Cellular therapeutics – using intact cells to treat and cure disease – is a hugely promising new approach in medicine but it is hindered by the inability of doctors and scientists to effectively track the movements, destination and persistence of these cells in patients without resorting to invasive procedures, like tissue sampling. In a paper published September 17 in the online journal Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh and elsewhere describe the first human tests of using ...

NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the Atlantic Ocean and captured a picture of Tropical Storm Edouard as it continues to weaken. The National Hurricane Center expects Edouard to affect the western Azores over the next two days. NASA's Aqua satellite flew over Tropical Storm Edouard on Sept. 18 at 1:45 p.m. EDT and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument took a visible picture that showed the eye had disappeared and the bulk of clouds pushed east of center. At 5 a.m. EDT on Sept. 19, Edouard's maximum sustained winds had decreased to near ...

Former Hurricane Odile may be a bad memory for Baja California, but the remnants have moved over New Mexico and Texas where they are expected to bring rainfall there. NASA's TRMM satellite measured Odile's heavy rainfall rates on Sept. 18, and NOAA's GOES-West satellite saw the clouds associated with the former storm continue to linger over the U.S. Southwest on Sept. 19. The remnants of Hurricane Odile were dropping heavy rain in the area from southern Arizona to western Texas when NASA-JAXA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite flew over on September ...

Tropical Storm Polo is riding along the coast of western Mexico like horses in the game of his namesake. NASA's Aqua satellite saw Polo about 300 miles south-southeast of Baja California on its track north. NASA's Aqua satellite flew over Polo on Sept. 18 at 4:35 p.m. EDT and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer captured a visible image of the storm that showed that much of the clouds, thunderstorms and showers were west and south of the center of circulation, and away from the coast. That's an indication that easterly wind shear had increased and were pushing ...

Tropical Storm Fung-Wong continued to affect the Philippines while moving north through the Northwestern Pacific Ocean. NASA's Aqua satellite provided infrared data on the storm's clouds that showed some high, strong thunderstorms with the potential for heavy rainfall over the northern and central regions of the country. The storm is now expected to affect three more countries over the next several days. The AIRS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite uses infrared light to read cloud top temperatures in tropical cyclones. When Aqua passed over Fung-Wong infrared data ...

MADISON, Wis. — Bent and tossed by the wind, a field of soybean plants presents a challenge for an Asian lady beetle on the hunt for aphids. But what if the air — and the soybeans — were still? Rising temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns may get the lion's share of our climate change attention, but predators may want to give some thought to wind, according to a University of Wisconsin Madison zoologist's study, which is among the first to demonstrate the way "global stilling" may alter predator-prey relationships. "There are all sorts of other things that ...

September 19, 2014 -- Recent two-generation approaches to reducing poverty that help children and their parents are receiving increasing attention from researchers, advocates, and foundations. By combining education and training for parents to enable them to move to jobs that offer a path out of poverty with high-quality early care and education for children, these programs aim to improve the life opportunities of both. However, according to a new report from the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP), State Policies through a Two-Generation Lens, while research ...

A new resource unveiled today by researchers from several Harvard University labs in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin provides both experienced and aspiring researchers with the intellectual raw materials needed to design, build, and operate robots made from soft, flexible materials. With the advent of low-cost 3D printing, laser cutters, and other advances in manufacturing technology, soft robotics is emerging as an increasingly important field. Using principles drawn from conventional rigid robot design, but working with pliable materials, engineers are pioneering ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- Researchers at MIT and Northeastern University have equipped a robot with a novel tactile sensor that lets it grasp a USB cable draped freely over a hook and insert it into a USB port. The sensor is an adaptation of a technology called GelSight, which was developed by the lab of Edward Adelson, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Vision Science at MIT, and first described in 2009. The new sensor isn't as sensitive as the original GelSight sensor, which could resolve details on the micrometer scale. But it's smaller — small enough to fit on a robot's ...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Researchers at Jacksonville's campus of Mayo Clinic have discovered a defect in a key cell-signaling pathway they say contributes to both overproduction of toxic protein in the brains of Alzheimer's disease patients as well as loss of communication between neurons — both significant contributors to this type of dementia. Their study, in the online issue of Neuron, offers the potential that targeting this specific defect with drugs "may rejuvenate or rescue this pathway," says the study's lead investigator, Guojun Bu, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at Mayo ...

Membrane proteins and large protein complexes are notoriously difficult to study with X-ray crystallography, not least because they are often very difficult, if not impossible, to crystallize, but also because their very nature means they are highly flexible. The result is that when a structure can be obtained it is often of low resolution, ambiguous and reveals a mosaic-like spread of protein domains that sometimes create more puzzles than they solve. [Schröder, Levitt & Brunger. (2014), Acta Cryst. D70, 2241-2255; doi: 10.1107/S1399004714016496 ] Now, Gunnar Schröder ...

With almost all of the U.S. population armed with cellphones – and close to 80 percent carrying a smartphone – mobile phones have become second-nature for most people. What's coming next, say University of Washington researchers, is the ability to interact with our devices not just with touchscreens, but through gestures in the space around the phone. Some smartphones are starting to incorporate 3-D gesture sensing based on cameras, for example, but cameras consume significant battery power and require a clear view of the user's hands. UW engineers have developed a ...

Many patients with advanced, incurable cancer do not receive any palliative care, reveals new research to be presented later this month at the ESMO 2014 Congress in Madrid, Spain, 26-30 September. The findings are astonishing as they come at the same time as 15 new oncology centres in Europe, Canada, South America and Africa are being awarded the prestigious title of 'ESMO Designated Centre of Integrated Oncology and Palliative Care.' SR I Dr Alexandru Grigorescu, medical oncology consultant at the Institute of Oncology Bucharest, Romania, member of the ESMO Palliative ...

