Hurricane Julio moved past the Hawaiian Islands like a car on a highway in the distance, and NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of the storm, now downgraded to a tropical storm located more than 700 miles away. Julio is far enough away from Hawaii so that there are no coastal watches or warnings in effect. On August 13 at 21:10 UTC (5:10 p.m. EDT), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer of MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of Hurricane Julio moving through the Central Pacific Ocean. The visible image shows that powerful ...

Alexandria, Va. — Tokyo, a city of more than 13 million people, has been devastated by earthquakes in the past and likely will be again. But when? And what role do ongoing slow-slip earthquakes — the kind that generally can't be felt at the surface — play in relieving or building up stress? New research examining plate movements under Tokyo has found that since the massive magnitude-9 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, recurrence intervals for nondamaging slow-slip quakes beneath Japan's capital have shortened. That has left seismologists wondering if this aseismic ...

PRINCETON, N.J.—The death of a spouse undoubtedly brings with it stress, anxiety and uncertainty. Now, a report by Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs quantifies this stress, showing how a husband's declining health could put Taiwanese women at risk for health issues. Using data from a longitudinal sample of Taiwanese older adults, the researchers found that the more a husband suffered, the more his wife's glucose levels increased. Yet, when a wife's health was declining, her husband's levels remained the same. Being widowed, ...

August 14, 2014 – More than 40 percent of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) recipients take opioid pain relievers, while the prevalence of chronic opioid use is over 20 percent and rising, reports a study in the September issue of Medical Care. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. The high proportion of SSDI recipients who are chronic opioid users—in many, at high and very high daily doses—"is worrisome in light of established and growing evidence that intense opioid use to treat non-malignant [non-cancer] ...

Socorro Island in the Eastern Pacific received an unwelcome tropical visitor on the morning of August 13 when satellite data confirmed the formation of Tropical Storm Karina. Karina strengthened from the eleventh tropical depression in the Eastern Pacific. Tropical Depression 11-E formed at 11 p.m. EDT on August 12. Just twelve hours later at 11 a.m. EDT, the depression had become better organized and winds increased to tropical storm strength. NOAA's GOES-West satellite captured an infrared image of newborn Tropical Storm Karina approaching Socorro Island in the Eastern ...

Although Tropical Storm Karina is still strengthening in the Eastern Pacific Ocean NASA's Aqua satellite revealed a large band of fragmented thunderstorms wrapping into its center from the north. On August 13 at 21:00 UTC (5 p.m. EDT), the MODIS or Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Storm Karina off the west coast of Mexico. The image showed a concentration of strong thunderstorms around the center of circulation while the band of thunderstorms to the north appeared broken. The strongest ...

An enzyme therapy may prevent skeletal abnormalities associated with the genetic disorder neurofibromatosis type-1, Vanderbilt investigators have discovered. The researchers demonstrated in a mouse model of the disorder that the enzyme asfotase-alpha improves bone growth, mineralization and strength. The findings, reported in the August issue of Nature Medicine, "suggest that we can make bone stronger and better by injecting this drug, and possibly prevent fractures in patients with neurofibromatosis," said Florent Elefteriou, Ph.D., director of the Vanderbilt Center for ...

A research team led by Nanyang Technological University (NTU) scientists have made a key finding which is expected to open up improved treatment possibilities for children suffering from leukaemia. They found that two in three cases of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, a type of cancer of the white blood cells, may be caused by mutations in one of the two key genes found in children. These genes are however more prevalent in those with Down syndrome. This means that scientists can design better tailored treatment protocols, depending on which mutating gene is carried ...

Researchers from the Copenhagen Center for Glycomics at the University of Copenhagen have studied an important receptor protein called LDLR using new, groundbreaking techniques. The protein plays an important role in the absorption of the bad cholesterol, LDL. The findings have just been published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The key to major discoveries within the fields of health and diseases is not just hidden in the human DNA code. The proteins encoded by the genes also play an important role, not least the attached sugar chains which give the proteins ...

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 14, 2014 – Although replicating important findings is essential for helping education research improve its usefulness to policymakers and practitioners, less than one percent of the articles published in the top education research journals are replication studies, according to new research published today in Educational Researcher (ER), a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. "Facts Are More Important Than Novelty: Replication in the Education Sciences," by Matthew C. Makel of Duke University and Jonathan A. ...

Philadelphia, PA, August 14, 2014 – There are many forms of memory and only some of these may be critical for the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), reports a new study by researchers at the University at Albany and the University of California Los Angeles. Their findings, published in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry, suggest that even with no explicit memory of an early childhood trauma, symptoms of PTSD can still develop in adulthood. There are case reports of people who have experienced terrible life events that resulted in brain damage, ...

Researchers have discovered that women who had been prescribed aspirin regularly before being diagnosed with breast cancer are less likely to have cancer that spread to the lymph-nodes than women who were not on prescription aspirin. These women are also less likely to die from their breast cancer. The study of Irish patients funded by the Irish Health Research Board and Irish Cancer Society and published by the American Association for Cancer Research in the Journal, Cancer Research, analyses records from the National Cancer Registry Ireland (NCRI), and prescription ...

New York, NY—August 14, 2014—A new technique developed by Elisa Konofagou, associate professor of biomedical engineering and radiology at Columbia Engineering, has demonstrated for the first time that the size of molecules penetrating the blood-brain barrier (BBB) can be controlled using acoustic pressure—the pressure of an ultrasound beam—to let specific molecules through. The study was published in the July issue of the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism. "This is an important breakthrough in getting drugs delivered to specific parts of the brain precisely, ...

