ROCHESTER, Minn. — If a research survey of African American professional women is any indication, attitudes may be changing towards participation in medical research. Mayo Clinic and The Links, Incorporated researchers teamed up to survey members of the international women's organization, and found that a majority of African American women surveyed are willing to or have taken part in medical research. The results appear in the Journal of Women's Health. "Our findings are highly encouraging," says Sharonne Hayes, M.D., Mayo Clinic cardiologist, co-author of the study, ...

The Little Deer fire in California began as a lightning strike on July 31, 2014. Currently it has burned 4,700 acres and is 43% contained however there has been increased humidity over the fire the last 24 hours with shifting wind conditions. The threat of thunder storms today (08/04) and tomorrow (08/05) may cause an increase in fire activity. The Beaver Complex is comprised of the Salt Creek Fire (20 miles northwest of Medford) and the Oregon Gulch Fire (15 miles east of Ashland), which are lightning-started fires that started on July 30-31, 2014. After it was first ...

The Eiler wildfire which began on July 31, 2014, has almost consumed 26,000 acres. It is currently unknown as to the cause of this fire. The weather patterns currently around this fire do not bode well for a quick containment. Maximum temperatures are in the mid- to high 80's with 10-20% relative humidity. There is an unstable atmosphere at work along with thunderstorm chances which are increasingly today (08/04) through Wednesday (08/06). A Red Flag Warning in effect for dry lightning on Monday (08/04). The Bald Fire began with a lightning strike on July 30, 2014. ...

Canadian wildfires have been raging this summer and some of the smoke from those fires already drifted downward into the U.S. over the Great Lakes (see the image feature from July 25 below). In this image collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Aqua satellite on August 02, 2014 the large swath of smoke from these fires has taken a northward track and settled over the Bay of Baffin which borders Greenland. To view the other Canadian fire images from July 2014: Smoke from Canadian Fires Hovers Over Great Lakes - July 25, 2014 Smoke ...

Wildfires in far eastern Russia dot the landscape and what isn't covered by the fires is covered by the smoke that rises from these wildfires. This image taken by the Terra satellite shows the entire area covered with a blanket of heavy smoke coming off of dozens of wildfires that have broken out in the remote areas of Russia. Usually these fires are caused by lightning strikes that then consume the dry vegetation. With nothing to stop the spread, these fires take off and cover the landscape, especially during this time of year.INFORMATION: NASA's Terra satellite collected ...

Three massive volcanic eruptions occurred on Jupiter's moon Io within a two-week period last August, leading astronomers to speculate that these presumed rare "outbursts," which can send material hundreds of miles above the surface, might be much more common than astronomers thought. "We typically expect one huge outburst every one or two years, and they're usually not this bright," said Imke de Pater, professor and chair of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of one of two papers describing the eruptions. "Here we had three extremely ...

Fairfax, Va., August 4, 2014—Standardizing prescribing practices for single-fraction radiation therapy (SFRT) for palliation of bone metastases could lead to cost savings and improvement in patients' quality of life, according to a study published in the August 1, 2014 edition of the International Journal of Radiation Oncology • Biology • Physics (Red Journal), the official scientific journal of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO). Bone metastases are a common manifestation of distant spread of disease, occurring most frequently with prostate, breast ...

Boulder, Colo., USA – How long does it take for natural Earth processes to form hydraulic fractures? Is the formation driven by sediment compaction, oil and gas generation, or something else? What role do these natural fractures play in modern hydraulic fracturing production? A new GSA BULLETIN study by András Fall and colleagues from The University of Texas at Austin, Virginia Tech, and ExxonMobil addresses these questions, and the article is open-access online. The process of fracture formation by a natural increase in pore-fluid pressure has previously been referred ...

There's a new wave of sound on the horizon carrying with it a broad scope of tantalizing potential applications, including advanced ultrasonic imaging and therapy, acoustic cloaking, and levitation and particle manipulation. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a technique for generating acoustic bottles in open air that can bend the paths of sound waves along prescribed convex trajectories. Sound waves move much like light waves. They travel on a straight path but this path - through ...

During the middle of 2013, Jupiter's moon Io came alive with volcanism. Now, an image from the Gemini Observatory captures what is one of the brightest volcanoes ever seen in our solar system. The image, obtained on August 29, reveals the magnitude of the eruption that was the "grand finale" in a series of eruptions on the distant moon. Io's volcanism is caused by the tidal push-and-pull of massive Jupiter, which heats the satellite's interior – making it our Solar System's most volcanically active known body. According to University of California Berkeley (UCB) astronomer ...

Changes in the treatment of the most common form of heart attack over the past decade have been associated with higher survival rates for men and women regardless of age, race and ethnicity, according to a UCLA-led analysis. But the study also suggests that there is room for improvement in how current treatment guidelines are applied among specific patient groups. The researchers reviewed records for 6.5 million people who were treated for heart attacks between 2002 and 2011. The analysis was among the first and largest national studies to assess the impact of the trend ...

Positive emotions – even those viewed through a distorted lens – may play an exacerbating role in fueling eating disorders like anorexia nervosa, which has a death rate 12 times higher for females between the ages of 15 and 24 than all other causes of death combined, according to a Rutgers study. In research published in Clinical Psychological Science, Edward Selby, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, School of Arts and Sciences, measured over a two week period the emotional states of 118 women between the ages of 18-58 being treated for anorexia nervosa. ...

