In one of the most comprehensive multi-observatory galaxy surveys yet, astronomers find that galaxies like our Milky Way underwent a stellar "baby boom," churning out stars at a prodigious rate, about 30 times faster than today. Our sun, however, is a late "boomer." The Milky Way's star-birthing frenzy peaked 10 billion years ago, but our sun was late for the party, not forming until roughly 5 billion years ago. By that time the star formation rate in our galaxy had plunged to a trickle. Missing the party, however, may not have been so bad. The sun's late appearance ...

New evidence published in Science by Smithsonian geologists dates the closure of an ancient seaway at 13 to 15 million years ago and challenges accepted theories about the rise of the Isthmus of Panama and its impact on world climate and animal migrations. A team analyzed zircon grains from rocks representing an ancient sea and riverbeds in northwestern South America. The team was led by Camilo Montes, former director of the Panama Geology Project at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He is now at the Universidad de los Andes. The team's new date for closure ...

New research shows that Lake Erie's dead zones are actually quite active, greatly affecting fish distributions, catch rates and the effectiveness of fishing gear. Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey, the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant and partners recently found that dead zones caused by hypoxia, the depletion of oxygen in water, are unexpectedly variable in Lake Erie, sometimes disappearing and reemerging elsewhere in the matter of hours. They also found that fish like yellow perch cluster at the edges of these areas. The discovery of erratic dead zones can help ...

PITTSBURGH-- Three leading cognitive scientists from Carnegie Mellon University are questioning the gender representation of invited contributors in the special February 2015 issue, "The Changing Face of Cognition," published by the international journal Cognition. Cognition, a highly regarded scientific journal, publishes theoretical and experimental papers on the study of the mind - a topic that has been a research strength of CMU for decades and that is receiving intense focus through the federal government's BRAIN Initiative. In an opinion piece to appear in Cognition, ...

A study in the scientific journal BMC Health Services Research shows that early and guideline adherent physical therapy following an initial episode of acute, nonspecific low back pain (LBP) resulted in substantially lower costs and reduced use of health care resources over a 2-year period. Physical therapist researchers John D. Childs, PT, PhD, et al analyzed 122,723 patients who went to a primary care physician following an initial LBP episode and received physical therapy within 90 days. Of these, 24% (17,175) received early physical therapy (within 14 days) that adhered ...

Getty Images last year created a new online image catalog of women in the workplace - one that countered visual stereotypes on the Internet of moms as frazzled caregivers rather than powerful CEOs. A new University of Washington study adds to those efforts by assessing how accurately gender representations in online image search results for 45 different occupations match reality. In a few jobs -- including CEO -- women were significantly underrepresented in Google image search results, the study found, and that can change searchers' worldviews. Across all the professions, ...

PHOENIX, Ariz. -- April 9, 2015 -- Scientists at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), using state-of-the-art genetic technology, have discovered the likely cause of a child's rare type of severe muscle weakness. The child was one of six cases in which TGen sequenced -- or decoded -- the genes of patients with Neuromuscular Disease (NMD) and was then able to identify the genetic source, or likely genetic source, of each child's symptoms, according to a study published April 8 in the journal Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine. "In all six cases of ...

A family of proteins called G proteins are a recognized component of the communication system the human body uses to sense hormones and other chemicals in the bloodstream and to send messages to cells. In work that further illuminates how cells work, researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered a new role for G proteins that may have relevance to halting solid tumor cancer metastasis. The study is reported online April 9 in Developmental Cell. "Our work provides the first direct evidence that G proteins are signaling on membranes ...

Bushfires are inevitable in the fire-prone landscapes of Western Australia. Long dry summers, vegetation and undergrowth, and ignition from lightning or human causes mean that bushfires can and do occur every summer. A bushfire is an unplanned fire (in the U.S. this is referred to as a wildfire). Each year Australia's Department of Parks and Wildlife responds to more than 600 bushfires that occur on or near land managed by the department. Bushfires have many causes, some natural such as lightning and some as a result of human activity such as camp fires, escapes from ...

ATLANTA--A combination of mental practice and physical therapy is an effective treatment for people recovering from a stroke, according to researchers at Georgia State University. The findings, published on March 30 in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, examine how the brains of stroke patients change after treatment. Mental practice and physical therapy are interventions used to improve impaired motor movement, coordination and balance following stroke. Mental practice, also known as motor imagery, is the mental rehearsal of a motor action without an overt ...

URBANA, Ill. - Two University of Illinois food scientists have learned that understanding and manipulating porosity during food manufacturing can affect a food's health benefits. Youngsoo Lee reports that controlling the number and size of pores in processed foods allows manufacturers to use less salt while satisfying consumers' taste buds. Pawan Takhar has found that meticulously managing pore pressure in foods during frying reduces oil uptake, which results in lower-fat snacks without sacrificing our predilection for fried foods' texture and taste. Both scientists ...

BOSTON (April 9, 2015)- Making small, consistent changes to the types of protein- and carbohydrate-rich foods we eat may have a big impact on long-term weight gain, according to a new study led by researchers at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy at Tufts University. The results were published on-line this week in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Based on more than 16 years of follow-up among 120,000 men and women from three long-term studies of U.S. health professionals, the authors first found that diets with a high glycemic load (GL) from ...

