New Rochelle, August 19, 2014—A new ovoid structure discovered in the Nakhla Martian meteorite is made of nanocrystalline iron-rich clay, contains a variety of minerals, and shows evidence of undergoing a past shock event from impact, with resulting melting of the permafrost and mixing of surface and subsurface fluids. Based on the results of a broad range of analytical studies to determine the origin of this new structure, scientists present the competing hypotheses for how this ovoid formed, point to the most likely conclusion, and discuss how these findings impact the ...

Women could benefit greatly from the Affordable Care Act's mandate for contraceptive coverage, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. The Affordable Care Act requires private insurance plans -- except those grandfathered or exempted due to employers' religious beliefs -- to provide women with access to all FDA-approved contraceptive methods without cost-sharing. This first-dollar coverage "has the potential to dramatically shift contraceptive use patterns, to reduce the U.S. unintended pregnancy rate ... and to improve the health of women and families," ...

The ancestors of today's crocodiles colonised the seas during warm phases and became extinct during cold phases, according to a new Anglo-French study which establishes a link between marine crocodilian diversity and the evolution of sea temperature over a period of more than 140 million years. The research, led by Dr Jeremy Martin from the Université de Lyon, France and formerly from the University of Bristol, UK is published this week in Nature Communications. Today, crocodiles are 'cold-blooded' animals that mainly live in fresh waters but two notable exceptions, ...

Edmonton—The invention of fibre optics revolutionized the way we share information, allowing us to transmit data at volumes and speeds we'd only previously dreamed of. Now, electrical engineering researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada are breaking another barrier, designing nano-optical cables small enough to replace the copper wiring on computer chips. This could result in radical increases in computing speeds and reduced energy use by electronic devices. "We're already transmitting data from continent to continent using fibre optics, ...

Tropical Storm Karina continues to weaken in the Eastern Pacific over open waters, and NASA data shows there's not much punch left in the storm. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite can measure the rate of rainfall from its orbit in space and when it passed over Tropical Storm Karina in the Eastern Pacific it saw an isolated area of heavy rain remaining in the storm. Tropical Storm Karina weakened during the overnight hours and by Tuesday, August 19, maximum sustained winds had decreased to near 60 mph (95 kph). When TRMM passed overhead at 03:04 ...

LIVERPOOL, UK – 19 August 2014: An engineer at the University of Liverpool has found how worms move around, despite not having a brain to communicate with the body. Dr Paolo Paoletti, alongside his colleague at Harvard, Professor L Mahadevan, has developed a mathematical model for earthworms and insect larvae which challenges the traditional view of how these soft bodied animals get around. The most widely accepted model is that of the central pattern generator (CPG) which states that the central brain of these creatures generates rhythmic contraction and extension ...

In less than 24 hours after Tropical Depression 12-E was born in the eastern Pacific Ocean it strengthened into Tropical Storm Lowell. NOAA's GOES-West and NASA's Aqua satellite captured infrared images of the massive storm as it continues to strengthen. On August 18 at 21:11 UTC (5:11 p.m. EDT), NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the Eastern Pacific and the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument gathered infrared data on Lowell's clouds and sea surface temperatures. The AIRS infrared data showed that powerful thunderstorms stretching high into the troposphere ...

Spontaneous gesture can help children learn, whether they use a spoken language or sign language, according to a new report. Previous research by Susan Goldin-Meadow, the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Psychology, has found that gesture helps children develop their language, learning and cognitive skills. As one of the nation's leading authorities on language learning and gesture, she has also studied how using gesture helps older children improve their mathematical skills. Goldin-Meadow's new study examines how gesturing contributes ...

TEMPE, Ariz. – An Arizona State University alumna has devised the largest catalog ever produced for stellar compositions. Called the Hypatia Catalog, after one of the first female astronomers who lived ~350 AD in Alexandria, the work is critical to understanding the properties of stars, how they form, and possible connections with orbiting planets. And what she found from her work is that the compositions of nearby stars aren't as uniform as once thought. Since it is not possible to physically sample a star to determine its composition, astronomers study of the light ...

MAYWOOD, Ill -- A leukemia drug called dasatinib shows promise for treating skin, breast and several other cancers, according to researchers at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. Dasatinib fights leukemia by checking the uncontrolled growth of cancer cells. But when used against other cancer cells, researchers found, the drug employs a different strategy: It causes the cells to clump together, thus preventing them from migrating. Without the ability to migrate, cancer cells cannot metastasize (spread to other parts of the body). Mitchell Denning, ...

Electroacupuncture has traditionally been used to treat pain, but its effect on pain following brachial plexus injury is still unknown. In a recent study reported on the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 14, 2014), rat models of an avulsion injury to the left brachial plexus root (associated with upper-limb chronic neuropathic pain) were given electroacupuncture stimulation at bilateral Quchi (LI11), Hegu (LI04), Zusanli (ST36) and Yanglingquan (GB34). After electroacupuncture therapy, chronic neuropathic pain in the rats' upper limbs was significantly attenuated. ...

Medical researchers have used DNA sequencing to identify a gene variant responsible for causing lupus in a young patient. The development shows that for the first time, it is feasible for researchers to identify the individual causes of lupus in patients by using DNA sequencing, allowing doctors to target specific treatments to individual patients. Lupus is a chronic autoimmune disease that affects one in 700 Australians, predominantly young and middle aged women. Medical researchers at the Australian National University's Centre for Personalised Immunology, based ...