In spite of the many positive aspects of work, some people are unable to detach from it – working excessively and compulsively. These are called workaholics. Postdoctoral Fellow Cecilie Schou Andreassen and colleagues from the Department of Psychosocial Science at the University of Bergen (UiB) in Norway has been the first to assess workaholism in a nationally representative sample. According to Schou Andreassen, the "workaholism" concept has been studied by scholars for nearly 45 years. Still, reliable statistics on the prevalence of workaholism is hard to find. The ...

Alexandria, Va. — The La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles are a famous predator trap. For every herbivore, a dozen or more carnivores — saber-toothed cats and dire wolves chief among them — are pulled from the prolific Pleistocene fossil site. In fact, the remains of more than 4,000 dire wolves have been excavated, along with more than 2,000 saber-toothed cats. The sheer number of fossils allows researchers to ask population-level questions about the climate and environment as well as how these animals evolved. Now, two new studies focusing dire wolves and saber-toothed ...

The outbreak of Ebola virus disease that has claimed more than 1,000 lives in West Africa this year poses a serious, ongoing threat to that region: the spread to capital cities and Nigeria—Africa's most populous nation—presents new challenges for healthcare professionals. The situation has garnered significant attention and fear around the world, but proven public health measures and sharpened clinical vigilance will contain the epidemic and thwart a global spread, according to a new commentary by Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and ...

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) give rise to all other blood cell types, but their development and how their fate is determined has long remained a mystery. In a paper published online this week in Nature, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine elaborate upon a crucial signaling pathway and the role of key proteins, which may help clear the way to generate HSCs from human pluripotent precursors, similar to advances with other kinds of tissue stem cells. Principal investigator David Traver, PhD, professor in the Department of Cellular ...

Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have developed a new approach for studying single molecules and nanoparticles by combining electrical and optical measurements on an integrated chip-based platform. In a paper published July 9 in Nano Letters, the researchers reported using the device to distinguish viruses from similarly-sized nanoparticles with 100 percent fidelity. Combining electrical and optical measurements on a single chip provides more information than either technique alone, said corresponding author Holger Schmidt, the Kapany Professor of Optoelectronics in the Baskin ...

A research group at the muscle physiology and cell biology unit, the Tokai University School of Medicine, Japan, led by Dr. Tetsuro Tamaki, have developed the stem cell isolation method from the skeletal muscle, termed skeletal muscle-derived multipotent stem cells (Sk-MSCs), which can differentiate into Schwann and perineurial/endoneurial cells, and vascular relating pericytes, endothelial and smooth muscle cells in the damaged peripheral nerve niche. Application of the Sk-MSCs in the bridging conduit of the long nerve gap injury resulted favorable axonal regeneration ...

In a Perspectives paper published in Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 14), Professor Peter Drummond speculates about neuronal changes that might contribute to chronic pain after peripheral nerve injury. Professor Drummond and co-workers at Murdoch University, Perth Western Australia, discovered recently that the expression of α1-adrenoceptors increases on pain-signalling nerve fibers that survive peripheral injury. As these receptors boost neural excitability, an increase in their expression could intensify pain. After tissue injury, resident cells and other ...

Bethesda, MD (Aug. 14, 2014) – Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) is one of the most innovative new treatments of the 21st century. Experts believe that this procedure, which transplants microbes from one human gut to another through fecal matter, could offer the cure to a vast range of diseases and shed new light on the role of the microbiome in gastrointestinal diseases. New research presented this weekend at the American Gastroenterological Association's 2014 James W. Freston Conference in Chicago, IL, highlights significant advances in this field, and confirms the ...

Health care systems that keep HIV patients from dying early in low- and middle-income nations need urgently to be repurposed to treat the chronic diseases that many of these patients now have, experts say. According to recommendations resulting from a multidisciplinary conference sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, scientists and physicians in low- and middle-income countries should build on existing HIV research to study and treat chronic conditions. Patients once condemned to death by AIDS now suffer from noncommunicable diseases such as tuberculosis, cancer, ...

Near real-time analysis of the April 1 earthquake in Iquique, Chile, showed that the 8.2 event occurred in a gap on the fault unruptured since 1877 and that the April event was not what the scientists had expected, according to an international team of geologists. "We assumed that the area of the 1877 earthquake would eventually rupture, but all indications are that this 8.2 event was not the 8.8 event we were looking for," said Kevin P. Furlong, professor of geophysics, Penn State. "We looked at it to see if this was the big one." But according to the researchers, ...

Presenting an authentic image on social network sites (SNSs) includes an element of fakery according to a new study by researchers at Aalto University. During the study, researchers discovered that being authentic is very important for social media users. At the same time, users also admitted faking parts of their online image in order to conform to social norms and expectations. By focusing on two SNSs, Facebook and Last.fm, the researchers came to the conclusion that being real is much more acceptable according to social norms. Although both of these SNSs differ ...

Following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant meltdown, biological samples were obtained only after extensive delays, limiting the information that could be gained about the impacts of that historic disaster. Determined not to repeat the shortcomings of the Chernobyl studies, scientists began gathering biological information only a few months after the disastrous meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan in 2011. Results of these studies are now beginning to reveal serious biological effects of the Fukushima radiation on non-human organisms ranging from ...