3,500 million years ago the Martian crater Gale, through which the NASA rover Curiosity is currently traversing, was covered with glaciers, mainly over its central mound. Very cold liquid water also flowed through its rivers and lakes on the lower-lying areas, forming landscapes similar to those which can be found in Iceland or Alaska. This is reflected in an analysis of the images taken by the spacecraft orbiting the red planet. NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover has completed a Martian year –687 Earth days– this week. The vehicle travels through an arid and reddish landscape ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — It's a classic Catch-22: Medical researchers need to figure out if a promising new treatment is truly better than a current one, by randomly assigning half of a group of patients to get each treatment. But when they approach patients about taking part in the study, those 50-50 random odds don't sound good enough – and the study struggles to get enough volunteers. That slows down the effort to improve treatment for that condition. Now, new research shows the promise of an approach that takes some of the "random" out of the process, while preserving ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (June 25, 2014)—Women who had their children later in life will be happy to learn that a new study suggests an association between older maternal age at birth of the last child and greater odds for surviving to an unusually old age. That's according to a nested case-control study published online today in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS). In this study which used Long Life Family Study data, 311 women who survived past the oldest fifth percentile of survival (according to birth cohort-matched life tables) were identified ...

PITTSBURGH—Smartphones, GoPro cameras and Google Glass are making it easy for anyone to shoot video anywhere. But, they do not make it any easier to watch the tedious videos that can result. Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists, however, have invented a video highlighting technique that can automatically pick out the good parts. Called LiveLight, this method constantly evaluates action in the video, looking for visual novelty and ignoring repetitive or eventless sequences, to create a summary that enables a viewer to get the gist of what happened. What it produces ...

TORONTO, June 25, 2014–As the first people with HIV grow old, a new study from St. Michael's Hospital questions whether the health care system and other government policies are prepared to meet their complex medical and social needs. In high-income countries such as Canada, 30 per cent of people living with HIV are 50 or older, and many are living into their 60s and 70s. In San Francisco, more than half the people with HIV are over 50. "It's a positive thing that people are aging with HIV," said Dr. Sean B. Rourke, a neuropsychologist who heads the Neurobehavioural ...

Skyrmions, subatomic quasiparticles that could play a key role in future spintronic technologies, have been observed for the first time using x-rays. An international collaboration of researchers working at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS) observed skyrmions in copper selenite (Cu2SeO3) an insulator with multiferroic properties. The results not only hold promise for ultracompact data storage and processing, but may also open up entire new areas of study in the emerging field of quantum topology. "Using resonant x-ray scattering, we were able to gather unique ...

PRINCETON, N.J.—China's rapid socioeconomic growth continues to tax national water resources – especially in the agricultural sector – due to increasing demands for food. And, because of the country's climate and geography, irrigation is now widespread, burdening rivers and groundwater supplies. One solution to these growing problems, however, might be to reorganize the country's crop production and trade, especially in agricultural provinces such as Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang and Hebei, according to new report issued by Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School ...

Machine learning, in which computers learn new skills by looking for patterns in training data, is the basis of most recent advances in artificial intelligence, from voice-recognition systems to self-parking cars. It's also the technique that autonomous robots typically use to build models of their environments. That type of model-building gets complicated, however, in cases in which clusters of robots work as teams. The robots may have gathered information that, collectively, would produce a good model but which, individually, is almost useless. If constraints on power, ...

"An end to seafood by 2050?" "Fish to disappear by 2050?" These sensational media headlines were the result of a 2010 report by the United Nations Environment Program, declaring that over-fishing and pollution had nearly emptied the world's fish stocks. That scarcity portends disaster for over a billion people around the world who are dependent on fish for their main source of protein. Now, a new study by Dr. Roi Holzman and Victor China of the Department of Zoology at Tel Aviv University's George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences has uncovered the reason why 90% of fish ...

Over the last two decades, nearly half of all initiatives that review and provide feedback to clinicians on healthcare practices show little to no impact on quality of care, according to a new study by Women's College Hospital's Dr. Noah Ivers. The study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found only 28 per cent of all studies showed an improvement of at least 10 per cent in quality of care over a 25-year period. "Research shows there is a gap between recommended practices and the care patients actually receive," said Dr. Noah Ivers, a family physician ...

VIDEO: This video visualizes the effects of hydrofracking flowback fluid on colloid mobilization in unsaturated sand. Included are the injection of the colloids into the sand column at the beginning of... Click here for more information. ITHACA, N.Y. – The chemical makeup of wastewater generated by "hydrofracking" could cause the release of tiny particles in soils that often strongly bind heavy metals and pollutants, exacerbating the environmental risks during accidental spills, ...

Researchers from LSTM have exploited a natural experiment created by insecticidal pressure to determine how the most important malaria vectors - A. gambiae s.s. and A. coluzzii – respond rapidly to environmental change. Working with genome analysis specialists from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and field entomologists in Ghana, LSTM researchers sequenced the genomes of individual wild mosquitoes of each species from southern Ghana. The results, published in Nature Communications, reveal that transfer of a major insecticide resistance mutation (kdr) resulted in replacement ...

