An international team of researchers analyzing decades of observations from many facilities, including NASA's Swift satellite, has discovered an unusual source of light in a galaxy some 90 million light-years away. The object's curious properties make it a good match for a supermassive black hole ejected from its home galaxy after merging with another giant black hole. But astronomers can't yet rule out an alternative possibility. The source, called SDSS1133, may be the remnant of a massive star that erupted for a record period of time before destroying itself in a supernova ...

On an archaeology field trip in New Mexico as an undergraduate in 2006, Dana Bardolph noticed something that struck her as an odd gender imbalance: The professor leading the dig was a men, while the graduate assistant and all but two of the 14 undergrads were women. "And it just got me thinking," Bardolph recalled. "Is this reflective of the profession as a whole, or is it an anomaly?" The question stayed with her, and four years ago she decided to search for an answer. Her findings -- generated after digging through more than 4,500 peer-reviewed papers in 11 archaeology ...

TORONTO, November 19, 2014 - Today an international team of researchers announced the discovery of two new particles in the baryon family, which makes them cousins of the familiar proton and neutron. The LHCb collaboration at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, used CERN's Large Hadron Collider to make these discoveries. The masses of these particles, named Xi_b'- and Xi_b*- had been predicted in a paper published in 2009 by York University Professor Randy Lewis and Richard Woloshyn, scientist at the TRIUMF Lab in Vancouver, using a supercomputer approach ...

Far more breast cancer patients are choosing to undergo mastectomy, including removal of both breasts, instead of choosing breast conservation surgery even when they have early stage disease that is confined to one breast, a Vanderbilt study shows. In the past decade, there have also been marked trends toward higher proportions of women opting for breast reconstruction. The rates of increase were steepest among women with lymph node-negative and in situ (contained) disease. This is a reversal of trends seen since the 1990s when breast conservation surgery (BCS) was ...

Delivering stem cell factor directly into damaged heart muscle after a heart attack may help repair and regenerate injured tissue, according to a study led by researchers from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai presented November 18 at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2014 in Chicago, IL. "Our discoveries offer insight into the power of stem cells to regenerate damaged muscle after a heart attack," says lead study author Kenneth Fish, PhD, Director of the Cardiology Laboratory for Translational Research, Cardiovascular Research Center, Mount Sinai ...

Tropical Storm Adjali started curving to the southwest on its trek through the Southern Indian Ocean when NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead on Nov. 19. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible picture of Tropical Storm Adjali on Nov. 19 at 9:05 UTC (4:05 a.m. EST). The MODIS image showed that the storm began curving to the southwest, and despite slight weakening, thunderstorms circled around the low-level center. Adjali was curving to the southwest as it continued to move along ...

Minimum legal drinking age legislation in Canada can have a major impact on young drivers, according to a new study from the Northern Medical Program at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC). Drivers just older than the legal age had a significant increase in motor vehicle crashes compared to those immediately under the restriction. In the study, published this week in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Dr. Russ Callaghan and his research team looked at Quebec motor vehicle collision statistics between 2000 and 2012 which involved young drivers. ...

A physicist in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences is the lead contributor to the discovery of two never-before-seen baryonic particles. The finding, which is the subject of a forthcoming article in Physical Review Letters (American Physical Society, 2014), is expected to have a major impact on the study of quark dynamics. Steven Blusk, associate professor of physics, has identified particles known as Xi_b'- and Xi_b*-. Although the particles had been predicted to exist, nobody has seen them until now. The discovery is part of his ongoing work at the Large ...

The first issue of a new publication series from The Gerontological Society of America (GSA) called From Policy to Practice explores pain as a public health problem and takes a look at how various policies impact the care provided to patients in a range of practice settings. It also provides readers with an overview of provisions of the Affordable Care Act that address pain research, education, training, and clinical care -- as well as steps taken to implement those provisions. "An Interdisciplinary Look at the Potential of Policy to Improve the Health of an Aging America: ...

Physician-researchers from the Cardiac Center at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) presented new findings on pediatric cardiovascular disease at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2014 in Chicago. Among many other topics, they investigated using automated external defibrillators in infants, long-term cardiac risk in surgical survivors of the Fontan operations for congenital heart disease, and whether centers that perform more cardiac catheterizations tend to have better outcomes. Pediatric cardiologist Yoav Dori, M.D., Ph.D., delivered ...

Alexandria, Va., USA - Today, the International and American Associations for Dental Research (IADR/AADR) published a special themed issue of the Journal of Dental Research (JDR) centered on novel dental biomaterials and technologies. Although the Associations have published clinical supplements to the JDR, this is the first special themed issue the Associations have published. This special themed issue of the JDR contains a collection of timely articles designed to provide the reader with a review of some of the important new material developments, as well as examples ...

Peruvian coastal waters may provide suitable habitat that may help the recovery of endangered South Pacific green turtles, according to a study published November 19, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Ximena Velez-Zuazo from University of Puerto Rico and colleagues. Green turtles inhabit tropical and subtropical coastal waters around the world. The authors of this study worked to identify suitable habitat for the endangered species by measuring two populations off the Peruvian coast from 2010 to 2013 in potentially important feeding grounds. The researchers ...

