Astronomers using data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Kepler Space Telescope have discovered clear skies and steamy water vapour on a planet outside our Solar System. The planet, known as HAT-P-11b, is about the size of Neptune, making it the smallest exoplanet ever on which water vapour has been detected. The results will appear in the online version of the journal Nature on 24 September 2014. The discovery is a milestone on the road to eventually finding molecules in the atmospheres of smaller, rocky planets more akin ...

A team of researchers, led by Miho N. Ishigaki, at the Kavli IPMU, The University of Tokyo, pointed out that the elemental abundance of the most iron-poor star can be explained by elements ejected from supernova explosions of the universe's first stars. Their theoretical study revealed that massive stars, which are several tens of times more immense than the Sun, were present among the first stars. The presence of these massive stars has great implications on the theory of star formation in the absence of heavy elements. Iron-poor stars provide insight about the very ...

CORAL GABLES, FLORIDA (September 24, 2014) — The challenge and excitement of catching a large fish makes shark fishing very appealing for recreational anglers. However, many species of sharks have experienced population declines due to commercial overfishing. Although generally overlooked by conservation advocates, catch and release shark fishing can provide a strong economic incentive to protect sharks, benefiting both ecotourism businesses and shark conservation. Florida is one of the largest recreational shark fishing markets in the world. However, Florida's recreational ...

Miami, Fla. (September, 24, 2014)—Two decades after its initiation, the University of Miami (UM) Linda Ray Intervention Program for substance-exposed babies and toddlers demonstrates long-term success. The program is designed to help children from birth to three years of age who are developmentally delayed, prenatally exposed to drugs and often with the additional risk of maltreatment, ultimately achieve their developmental milestones and be ready to enter kindergarten ready to learn. The program started in 1993 as an innovative partnership between the UM Linda Ray Intervention ...

DENVER – There were only modest acute changes in cardiac biomarkers and electrocardiograms and there were no clinically significant cardiac events in patients with high-dose radiation exposure to the heart following thoracic radiation therapy (RT) and short-term follow-up. Radiation therapy is standard of care for some patients with thoracic malignancies such as lung cancer, esophageal cancer, thymoma, or malignant mesothelioma. Radiation exposure to the heart is avoided when possible but even with advanced radiation therapy techniques there are instances when high radiation ...

Indian scientists are significantly more religious than United Kingdom scientists, according to the first cross-national study of religion and spirituality among scientists. The U.K. and India results from Religion Among Scientists in International Context (RASIC) study were presented at the Policies and Perspectives: Implications From the Religion Among Scientists in International Context Study conference held today in London. The conference was sponsored by the Religion and Public Life Program and the Baker Institute for Public Policy. The U.K. results were also presented ...

Texting while driving with Google Glass is clearly a distraction, a new University of Central Florida study has concluded -- but there is a twist. In the study, texting Glass users outperformed smartphone users when regaining control of their vehicles after a traffic incident. "Texting with either a smartphone or Glass will cause distraction and should be avoided while driving" said UCF researcher Ben Sawyer. "Glass did help drivers in our study recover more quickly than those texting on a smartphone. We hope that Glass points the way to technology that can help deliver ...

DENVER – The average cost to screen high-risk individuals for developing lung cancer with low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) plus the average cost of curative intent treatment, like surgery, is lower than the average cost to treat advanced stage lung cancer, which quite rarely results in a cure. The National Lung Cancer Screening Trial (NLST) has previously shown that LDCT screening of people at high-risk for lung cancer reduces lung cancer mortality by 20%, thus many organizations including the United States Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) have recommend LDCT ...

ATLANTA—Customers care more about their past experiences with service firms when the economy is doing well, according to a research team from the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University. The researchers found it is more important for service firms to focus their resources and efforts on improving customer experience when economic times are good, as opposed to when the economy is down. This new finding contradicts previous beliefs that firms should increase their efforts to improve customer experience during difficult economic times to hold on ...

WASHINGTON – Scientists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Materials Science and Technology Division have developed a novel one-step process using, for the first time in these types of syntheses, potassium superoxide (KO2) to rapidly form oxide nanoparticles from simple salt solutions in water. "Typically, the synthesis of oxide nanoparticles involves the slow reaction of a weak oxidizing agent, such as hydrogen peroxide, with dilute solutions of metal salts or complexes in both aqueous and non-aqueous solvent systems," said Dr. Thomas Sutto, NRL research chemist. ...

Washington, D.C.—New modeling studies from Carnegie's Alan Boss demonstrate that most of the stars we see were formed when unstable clusters of newly formed protostars broke up. These protostars are born out of rotating clouds of dust and gas, which act as nurseries for star formation. Rare clusters of multiple protostars remain stable and mature into multi-star systems. The unstable ones will eject stars until they achieve stability and end up as single or binary stars. The work is published in The Astrophysical Journal. About two-thirds of all stars within 81 light ...

Over 92,960 acres have been burned by the King Fire since it began on September 13, 2014. The fire is currently 38% contained, and the cause of the fire is arson. Over 7,600 personnel are battling this fire. With the southwest winds there is a potential for extreme fire behavior if the winds, fuels, and topography come into alignment. There is the possibility for single and group tree torching, upslope crown runs, and spotting up to 1/2 mile. The highest probability is on the northwest portion of the fire. A Red Flag warning remains in effect for this fire. A Red ...