The magnetic hose designed by the researchers consists of a ferromagnetic cylinder covered by a superconductor material, a surprisingly simple design given the complicated theoretical calculations and numerous lab tests it had to undergo. A 14-centimeter prototype was built, which transports the magnetic field from one extreme to the other with a efficiency of 400% in comparison to current methods used to transport these fields. Even with the efficiency of the prototype, researchers theoretically demonstrated that the magnetic hose can be even more efficient if the ferromagnetic ...

In an important development for the health of elderly people, University of Liverpool researchers have developed a new method to target bone growth. As people age their bones lose density and, especially in women after the menopause, become more brittle. The new method developed by researchers from the University's Institute of Ageing and Chronic Disease offers the possibility of more effective treatment than currently available. Professor Jonathan Jarvis of Liverpool John Moores University designed miniature muscle pacemakers that were used in the University of Liverpool ...

Chestnut Hill, MA (June 25, 2014) - Strength in numbers may not just be a truism for those seeking moral and emotional support, but it also may be an avenue for those seeking customer support. New research shows peer-to-peer problem solving can lessen the need for firms to actually have to contact their supplier for a traditional customer support service call. "This has never been shown before, this notion that people who have full-time day jobs handling support for their companies also take time to answer other people's questions, thereby significantly reducing their ...

Amsterdam, NL, 25 June 2014 – Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has become a well-recognized non-pharmacologic treatment that improves motor symptoms of patients with early and advanced Parkinson's disease. Evidence now indicates that DBS can decrease the number and severity of non motor symptoms of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) as well, according to a review published in the Journal of Parkinson's Disease. "Non motor features are common in PD patients, occur across all disease stages, and while well described, are still under-recognized when considering their huge ...

(Boston)--Women who are able to naturally have children later in life tend to live longer and the genetic variants that allow them to do so might also facilitate exceptionally long life spans. A Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) study published in Menopause: The Journal of the North American Menopause Society, says women who are able to have children after the age of 33 have a greater chance of living longer than women who had their last child before the age of 30. "Of course this does not mean women should wait to have children at older ages in order to ...

Earlier this year, mounting concerns over the potential health effects of triclosan, a common antimicrobial ingredient, prompted Minnesota to ban the germ-killer from consumer soaps statewide starting in 2017. Are these concerns warranted? An article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society, investigates. Jyllian Kemsley, a senior editor at C&EN, notes that when it was first patented, triclosan was used as an antimicrobial agent in health care settings. It was a much more benign option as a surgical scrub than the ...

As many patients know, treating wounds has become far more sophisticated than sewing stitches and applying gauze, but dressings still have shortcomings. Now scientists are reporting the next step in the evolution of wound treatment with a material that leads to faster healing than existing commercial dressings and prevents potentially harmful bacteria from sticking. Their study appears in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Yung Chang and colleagues note that the need for improved dressings is becoming urgent as the global population ages. With it, health ...

The oil and gas extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, could potentially contribute more pollutants to groundwater than past research has suggested, according to a new study in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology. Scientists are reporting that when spilled or deliberately applied to land, waste fluids from fracking are likely picking up tiny particles in the soil that attract heavy metals and other chemicals with possible health implications for people and animals. Tammo S. Steenhuis and colleagues note that fracking, which involves ...

Testing for cocaine and other drugs usually involves two steps: a quick on-site prescreen, and then a more accurate confirmatory test at a distant laboratory. This process can take days or weeks — but that's too long in many cases where public safety is at risk. Now, researchers report development of a backpack-sized device that can perform highly accurate and sensitive tests anywhere within 15 minutes. The study appears in ACS' journal Analytical Chemistry. Aaron Wheeler and colleagues explain that the current two-stage system of testing urine for drugs of abuse is expensive ...

Biological membranes are like a guarded border. They separate the cell from the environment and at the same time control the import and export of molecules. The nuclear membrane can be crossed via many tiny pores. Scientists at the Biozentrum and the Swiss Nanoscience Institute at the University of Basel, together with an international team of researchers, have discovered that proteins found within the nuclear pore function similar to a velcro. In Nature Nanotechnology, they report how these proteins can be used for controlled and selective transport of particles. There ...

This news release is available in German. The human immune system is very complex. A large number of different cells with various functions ensure that invading microorganisms such as viruses or bacteria can quickly be rendered innocuous and the entire organism stays healthy. The immune system also includes natural killer cells (NK cells), which recognise and eliminate tumour or virus-infected cells. NK cells therefore combat the body's own stressed cells to prevent them from becoming a potential hazard. However, this bears its risks. Other immune cells, the specific ...

In the past 20 years, the Laboratory for Shock Wave and Detonation Physics Research in Institute of Fluid Physics (IFP), China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP) has conducted the research in hypervelocity launch technology. The State Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing of Wuhan University of Technology participated in the research as a cooperator, and took charge of the flier processing. In this project, significant progresses have been made in optimization of the physical design, material processing and experimental measurement ...

Confined water exists widely and plays important roles in natural environments, particularly inside biological nanochannels. Professor Lei Jiang and his group from State Key Laboratory of Organic Solids, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, set out to study this unified bionic frontier. After several years of innovative research, they developed a series of biomimetic nanochannels, delivered a strategy for the design and construction of smart nanochannels and applied the nanochannels in energy conversion systems. The author thought the inner surface property ...