Livermore - New results from the NASA NuSTAR telescope show that a supernova close to our galaxy experienced a single-sided explosion. A team of scientists including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers found that X-ray emissions taken with the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) show that the Supernova 1987A explosion was highly asymmetric. The results appear in the May 8 edition of the journal, Science. NuSTAR observations, including those of 1987A, provide strong and compelling observational evidence that supernovae are not symmetric. Supernova ...

El Salvador, Niger, and Pakistan are performing better in improving water and sanitation for their citizens than industrial giants like Russia and Brazil according to the new WaSH Performance Index developed by The Water Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Gillings School of Global Public Health. The new index to be released Friday, May 8 during a live webcast shows which countries are leaders in improving access to water and sanitation for their citizens. Sub-Saharan Africa countries including Mali, South Africa, and Ethiopia are also among the ...

(MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- May 8, 2015) St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists have gained ground toward developing more targeted therapies for the most common childhood brain tumor. The findings appear today in the Journal of Molecular Biology. The findings involve the DDX3X gene. In 2012, the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital -- Washington University Pediatric Cancer Genome Project highlighted DDX3X as a promising focus for efforts to develop targeted therapies against medulloblastoma. Such treatments target the genetic mistakes that give rise to the brain tumor's ...

PITTSBURGH -- Scientists have been manipulating genes for a while. The University of Pittsburgh's Alexander Deiters just found a way to control the process with higher precision. By using light. Deiters and his group are the first to achieve this. The resulting paper was recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Since 2013, scientists have used a gene-editing tool called CRISPR/Cas9. The method employs a bacterially derived protein (Cas9) and a synthetic guide RNA to induce a double-strand break at a specific location in the genome. This ...

Object recognition -- determining what objects are where in a digital image -- is a central research topic in computer vision. But a person looking at an image will spontaneously make a higher-level judgment about the scene as whole: It's a kitchen, or a campsite, or a conference room. Among computer science researchers, the problem known as "scene recognition" has received relatively little attention. Last December, at the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, MIT researchers announced the compilation of the world's largest database of images ...

The Philippines warning center has raised a #2 warning for its citizens in the Luzon province of Catanduanes. This warning indicates, among other things, that the tropical cyclone will affect the locality and that winds of greater than 100 kph up to 185 kph (62 to 114 mph) may be expected in at least 18 hours. Philippines know the storm as Dodong and have also raised warning #1 for the areas of Luzon provinces of Sorsogon. Albay, Camarines Norte, Camarines Sur, Quezon, Polillo Island, Aurora, Quirino, Isabela and the Visayas provinces of Northern and Eastern Samar. Warning ...

Forecasters expect Tropical Depression 07W which is riding behind Typhoon Noul to intensify to typhoon strength within the next five days. Currently 07W is located 298 miles southeast of Pohnopei, one of the Federated States of Micronesia. It is moving at a slow 5 knots on a east northeast trajectory with maximum sustained winds of 30 knots gusting to 40 (18 to 24 mph). Maximum wave height is 11 feet. 07W is moving east, but will turn round to a northwesterly course. A tropical storm WARNING is in force for Kosrae, Pingelap and Mokil in Pohnpei State. A tropical storm ...

For the last decade, scientists have deployed increasingly capable underwater robots to map and monitor pockets of the ocean to track the health of fisheries, and survey marine habitats and species. In general, such robots are effective at carrying out low-level tasks, specifically assigned to them by human engineers -- a tedious and time-consuming process for the engineers. When deploying autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), much of an engineer's time is spent writing scripts, or low-level commands, in order to direct a robot to carry out a mission plan. Now a new ...

The EU-funded MycoSynVac project combines gene engineering and biotechnology to design a novel veterinary vaccine chassis based on the bacterium Mycoplasma pneumoniae. By combining their systems biology expertise with cutting-edge synthetic biology methodologies, researchers will engineer a universal chassis, which will be free of virulence and optimized for fast growth in a serum-free medium. This chassis will be used to create specific vaccines against two highly detrimental pathogens that are causing suffering in livestock animals and large financial losses to the ...

TAMPA, Fla. -- Androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) is a common treatment option for patients with advanced stage prostate cancer. But nearly 80 percent of patients who receive ADT report experiencing hot flashes during and after treatment. Moffitt Cancer Center researchers are working to determine what genetic factors and other characteristics might make prostate cancer patients more likely to experience hot flashes during and after therapy. Cancer therapies often are associated with unwanted side effects. Some side effects can be so debilitating that patients decide ...

Mexico is undergoing a transformation: ranked as the second largest economy in Latin America, it's an increasingly dynamic middle-income country -- and its population is ageing rapidly. How will this relate to the burden of cancer? Mexico is an interesting case study for the relationship between population ageing and cancer burden, according to new research published in ecancermedicalscience. Researchers led by Dr Ajay Aggarwal of the Institute of Cancer Policy, Kings College London, UK, examined population data, cancer databases, and the research output of Mexican ...

The ability that some people have to use echoes to determine the position of an otherwise silent object, in a similar way to bats and dolphins, requires good high-pitch hearing in both ears, according to new research from the University of Southampton. The study, published in Hearing Research, found that locating an object by listening to echoes, without moving the head, requires good hearing at high frequencies and in both ears. This builds on research published in 2013 by the team at the University's Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR) that demonstrated ...