DETROIT – Pain can make it difficult for some patients to get a good night's rest while recovering in the hospital following certain surgical procedures, often resulting in longer hospital stays, according to researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. The study shows patients who reported poor sleep while in the hospital following total hip replacement or knee replacement surgery had higher pain scores. "Our results show that increased pain scores result in deceased sleep duration," says study lead author Anya Miller, M.D., with the Department of Otolaryngology-Head ...

HOUSTON – (Sept. 24, 2014) – The cost of monthly premiums for health insurance plans for Texans under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) can vary by hundreds of dollars, depending on a person's income and the level of coverage chosen, according to a report released today by the Episcopal Health Foundation and Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. The report found Texans earning about $17,000 a year were offered free premiums on some ACA Marketplace health insurance plans because of federal tax credits. However, a person who makes around $35,000 a year would ...

Researchers say there should be an international database containing the very latest information about organ donations and transplants, so policy makers can make informed decisions on whether to adopt an opt-out or opt-in system. The call comes after a study, carried out by The University of Nottingham, the University of Stirling and Northumbria University, showed that overall an opt-out system might provide a greater number of organs for transplant but many factors can influence the success of either system and a repository of accessible information would help individual ...

From recreational boats and fishing vessels to commercial cruise ships and private marinas, a newly published study shows that oil discharges related to human maritime activity on the Canadian coast is posing a major threat to marine ecosystems in the Pacific Ocean. The study – published in the August edition of the journal Applied Geography, with University of Calgary associate professor in geography Stefania Bertazzon as lead author – provides a geospatial analysis of oil discharges in the Canadian Pacific Ocean. The findings show that a large portion of oil discharge ...

On September 30, 2014, in Washington, DC, higher education and health leaders will release a report that is the first to examine nationwide the impact and use of holistic review—a university admissions process that assesses an applicant's unique experiences alongside traditional measures of academic achievement such as grades and test scores—for students pursuing careers in the health professions. Many colleges and universities use a holistic admission process to select students. The practice has become more popular in health fields such as medicine, because it enables ...

The liver provides critical functions, such as ridding the body of toxins. Its failure can be deadly, and there are few options for fixing it. But scientists now report in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces a way to potentially inject stem cells from tonsils, a body part we don't need, to repair damaged livers — all without surgery. Byeongmoon Jeong and colleagues point out that currently, the only established method for treating liver failure or severe cases of liver disease is complete or partial transplantation. But the need is much greater than the number ...

A new linguistic study may make it possible to more accurately predict the dialect features people use based on their demographic characteristics and where they live. In a new article published in the September 2014 issue of Language, Martijn Wieling (University of Groningen) and colleagues used statistical modeling techniques to predict whether speakers in Tuscany use words from standard Italian or words unique to local dialects. The article, "Lexical differences between Tuscan dialects and standard Italian: Accounting for geographic and socio-demographic variation using ...

Over the past 20 years, a strange idea called a "weak value" has taken root in quantum information science. Many of the things you can do with quantum technologies entail being able to gain information from quantum systems. But there is a quantum conundrum: we can't say what a particle is doing when we're not looking at it, but when we do look at it, we change its behaviour. But what if we could look "a little"? Well, that's a weak measurement, a concept which is central to the notion of a weak value. The basic idea of weak measurement is to gain a little bit of information ...

In the study, conducted by researchers David Just PhD., Ozge Sigirci, and Brian Wansink PhD. author of the forthcoming book, Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life, 139 diners in an Italian all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant were either charged $4 or $8 for the lunch buffet. The buffet offered pizza, salad, breadsticks, pasta, and soup. After finishing, diners were asked to rate the taste of the pizza and how much they enjoyed the dining experience on a 9 point scale. "People set their expectation of taste partially based on the price—and it becomes ...

An enzyme found in all living things could hold the key to combatting deadly diseases such as sleeping sickness, a study suggests. Research into the enzyme, which helps cells convert nutrients into energy, has shown that it is activated in different ways in various species. Researchers say this discovery creates an opportunity to design drugs that block activity of the enzyme – known as pyruvate kinase – in species that cause infection. Blocking the enzyme would effectively kill the parasite, without affecting the same enzyme in the patient. Findings from the study ...

Tel Aviv — "I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that cyber defense solutions will serve as the essential basis for human development and economic growth in this century — I think it's happening before our very eyes," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told leading policymakers and cybersecurity experts at the 4th Annual International Cybersecurity Conference, held at Tel Aviv University on September 14-15, 2014. The signature event of Cyber Week 2014, one of the most important annual cyber events in the world, the TAU conference series presented the full spectrum ...

(MEMPHIS, Tenn. – September 24, 2014) St. Jude Children's Research Hospital investigators found that adjusting treatment based on early response to chemotherapy made a life-saving difference to young patients with an acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) subtype associated with a poor outcome. The study appeared in the September 20 edition of the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The results are good news for children and adolescents with Philadelphia chromosome-like ALL (Ph-like ALL), a subtype that until now was associated with a poor prognosis. Ph-like ALL accounts for as ...

A recent study by the University of Eastern Finland shows that scaling maximal oxygen uptake and maximal workload by body weight confounds measures of cardiorespiratory fitness. It has been a common practice in exercise testing to scale the results by body weight and, according to researchers, this practice should be abandoned. More reliable data on cardiorespiratory fitness can be observed by using lean mass proportional measures. The results were published recently in Clinical Physiology and Functional Imaging. Exercise tests, such as the maximal cycle ergometer exercise ...