An ultrasensitive biosensor made from the wonder material graphene has been used to detect molecules that indicate an increased risk of developing cancer. The biosensor has been shown to be more than five times more sensitive than bioassay tests currently in use, and was able to provide results in a matter of minutes, opening up the possibility of a rapid, point-of-care diagnostic tool for patients. The biosensor has been presented today, 19 September, in IOP Publishing's journal 2D Materials. To develop a viable bionsensor, the researchers, from the University of ...

TORONTO, Sept. 19, 2014 — York University researchers say a simple test that combines thinking and movement can help to detect heightened risk for developing Alzheimer's disease in a person, even before there are any telltale behavioural signs of dementia. Faculty of Health Professor Lauren Sergio and PhD candidate Kara Hawkins who led the study asked the participants to complete four increasingly demanding visual-spatial and cognitive-motor tasks, on dual screen laptop computers. The test aimed at detecting the tendency for Alzheimer's in those who were having cognitive ...

For future astronauts, the process of suiting up may go something like this: Instead of climbing into a conventional, bulky, gas-pressurized suit, an astronaut may don a lightweight, stretchy garment, lined with tiny, musclelike coils. She would then plug in to a spacecraft's power supply, triggering the coils to contract and essentially shrink-wrap the garment around her body. The skintight, pressurized suit would not only support the astronaut, but would give her much more freedom to move during planetary exploration. To take the suit off, she would only have to apply ...

Call it the Jimmy Durante of dinosaurs – a newly discovered hadrosaur with a truly distinctive nasal profile. The new dinosaur, named Rhinorex condrupus by paleontologists from North Carolina State University and Brigham Young University, lived in what is now Utah approximately 75 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period. Rhinorex, which translates roughly into "King Nose," was a plant-eater and a close relative of other Cretaceous hadrosaurs like Parasaurolophus and Edmontosaurus. Hadrosaurs are usually identified by bony crests that extended from the skull, ...

A collaborative research team led by Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) scientists has identified a new gene associated with fasting glucose and insulin levels in rats, mice and in humans. The findings are published in the September issue of Genetics. Leah Solberg Woods, Ph.D., associate professor of pediatrics at MCW and a researcher in the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin Research Institute, led the study and is the corresponding author of the paper. The authors of the paper identified a gene called Tpcn2 in which a variant was associated with fasting glucose levels ...

The results of the QUT Centre for Accident Research & Road Safety - Queensland (CARRS-Q) study have been presented at the Occupational Safety in Transport Conference (OSIT) which is being held on the Gold Coast and finishes today. Dr Ross Blackman, a CARRS-Q road safety researcher, said speed limit credibility was being put at risk when reduced speed limits and related traffic controls remained in place at inactive roadwork sites. "It's seen as crying wolf. If people are asked to slow down at roadwork sites but find there is no roadwork being undertaken they become ...

Leguminous plants are able to grow well in infertile land, and bear many beans that are important to humans. The reason for this is because most legumes have a symbiotic relationship with bacteria, called rhizobia, that can fix nitrogen in the air and then supply the host plant with ammonia as a nutrient. The plants create symbiotic organs called nodules in their roots. However, if too many root nodules are made it will adversely affect the growth of the plants, because the energy cost of maintaining excessive nodules is too large. Therefore legumes must have a mechanism ...

Paratuberculosis, also known as Johne's disease, is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP). In Austria, there is a legal obligation to report the disease. Paratuberculosis mainly affects ruminants and causes treatment-resistant diarrhoea and wasting among affected animals. The disease can cause considerable economic losses for commercial farms. The animals produce less milk, exhibit fertility problems and are more susceptible to other conditions such as udder inflammation. To date there has been no treatment for paratuberculosis. ...

Japanese researchers showed monkeys a number of images representing various glosses and then they measured the responses of 39 neurons by using microelectrodes. They found that a specific population of neurons changed the intensities of the responses linearly according to either the contrast-of-highlight, sharpness-of-highlight, or brightness of the object. This shows that these 3 perceptual parameters are used as parameters when the brain recognizes a variety of glosses. They also found that different parameters are represented by different populations of neurons. This ...

Imagine you are a species which over thousands of years has adapted to the arctic cold, and then you get exposed to a substance that makes the cold dangerous for you. This is happening to the small white worm Enchytraeus albidus, and the cold provoking substance, called nonylphenol, comes from the use of certain detergents, pesticides and cosmetics. Nonylphenol is suspected of being a endocrine disruptor, but when entering the worm it has another dangerous effect: It inhibits the worm's ability to protect the cells in its body from cold damage. Enchytraeus albidus ...

The present size and speed limitations of computer processors and memory could be overcome by replacing silicon with 'phase-change materials' (PCMs), which are capable of reversibly switching between two structural phases with different electrical states – one crystalline and conducting and the other glassy and insulating – in billionths of a second. Modelling and tests of PCM-based devices have shown that logic-processing operations can be performed in non-volatile memory cells using particular combinations of ultra-short voltage pulses, which is not possible with silicon-based ...

An international collaboration led by research groups from Mainz and Darmstadt, Germany, has achieved the synthesis of a new class of chemical compounds for superheavy elements at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Research (RNC) in Japan. For the first time, a chemical bond was established between a superheavy element – seaborgium (element 106) in the present study – and a carbon atom. Eighteen atoms of seaborgium were converted into seaborgium hexacarbonyl complexes, which include six carbon monoxide molecules bound to the seaborgium. Its gaseous properties ...