NASA and NOAA satellites have been supplying forecasters with data developing tropical cyclones in the Eastern and Central Pacific Ocean and over the last several days. There have been as many as five tropical systems at the same time. On Monday, August 4, there were three tropical systems stretching from west to east: Tropical Depression Genevieve in the Central Pacific, Hurricane Iselle and Tropical Storm Julio in the Eastern Pacific. Tropical Depression Genevieve May Strengthen On August 4, Tropical Depression Genevieve was located about 930 miles (1,495 km) southwest ...

SAN ANTONIO (August 4, 2014) — A calculator to help men and their doctors assess their risk of prostate cancer, developed at the UT Health Science Center, has had a major upgrade to enhance how men and their physicians better understand a man's risk of prostate cancer. A description of the update's needs and benefits is described by the Health Science Center authors in a viewpoint published online Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "The prostate cancer risk calculator has been updated using current risk factors and a better interface; the current ...

Whale sharks (Rhincodon typus)—which grow more than 30 feet long—are the largest fish in the world's ocean, but little is known about their movements on a daily basis or over years. A newly discovered juvenile whale shark aggregation off Saudi Arabia is giving researchers a rare glimpse into the lives of these gentle giants. Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and colleagues from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries report on the movements of whale sharks tagged at the ...

Horses are sensitive to the facial expressions and attention of other horses, including the direction of the eyes and ears. The findings, reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on August 4, are a reminder for us humans to look beyond our own limitations and recognize that other species may communicate in ways that we can't, the researchers say. After all, human ears aren't mobile. "Our study is the first to examine a potential cue to attention that humans do not have: the ears," says Jennifer Wathan of the University of Sussex. "Previous work investigating ...

Researchers have uncovered one of the basic processes that may help to explain why some people's thinking skills decline in old age. Age-related declines in intelligence are strongly related to declines on a very simple task of visual perception speed, the researchers report in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on August 4. The evidence comes from experiments in which researchers showed 600 healthy older people very brief flashes of one of two shapes on a screen and measured the time it took each of them to reliably tell one from the other. Participants repeated ...

In the first study of its kind, Prapti Gautam, PhD, and colleagues from The Saban Research Institute of Children's Hospital Los Angeles found that children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) showed weaker brain activation during specific cognitive tasks than their unaffected counterparts. These novel findings suggest a possible neural mechanism for the persistent attention problems seen in individuals with FASD. The results of this study will be published in Cerebral Cortex on August 4. "Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used to observe ...

Scientists in the middle of the status hierarchy, not those at the top or the bottom, are the first to work with easy-to-use commercial products. They are also the most prone to imitate their prior collaborators' use of such commercial kits. These are among the findings of a study of scientists-as-customers appearing in Marketing Science, a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). Nonmonotonic Status Effects in New Product Adoption is by Yansong Hu of the University of Warwick and Christophe Van den Bulte of the University ...

Describing criminals and criminal activities with animal metaphors leads to more retaliation against perpetrators by inducing the perception that they're likely to continue engaging in violence, a new Aggressive Behavior study suggests. When surveying jury?eligible adults, investigators varied animalistic descriptions of a violent crime and examined its effect on the severity of the punishment for the act. Compared with non?animalistic descriptions, animalistic descriptions resulted in significantly harsher punishment for the perpetrator due to an increase in perceived ...

It's easy to guess why it doesn't take long to learn to avoid certain behaviors and embrace others. But how do we know what drives these predilections? A study led by Aimee Dunlap at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and co-authored by University of Minnesota researcher David Stephens, offers insight into the evolutionary underpinning of animals' innate ability to quickly absorb critical life lessons. Animals are flooded with stimuli, but survival often depends on their ability to form specific associations that enhance fitness while ignoring others entirely. Psychologists ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — A team of researchers, led by Professor Charles E. Wyman, at the University of California, Riverside's Bourns College of Engineering have developed a versatile, relatively non-toxic, and efficient way to convert raw agricultural and forestry residues and other plant matter, known as lignocellulosic biomass, into biofuels and chemicals. The patent-pending method, called Co-solvent Enhanced Lignocellulosic Fractionation (CELF), brings researchers closer to solving the long elusive goal of producing fuels and chemicals from biomass at high enough yields ...

The low pressure area known as System 96W struggled to organize for a week and finally became Tropical Storm Nakri on August 2 as the Suomi NPP satellite passed overhead. Nakri had a short life, however, as it dissipated the following day while approaching South Korea. On Saturday, August 2, at 9 p.m. EDT, Nakri's maximum sustained winds were near 40 knots (46 mph/74 kph). At that time it was centered about 100 nautical miles southeast of Kunsan Air Base, near 35.0 north and 125.0 east. It was moving to the north at 14 knots (16.1 mph/21.9 kph). When NASA-NOAA's Suomi ...

As Super Typhoon Halong tracks north through the Northwestern Pacific Ocean, NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites have seen the powerful storm appear to wink at space as it developed and "opened" an eye and then close its eye as clouds moved over it. That wink appears to be a sign of eyewall replacement in the powerful storm. On August 2 at 01:45 UTC (August 1 at 9:45 p.m. EDT) NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of a wide-eyed Super Typhoon Halong moving through the Northwestern Pacific Ocean. At the time of the image, Halong was a powerful Category 5 Super Typhoon ...

Imagine a world in which your wristwatch or other wearable device communicates directly with your online profiles, storing information about your daily activities where you can best access it – all without requiring batteries. Or, battery-free sensors embedded around your home could track minute-by-minute temperature changes and send that information to your thermostat to help conserve energy. This not-so-distant "Internet of Things" reality would extend connectivity to perhaps billions of devices. Sensors could be embedded in everyday objects to help monitor and track ...