The one common element in recent weather has been oddness. The West Coast has been warm and parched; the East Coast has been cold and snowed under. Fish are swimming into new waters, and hungry seals are washing up on California beaches. A long-lived patch of warm water off the West Coast, about 1 to 4 degrees Celsius (2 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, is part of what's wreaking much of this mayhem, according to two University of Washington papers to appear in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. "In the fall of 2013 and ...

April 9, 2015 - A new University of Utah study is the first to provide clear insight into contributors to suicide risk among military personnel and veterans who have deployed. The study, published today in the journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, found that exposure to killing and death while deployed is connected to suicide risk. Previous studies that looked solely at the relationship between deployment and suicide risk without assessing for exposure to killing and death have shown inconsistent results. "Many people assume that deployment equals exposure ...

When black holes tango, one massive partner spins head over heels (or in this case heels over head) until the merger is complete, said researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology in a paper published in Physical Review Letters. This spin dynamic may affect the growth of black holes surrounded by accretion disks and alter galactic and supermassive binary black holes, leading to observational effects, according to RIT scientists Carlos Lousto and James Healy. The authors of the study will present their findings at the American Physical Society meeting in Baltimore ...

The RapidScat instrument that flies aboard the International Space Station (ISS) provided data about Tropical Cyclone Joalane's surface winds that showed how the strongest sustained winds consolidated as the tropical cyclone intensified and developed an eye. As of April 9, warnings were in effect at Rodrigues Island in the Southern Indian Ocean as Joalane approached. RapidScat measured the surface winds within Tropical Cyclone Joalane late on April 7 and on April 8, revealing that the strongest winds consolidated over a 24 hour period. RapidScat measured Joalane's winds ...

Outbreaks of leukemia that have devastated some populations of soft-shell clams along the east coast of North America for decades can be explained by the spread of cancerous tumor cells from one clam to another. Researchers call the discovery, reported in the Cell Press journal Cell on April 9, 2015, "beyond surprising." "The evidence indicates that the tumor cells themselves are contagious--that the cells can spread from one animal to another in the ocean," said Stephen Goff of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Columbia University. "We know this must be true because ...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can produce strikingly different clinical outcomes in young children, with some having strong conversation abilities and others not talking at all. A study published by Cell Press April 9th in Neuron reveals the reason: At the very first signs of possible autism in infants and toddlers, neural activity in language-sensitive brain regions is already similar to normal in those ASD toddlers who eventually go on to develop good language ability but nearly absent in those who later have a poor language outcome. "Why some toddlers with ASD get ...

Using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), a team led by Mount Sinai researchers has gained new insight into genetic changes that may turn a well known anti-cancer signaling gene into a driver of risk for bone cancers, where the survival rate has not improved in 40 years despite treatment advances. The study results, published today in the journal Cell, revolve around iPSCs, which since their 2006 discovery have enabled researchers to coax mature (fully differentiated) bodily cells (e.g. skin cells) to become like embryonic stem cells. Such cells are pluripotent, able ...

LA JOLLA--If you had 10 chances to roll a die, would you rather be guaranteed to receive $5 for every roll ($50 total) or take the risk of winning $100 if you only roll a six? Most animals, from roundworms to humans, prefer the more predictable situation when it comes to securing resources for survival, such as food. Now, Salk scientists have discovered the basis for how animals balance learning and risk-taking behavior to get to a more predictable environment. The research reveals new details on the function of two chemical signals critical to human behavior: dopamine--responsible ...

A genetic mutation associated with an increased risk of developing eating disorders in humans has now been found to cause several behavioral abnormalities in mice that are similar to those seen in people with anorexia nervosa. The findings, published online April 9 in Cell Reports, may point to novel treatments to reverse behavioral problems associated with disordered eating. "It's been known for a long time that about 50% to 70% of the risk of getting an eating disorder was inherited, but the identity of the genes that mediate this risk is unknown," explains senior author ...

Two types of touch information -- the feel of an object and the position of an animal's limb -- have long been thought to flow into the brain via different channels and be integrated in sophisticated processing regions. Now, with help from a specially devised mechanical exoskeleton that positioned monkeys' hands in different postures, Johns Hopkins researchers have challenged that view. In a paper published in the April 22 issue of Neuron, they present evidence that the two types of information are integrated as soon as they reach the brain by sense-processing brain cells ...

It turns out sea turtles, even at a tender 6-18 months of age, are very active swimmers. They don't just passively drift in ocean currents as researchers once thought. NOAA and University of Central Florida researchers say it's an important new clue in the sea turtle "lost years" mystery. Where exactly turtles travel in their first years of life, before returning to coastal areas as adults to forage and reproduce, has puzzled scientists for decades. "All species of sea turtles are endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act; knowing their distribution is ...

Building on their discovery of a gene linked to eating disorders in humans, a team of researchers at the University of Iowa has now shown that loss of the gene in mice leads to several behavioral abnormalities that resemble behaviors seen in people with anorexia nervosa. The team, led by Michael Lutter, MD, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry in the UI Carver College of Medicine, found that mice that lack the estrogen-related receptor alpha (ESRRA) gene are less motivated to seek out high-fat food when they are hungry and have abnormal social interactions. The effect ...

WASHINGTON -- Facial plastic surgery may do more than make you look youthful. It could change -- for the better -- how people perceive you. The first study of its kind to examine perception after plastic surgery finds that women who have certain procedures are perceived as having greater social skills and are more likeable, attractive and feminine. The study is not superficial -- the importance of facial appearance is rooted in evolution and studies suggest that judging a person based on his or her appearance boils down to survival. The results were published online ...