Florida harvester ants move and construct a similar subterranean nest about once a year, according to a study published November 19, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Walter Tschinkel from Florida State University. The Florida harvester ant excavates up to 2 meter deep nests in the sandy soils of the Gulf and Atlantic coastal plains. Scientists tracked and mapped nest relocations of over 400 colonies in a north Florida coastal plains pine forest from 2010 to 2013 and monitored the progress of entire relocations of 20 of these nests. The researchers found that ...

A new study in mice, conducted by researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet together with colleagues in Singapore and the United States, shows that our natural gut-residing microbes can influence the integrity of the blood-brain barrier, which protects the brain from harmful substances in the blood. According to the authors, the findings provide experimental evidence that our indigenous microbes contribute to the mechanism that closes the blood-brain barrier before birth. The results also support previous observations that gut microbiota can impact brain development ...

LA JOLLA--Scientists at the Salk Institute have discovered a powerful one-two punch for countering a common genetic mutation that often leads to drug-resistant cancers. The dual-drug therapy--with analogs already in use for other diseases--doubled the survival rate of mice with lung cancer and halted cancer in pancreatic cells. Lung cancer, which affects nonsmokers as well as smokers, is the most common cancer worldwide, causing 1.6 million deaths a year, far more than pancreatic, breast and colon cancer combined. About 30 percent of the most common type of lung cancer ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - An antidepressant commonly prescribed for women with postpartum depression may restore connections between cells in brain regions that are negatively affected by chronic stress during pregnancy, new research suggests. Ohio State University scientists found that rats that had been chronically stressed during pregnancy showed depressive-like behaviors after giving birth, and structures in certain areas of their brains were less complex than in unstressed rats. After receiving the drug for three weeks, these rats had no depressive symptoms and neurons ...

New York City residents' movement around the city was perturbed, but resumed less than 24-hours after Hurricane Sandy, according to a study published November 19, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Qi Wang and John Taylor from Virginia Tech. Tropical cyclones, including hurricanes and typhoons, are severe natural disasters that can cause tremendous loss of human life and suffering. Our knowledge of peoples' movements during natural disasters is so far limited due to a lack of data. The authors of this article studied human mobility using movement data from individuals ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Engineers have created a new way to use lidar technology to identify and classify landslides on a landscape scale, which may revolutionize the understanding of landslides in the U.S. and reveal them to be far more common and hazardous than often understood. The new, non-subjective technology, created by researchers at Oregon State University and George Mason University, can analyze and classify the landslide risk in an area of 50 or more square miles in about 30 minutes - a task that previously might have taken an expert several weeks to months. It can ...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- A new study by a Florida State University biologist shows that bleaching events brought on by rising sea temperatures are having a detrimental long-term impact on coral. Professor Don Levitan, chair of the Department of Biological Science, writes in the latest issue of Marine Ecology Progress Series that bleaching -- a process where high water temperatures or UV light stresses the coral to the point where it loses its symbiotic algal partner that provides the coral with color -- is also affecting the long-term fertility of the coral. "Even corals ...

New research has found that one of the world's most prolific bacteria manages to afflict humans, animals and even plants by way of a mechanism not before seen in any infectious microorganism -- a sense of touch. This unique ability helps make the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa ubiquitous, but it also might leave these antibiotic-resistant organisms vulnerable to a new form of treatment. Pseudomonas is the first pathogen found to initiate infection after merely attaching to the surface of a host, Princeton University and Dartmouth College researchers report in the journal ...

A social sensing game created at Illinois allows researchers to study natural interactions between children, collect large amounts of data about those interactions and test theories about youth aggression and victimization. The game's behavior analyses effectively identify classroom bullies, even revealing peer aggression that goes undetected by traditional research methods, the researchers say. The game's developers say it is an improvement over traditional research methods, such as questionnaires, which do not assess interactions between youth in real time. "What ...

When the mouse and human genomes were catalogued more than 10 years ago, an international team of researchers set out to understand and compare the "mission control centers" found throughout the large stretches of DNA flanking the genes. Their long-awaited report, published Nov. 19 in the journal Nature suggests why studies in mice cannot always be reproduced in humans. Importantly, the scientists say, their work also sheds light on the function of DNA's regulatory regions, which are often to blame for common chronic human diseases. "Most of the differences between mice ...

Microbiologists at NYU Langone Medical Center say they have what may be the first strong evidence that the natural presence of viruses in the gut -- or what they call the 'virome' -- plays a health-maintenance and infection-fighting role similar to that of the intestinal bacteria that dwell there and make up the "microbiome." In a series of experiments in mice that took two years to complete, the NYU Langone team found that infection with the common murine norovirus, or MNV, helped mice repair intestinal tissue damaged by inflammation and helped restore the gut's immune ...

For years, scientists have considered the laboratory mouse one of the best models for researching disease in humans because of the genetic similarity between the two mammals. Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have found that the basic principles of how genes are controlled are similar in the two species, validating the mouse's utility in clinical research. However, there are important differences in the details of gene regulation that distinguish us as a species. "At the end of the day, a lot of the genes are identical between a mouse and ...

For more than a century, the laboratory mouse (Mus musculus) has stood in for humans in experiments ranging from deciphering disease and brain function to explaining social behaviors and the nature of obesity. The small rodent has proven to be an indispensable biological tool, the basis for decades of profound scientific discovery and medical progress. But in new findings published online Nov. 19 in the journal Nature, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Ludwig Cancer Research, with colleagues across the country and world, have ...