in premenopausal women were especially relevant to women whose cancers ...