Countries need to work together to ensure Antarctic research continues and key questions on the region are answered, researchers say. In an article published in Nature this week, 75 scientists along with policy makers in 22 countries have outlined what they see as the major priorities for Antarctic research over the next 20 years and beyond. In it they outline six priorities for Antarctic science – the most important scientific questions to be addressed in the region, as well as what they think is needed to achieve them. One of the report's lead authors, Monash University ...

Although the days of odd behavior among hat makers are a thing of the past, the dangers mercury poses to humans and the environment persist today. Mercury is a naturally occurring element as well as a by-product of such distinctly human enterprises as burning coal and making cement. Estimates of "bioavailable" mercury—forms of the element that can be taken up by animals and humans—play an important role in everything from drafting an international treaty designed to protect humans and the environment from mercury emissions, to establishing public policies behind warnings ...

URBANA, Ill. – With all the effort it takes to grow a food crop from seed to sale, it may be surprising that some farms in Brazil lose 10 to 12 percent of their yield at various points along the postharvest route. According to a University of Illinois agricultural economist, when it comes to meeting the needs of the world's growing population that's a lot of food falling through the cracks. Interestingly, farm managers who are aware of the factors that contribute to postharvest grain loss actually lose less grain. This was one of the findings in a study that examined how ...

In three passes over the Central and Eastern Pacific Ocean, NASA's Terra satellite took pictures of the three current tropical cyclones, painting a Pacific Tropical Panorama. Terra observed Hurricane Genevieve, Hurricane Iselle and Hurricane Julio in order from west to east. Iselle has now triggered a tropical storm watch in Hawaii. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument is a key instrument aboard NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. Between the two satellites, MODIS instruments view the entire surface of the Earth every one to two days. When ...

WASHINGTON – Pelvic x-rays ordered as a matter of course for children who have suffered blunt force trauma do not accurately identify all cases of pelvic fractures or dislocations and are usually unnecessary for patients for whom abdominal/pelvic CT scanning is otherwise planned. A study published online in Annals of Emergency Medicine last week casts doubt on a practice that has been recommended by the Advanced Trauma Life Support Program (ATLS), considered the gold standard for trauma patients "(Sensitivity of Plain Pelvis Radiography in Children with Blunt Torso Trauma). ...

Black truffles, also known as Périgord truffles, grow in symbiosis with the roots of oak and hazelnut trees. In the world of haute cuisine, they are expensive and highly prized. In the world of epigenetics, however, the fungi (Tuber melanosporum) are of major interest for another reason: their unique pattern of DNA methylation, a biochemical process that chemically modifies nucleic acids without changing their sequence. Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the DNA sequence. A newly published study in the journal ...

Wikipedia the free, online collaborative encyclopedia is an important source of information. However, while the team of volunteer editors endeavors to maintain high standards, there are occasionally problems with the veracity of content, deliberate vandalism and incomplete entries. Writing in the International Journal of Information Quality, computer scientists in China have devised a software algorithm that can automatically check a particular entry and rank it according to quality. Jingyu Han and Kejia Chen of Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, explain ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Sequencing the genomes of tumor cells has revealed thousands of mutations associated with cancer. One way to discover the role of these mutations is to breed a strain of mice that carry the genetic flaw — but breeding such mice is an expensive, time-consuming process. Now, MIT researchers have found an alternative: They have shown that a gene-editing system called CRISPR can introduce cancer-causing mutations into the livers of adult mice, enabling scientists to screen these mutations much more quickly. In a study appearing in the August 6th issue of ...

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists have discovered an enzyme that regulates production of the toxins that contribute to potentially life-threatening Staphylococcus aureus infections. The study recently appeared in the scientific journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Researchers also showed that the same enzyme allows Staphylococcus aureus to use fatty acids acquired from the infected individual to make the membrane that bacteria need to grow and flourish. The results provide a promising focus for efforts to develop a much-needed ...

The Northern Territories in Canada is experiencing one of its worst fire seasons in history. As of this date, there have been 344 wildfires that have burned 2,830,907 hectares of land (close to 7 million acres). The area around the Great Slave Lake, Yellowknife, Ft. Smith, and the Buffalo Lake have been plagued with uncontrolled fires all season long. This natural-color image collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Aqua satellite on August 05, 2014 shows a pyrocumulonimbus cloud erupting from the fire north of Buffalo Lake. It ...

Scales are small insects that feed by sucking plant juices. They can attack nearly any plant and cause serious damage to many agricultural and ornamental plants. While native scales have natural enemies that generally keep their populations in check, invasive species often do not, and for this reason many commercially important scale pests in the United States are species that were accidentally introduced. In order to facilitate the identification of alien species at U.S. ports-of-entry, scientists of the United States Department of Agriculture and California Department ...

Research by a civil engineer from the University of Waterloo is helping shed light on the way wounds heal and may someday have implications for understanding how cancer spreads, as well as why certain birth defects occur. Professor Wayne Brodland is developing computational models for studying the mechanical interactions between cells. In this project, he worked with a team of international researchers who found that the way wounds knit together is more complex than we thought. The results were published this week in the journal, Nature Physics. "When people think ...