Researchers from the Institute of General Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences and MIPT have made an important step towards creating medical nanorobots. They discovered a way of enabling nano- and microparticles to produce logical calculations using a variety of biochemical reactions. Details of their research project are given in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. It is the first experimental publication by an exclusively Russian team in one of the most cited scientific magazines in many ...

Chicago – August 19, 2014 – People taking prescription opioids to treat moderate to severe pain may be able to breathe a little easier, literally. A study published in the September issue of Anesthesiology, the official medical journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists® (ASA®), found that a new therapeutic drug, GAL-021, may reverse or prevent respiratory depression, or inadequate breathing, in patients taking opioid medication without compromising pain relief or increasing sedation. "Although opioids such as oxycodone, methadone and fentanyl are commonly ...

This news release is available in French. Taking a Stand: balancing the BENEFITS and RISKS of physical activity in children Today the Canadian Society of Exercise Physiology took a stand on the promotion of childhood physical activity and published their position and recommendations in the journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism (APNM). This position stand provides an important overview of knowledge in the area of risk of physical activity for children and suggests both practical guidelines and a research agenda. Uniquely, this position stand addresses ...

This news release is available in German. Researchers trying to get new information about the metabolism of plants can switch off individual genes and study the resulting changes. However, Erich Kombrink from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne and Markus Kaiser from the University of Duisburg-Essen adopt a different approach. They identify small molecules that block specific components of the metabolic process like brake pads and prevent the downstream reactions. In their search for these molecules, they use a biological selection ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Under the right scenario, exporting U.S. coal to power plants in South Korea could lead to a 21 percent drop in greenhouse gas emissions compared to burning the fossil fuel at plants in the United States, according to a new Duke University-led study. "Despite the large amount of emissions produced by shipping the coal such a long distance, our analysis shows that the total emissions would drop because of the superior energy efficiency of South Korea's newer coal-fired power plants," said Dalia Patiño-Echeverri, assistant professor of energy systems and ...

The bacterium Clostridium difficile causes antibiotic-related diarrhoea and is a growing problem in the hospital environment and elsewhere in the community. Understanding how the microbe colonises the human gut when other "healthy" microbes have been destroyed during a course of antibiotics might lead to new ways to control infection. An important clue was reported recently in an open access article published in the journal Acta Crystallographica Section D Biological Crystallography. [Bradshaw et al. (2014). Acta Cryst. D70, 1983-1993; doi:10.1107/S1399004714009997] Ravi ...

New fundamental knowledge about the regulation of stem cells in the nerve tissue of zebrafish embryos results in surprising insights into neurodegenerative disease processes in the human brain. A new study by scientists at VIB and KU Leuven identifies the molecules responsible for this process. Zebrafish as a model The zebrafish is a small fish measuring 3 to 5 cm in length, with dark stripes along the length of its body. They are originally from India, but also a popular aquarium fish. Zebrafish have several unusual characteristics that make them popular for scientific ...

Global warming is currently taking a break: whereas global temperatures rose drastically into the late 1990s, the global average temperature has risen only slightly since 1998 – surprising, considering scientific climate models predicted considerable warming due to rising greenhouse gas emissions. Climate sceptics used this apparent contradiction to question climate change per se – or at least the harm potential caused by greenhouse gases – as well as the validity of the climate models. Meanwhile, the majority of climate researchers continued to emphasise that the short-term ...

During the last ice age a large part of North America was covered with a massive ice sheet up to 3km thick. The water stored in this ice sheet is part of the reason why the sea level was then about 120 meters lower than today. Young Chinese scientist Xu Zhang, lead author of the study who undertook his PhD at the Alfred Wegener Institute, explains. "The rapid climate changes known in the scientific world as Dansgaard-Oeschger events were limited to a period of time from 110,000 to 23,000 years before present. The abrupt climate changes did not take place at the extreme ...

Plants are superior to humans and animals in a number of ways. They have an impressive ability to regenerate, which enables them to regrow entire organs. After being struck by lightning, for example, a tree can grow back its entire crown. But there is one major downside to life as a plant: They are quite literally rooted to the habitats in which they live and therefore completely at the mercy of the elements. In response to this dilemma, plants have developed mechanisms that enable them to rapidly adapt their growth and development to changes. Plant hormones are important ...

UPTON, NY-New supercomputing calculations provide the first evidence that particles predicted by the theory of quark-gluon interactions but never before observed are being produced in heavy-ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a facility that is dedicated to studying nuclear physics. These heavy strange baryons, containing at least one strange quark, still cannot be observed directly, but instead make their presence known by lowering the temperature at which other strange baryons "freeze out" from the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) discovered and created ...

SAN ANTONIO (Aug. 14, 2014) — Cardiovascular disease is the greatest killer of humans the world over, presenting huge financial and quality-of-life issues. It is well known that the heart becomes less efficient with age in all mammals studied to date, even in the absence of overt cardiac disease. However, scientists still don't have a good understanding of how to prevent these functional declines that ultimately may lead to debilitating cardiovascular disease. The longest-lived rodent, the naked mole rat, beats these odds and escapes cardiovascular aging, at least to ...

New research that analyzes economic disparity among obese Chinese adults shows that there is no wage disparity for obese women in China, but there is pay inequality among obese men. Women in China make less on average than men, but the study results showed no disparity in wages because of body weight. Results of the study for men showed increasing wage disparities by occupation when gaining weight. The study, "The Obesity Pay Gap: Gender, Body Size, and Wage Inequalities: A Longitudinal Study of Chinese Adults, 1991-2009," which will be presented at the 109th Annual ...