Scientists at LSTM have come a step closer to understanding why people exposed to household air pollution (HAP) are at higher risk of lung infections such as pneumonia and tuberculosis. Three billion people worldwide are exposed to HAP from the fuels they burn to cook, light and heat with at home. Frequently, charcoal, wood and food waste are burned and generate high concentrations of smoke particles. This exposure is associated with increased risk of pneumonia, particularly in low and middle income countries where bacterial pneumonia is the biggest cause of infant mortality. ...

PITTSBURGH-- Countless research and self-help books claim that having more sex will lead to increased happiness, based on the common finding that those having more sex are also happier. However, there are many reasons why one might observe this positive relationship between sex and happiness. Being happy in the first place, for example, might lead someone to have more sex (what researchers call 'reverse causality'), or being healthy might result in being both happier and having more sex. In the first study to examine the causal connection between sexual frequency and ...

This news release is available in Spanish. Metals are pollutants that have to be monitored in order to obtain a global overview of the quality of water systems, due to the fact that they remain in the environment. Although sediments act as a drain for pollutants, they can also act as a source of pollutants under certain environmental conditions (like changes in the composition of the water or movement of the sediments owing to a flood event). The UPV/EHU's Hydrology-Environment Group has conducted research on the River Deba and its tributaries to assess the influence ...

The most populated areas of Puget Sound have experienced striking shifts in marine species, with declines in herring and smelt that have long provided food for other marine life and big increases in the catch of jellyfish, which contribute far less to the food chain, according to new research that tracks species over the last 40 years. The parallel trends of rising human population and declining forage fish such as herring and smelt indicate that human influences such as pollution and development may be eroding species that long dominated Puget Sound. In particular, the ...

Hamilton, ON (May 7, 2015) - A team of researchers based at McMaster University has developed a new understanding of post-concussion syndrome, answering questions that have been plaguing researchers in the field. Their study, published in the medical journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity, provides an explanation for why many people with even very trivial head injuries, or even injuries to other parts of their bodies, experience incapacitating post-concussion like syndromes. These symptoms include headaches, dizziness, cognitive impairment and other neuropsychiatric symptoms ...

Researchers have discovered a new gene that enables plants to regulate their growth in different temperatures. Published in PLoS Genetics today, the finding could lead to new ways of optimising plant growth when it comes to climate change. Associate Professor Sureshkumar Balasubramanian, from Monash University, along with colleagues in Spain, made the discovery after analysing natural populations of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, commonly known as thale cress. "Plants are highly sensitive to environmental changes and even small changes in temperature impact ...

Danish researchers at the University of Copenhagen have discovered how to map more than one protein at a time, when proteins repair damaged DNA. It is a discovery that will help accelerate the process of developing better and gentler cancer treatments. The discovery has just been described in an article in the renowned scientific journal, Science. When DNA is damaged, several different proteins start pouring in to repair the damage; their types depend on the damage done. Up until now, it has been common practice to study one protein at a time, but by way of so-called ...

Washington, DC (May 5, 2015) -- Dating apps like Tinder offer a quick look at a potential connection, with a simple swipe to either decline or accept the potential match. The stakes are high for putting the right picture in your profile. But does putting an enhanced picture of yourself increase the chance you'll make that match? Being cat-fished is a real risk and users have to take into consideration whether the picture of the person is "too hot to trust." A new study by researchers at the University of Connecticut found that enhanced photos of women viewed by men increased ...

Ann Arbor, MI, May 8, 2015 - Certain regions in the United States are characterized by a higher prevalence of obesity, which suggests that a person's socioeconomic, physical, and social environments can affect opportunities for healthy behaviors that might prevent excess weight gain. But what happens when people move from one neighborhood to another? A new study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that people who moved to more socioeconomically deprived neighborhoods gained additional weight. Researchers used data from the Dallas Heart Survey ...

Ann Arbor, MI, May 8, 2015 - Children are exposed to a considerable amount of televised food advertising: more than six ads accounting for about 2:21 minutes per hour during typical programming. Concerns about the role of televised food advertising as a contributor to childhood obesity led to the food industry adopting of a program of self-regulation. A new study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine evaluated the effectiveness of industry self-regulation and found that this program has achieved little improvement in the nutritional quality of foods advertised ...

Philadelphia, PA, May 8, 2015 - An important function of the human placenta is to protect the fetus from detrimental substances in maternal blood, such as glucocorticoids or toxins. Placental membrane-bound transporter proteins, known as multidrug resistance proteins, protect the fetus by returning unwanted materials to the maternal circulation. A study in The American Journal of Pathology reports that bacterial and viral infections differentially influence these transporter proteins in early and late pregnancy, suggesting potential mechanisms underlying infection-related ...

The Sun is a huge source of energy. In just one hour planet Earth is hit by so much sunshine that humankind could cover its energy needs for an entire year if only we knew how to harvest and save it. But storing sunshine is not trivial. Now a student at Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen has researched his way to a breakthrough which may prove pivotal for technologies trying to capture the energy of the sun, and saving it for a rainy day. Anders Bo Skov has recently started studying for his Master's degree in chemistry at University of Copenhagen. Together ...

Switching from driving to work to using public transport, walking, or cycling might help commuters shed weight within a couple of years, suggests research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. Given that car use is high, the findings strengthen the case for incentivising walking or cycling to boost population health, suggest the researchers. They base their findings on the responses of 4000 people to three waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) in 2004-5, 2005-6, and 2006-7. The BHPS is a long term annual study of a representative ...