PRINCETON, N.J. -- A sudden closing of a major airline hub such as the main Atlanta airport would undoubtedly leave thousands of travelers stranded. Because of Atlanta's hub status, such a blow would be felt nationally, altering the travel plans of millions while impacting the travel industry, tourism and other segments of the economy. A team of economists including Esteban Rossi-Hansberg of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs have developed a model that can measure the widespread effects of local industry fluctuations such ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (Aug. 6, 2014) – Recent studies have shown that transplanting induced pluripotent stem cell-derived neural stem cells (iPS-NSCs) can promote functional recovery after spinal cord injury in rodents and non-human primates. However, a serious drawback to the transplantation of iPS-NSCs is the potential for tumor growth, or tumorogenesis, post-transplantation. In an effort to better understand this risk and find ways to prevent it, a team of Japanese researchers has completed a study in which they transplanted a human glioblastoma cell line into the intact ...

Female candidates for elected office do as well as male candidates in terms of raising money and winning votes, so why do women only occupy 19 percent of congressional seats and approximately 25 percent of statewide offices and hold fewer governorships and mayorships? The traditional wisdom has been family obligations and responsibilities prevent women from running for office. "But in none of the scholarly research where scholars attempt to establish a link between family roles and political ambition did traditional family arrangements prevent women from eventually running ...

This news release is available in French. Montreal, August 5, 2014 — As the first generation to embrace exercise, baby boomers continue going to the gym, yet more out of necessity than for the challenge and enjoyment of physical activity. In a study recently published in the International Journal of Wellbeing, James Gavin, a professor in Concordia's Department of Applied Human Sciences, investigates our motivations for exercise, from looking good to having fun. He finds that for the baby boom generation, passion is the most important motivator — a fact the fitness ...

DOWNERS GROVE, Ill. – August 6, 2014 – According to researchers in California, African Americans' participation in colorectal cancer screening is low and the use of colonoscopy infrequent despite similar access to care across races in a Veterans Affairs healthcare system. The researchers also found that having established primary care at the time of screening eligibility significantly increased screening uptake. The study appears in the August issue of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, the monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal of the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy ...

Amsterdam, NL, August 6, 2014 – In a long-term, large-scale population-based study of individuals aged 55 years or older in the general population researchers found that those diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) had a four-fold increased risk of developing dementia or Alzheimer's disease (AD) compared to cognitively healthy individuals. Several risk factors including older age, positive APOE-ɛ4 status, low total cholesterol levels, and stroke, as well as specific MRI findings were associated with an increased risk of developing MCI. The results are published ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – When the ants come marching in, having miles of linked habitats may not be such a good idea after all. In a classic example of the law of unintended consequences, new University of Florida research suggests that wildlife corridors – strips of natural land created to reconnect habitats separated by agriculture or human activities -- can sometimes encourage the spread of invasive species such as one type of fire ant. The findings are particularly important in Florida, where invasive species are a vexing problem. The Sunshine State plays host to animals ...

Adolescents who behave aggressively are more likely to drink alcohol and in larger quantities than their peers, according to a recent study completed in Finland. Depression and anxiety, on the other hand, were not linked to increased alcohol use. The study investigated the association between psychosocial problems and alcohol use among 4074 Finnish 13- to 18-year-old adolescents. The results were published in Journal of Adolescence. The results indicate that smoking and attention problems also increase the probability of alcohol use. Furthermore, among girls, early menarche ...

New Rochelle, NY, August 6, 2014—The difficulty in replicating and directly comparing and confirming the scientific results reported by researchers worldwide who are studying new approaches to treating spinal cord injuries is slowing the translation of important new findings to patient care. A newly proposed reporting standard for spinal cord injury (SCI) experimentation defines the minimum information that is appropriate for modeling an SCI in the research setting, as presented in an article in Journal of Neurotrauma, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, ...

Informing the public about African Americans' disproportionate incarceration rate may actually bolster support for punitive policies that perpetuate inequality, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Stanford University psychology researchers Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt found that White participants who were exposed to higher racial disparities in incarceration rates reported being more afraid of crime and more likely to support the kinds of punitive policies that exacerbate these racial ...

A major study of all penguin species suggests the birds are at continuing risk from habitat degradation. Writing in the journal, Conservation Biology, a group of internationally renowned scientists recommends the adoption of measures to mitigate against a range of effects including; food scarcity (where fisheries compete for the same resources), being caught in fishing nets, oil pollution and climate change. This could include the establishment of marine protected areas, although the authors acknowledge this might not always be practical. A number of other ecologically ...

Emotional flexibility has become a widely discussed topic in emotional psychology, clinical psychology, health psychology and other fields. Professor Zhou Renlai and his group from Beijing Key Lab of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University (BNU) explored whether frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) lateralization can predict emotional flexibility. Frontal EEG activation during different emotion stimuli was measured. They identified the difference of frontal EEG lateralization could predict difference in emotional flexibility. Relative ...

When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Typhoon Halong on its northern journey through the western North Pacific Ocean, it became wide-eyed again after going through eyewall replacement. Eyewall replacement happens when the thunderstorms that circle the eye of a powerful hurricane are replaced by other thunderstorms. Basically, a new eye begins to develop around the old eye and it usually indicates a weakening trend. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard Aqua captured a visible image of Halong on August 6 at 04:30 UTC (12:30 a.m. ...