A visible image from NASA's Aqua satellite provides a clear picture that wind shear is responsible for weakening the once mighty Tropical Cyclone Gillian from hurricane to tropical storm strength. When NASA's Aqua satellite flew over Gillian on March 25 at 06:30 UTC/2:30 a.m. EDT, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument took a visible picture of the storm. That image showed that wind shear has pushed clouds and showers away from the center as the storm weakened to a tropical storm. In the MODIS image, the center of Gillian's circulation ...

LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 19, 2014) — When Premi Haynes was growing up in Pune, India, she attended Stella Maris High School, an English language convent school founded by Swiss nuns. Her second grade singing class used a book of English songs. One of the songs was "My Old Kentucky Home." At that time, Haynes had never heard of Kentucky, had no idea where it was, and had no particular ambition to go there. Some 20 years and a twist of fate later, on March 19 Haynes successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis in physiology at the University of Kentucky, where she's made a significant ...

Marked in red, hundreds of land use fires burn in the fields across Sierra Leone. Most fires in this region are deliberately set for a variety of reasons, including slash and burn agriculture. When a plot of land becomes exhausted, farmers shift cultivation to another plot where they cut the trees and brush at the beginning of the dry season in January and February. Once the dead plant material has dried, they set fire to it. Such fires peak in March and April right before farming season begins. From space, MODIS detects thermal anomalies, including fires, flares, and ...

WOODS HOLE, Mass.—While probing how organisms sense gravity and acceleration, scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) and the University of Utah uncovered evidence that acid (proton concentration) plays a key role in communication between neurons. The surprising discovery is reported this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team, led by the late MBL senior scientist Stephen M. Highstein, discovered that sensory cells in the inner ear continuously transmit information on orientation of the head relative to gravity and low-frequency ...

URBANA, Ill. – Using high-powered DNA-based tools, a recent study at the University of Illinois identified soil microbes that negatively affect ragweed and provided a new understanding of the complex relationships going on beneath the soil surface between plants and microorganisms. "Plant scientists have been studying plant-soil feedback for decades," said U of I microbial ecologist Tony Yannarell. "Some microbes are famous for their ability to change the soil, such as the microbes that are associated with legumes—we knew about those bacteria. But now we have the ability ...

For patient safety, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should require that clinical data be submitted as part of a more rigorous re-evaluation of medical devices that are modified after approval, according to UC San Francisco physician scientists in a commentary published online March 24, 2014 in the Annals of Internal Medicine. According to authors Rita Redberg, MD, UCSF professor of medicine, and UCSF second-year medical student Sarah Zheng, such a requirement could prevent deaths due to insufficiently tested device modifications. "The need for rapid approval ...

TAMPA, Fla. (March 25, 2014) – Following ischemic stroke, the integrity of the blood-brain barrier (BBB), which prevents harmful substances such as inflammatory molecules from entering the brain, can be impaired in cerebral areas distant from initial ischemic insult. This disruptive condition, known as diaschisis, can lead to chronic post-stroke deficits, University of South Florida researchers report. In experiments using laboratory rats modeling ischemic stroke, USF investigators studied the consequences of the compromised BBB at the chronic post-stroke stage. Their ...

The remnants of Tropical Depression 04W moved away from Palawan and into the South China Sea on March 25 as NASA's TRMM satellite passed overhead. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite passed over the South China Sea on March 25 at 02:56 UTC/March 25 at 10:56 p.m. EDT and gathered data on rainfall rates occurring in the remnants of TD04W. The image showed that the rainfall associated with the storm had moved away from Palawan and were only falling over the South China Sea. TRMM's Precipitation Radar instrument showed isolated areas where rain was ...

Phoenix — Guinea pigs and mice can be replaced with a non-animal skin sensitization method that uses a human-derived skin model, according to a study presented today by the PETA International Science Consortium, Ltd., at the Society of Toxicology's annual meeting. Recent results show that Cyprotex's in vitro skin sensitization assay SenCeeTox® can correctly identify chemicals that cause an allergic response in humans and, unlike many other methods, can predict the potency of the response. This non-animal method uses a three-dimensional, human-derived skin model that accurately ...

Scientists searching for habitable planets beyond Earth shouldn't overlook F-type stars in favor of their more abundant, smaller and cooler cousins, according to new research from University of Texas at Arlington physicists. Stars fall into seven lettered categories according to their surface temperature, but they also differ in other factors such as mass, luminosity and abundance in the universe. Scientists looking for habitable planets typically have focused on the less massive end of the spectrum, where our own G-type sun as well as the even less massive K and M-type ...

The water that surged into the intersection of New York City's Canal and Hudson streets during Hurricane Sandy—to choose just one flood-ravaged locale—was ultimately driven ashore by forces swirling hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic. That simple fact shows not only the scale and power of a tropical cyclone, but the difficulty of modeling and forecasting its potential for coastal flooding on the fine scale needed to most effectively prepare a response. Now, a study led by Professor Harry Wang of William & Mary's Virginia Institute of Marine Science demonstrates the ...

NEW YORK (25 March 2014) — A new study has found that women in India who have more education than their husbands, who earn more, or who are the sole earners in their families have a higher likelihood of experiencing frequent and severe intimate partner violence (IPV) than women who are not employed or who are less educated than their spouse. There are two existing theories that aim to predict what happens when a woman has status and resources that are equal to or greater than her husband's. One theory, called bargaining theory, posits that a woman who has more relative ...

An international group including one professor from the Moscow State University proposed the first ever quantitative description of the mechanism responsible for sunspot formation and underlying the Solar activity cycle. Magnetic field helicity is one of the so-called motion invariants in magneto-hydrodynamics. It is a conserved quantity, like energy, describing the degree to which the field lines are "wrapped around themselves". During the last 20 years, scientists realized that conservation of this quantity is even more influential upon magnetic field evolution than ...

BELLINGHAM, Washington, USA — Commercial demand is driving high-tech research and development in micro-opto-electro-mechanical systems (MOEMS) for diverse applications such as space exploration, wireless systems, and healthcare. A new special section on Emerging MOEMS Technology and Applications in the current issue of the Journal of Micro/Nanolithography, MEMS, and MOEMS (JM3) gathers recent breakthrough achievements and explains how such innovations in the photonics field are poised to emerge in the marketplace. The journal is published by SPIE, the international society ...

WASHINGTON D.C., March 25, 2014 -- A research team in Spain has the enviable job of testing out new electromechanical gear for potential use in future missions to the "Red Planet." They do it within their Mars environmental simulation chamber, which is specially designed to mimic conditions on the fourth planet from the sun -- right down to its infamous Martian dust. Mars is a key target for future space exploration, thanks to indications that the planet may have either been capable of supporting life in the past or is possibly even supporting it right now within its ...

A Malaysian-Dutch team of biologists have catalogued all 31 species of the tiny, but oh so pretty snail genus Plectostoma from West-Malaysia, Sumatra, and Thailand. Ten species are new to science, but some of those are going extinct as they are being discovered. The study was carried out by PhD student Thor-Seng Liew of Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, The Netherlands, and three colleagues. Liew, who is on study leave from Universiti Malaysia Sabah, spent four years studying the distribution, shell shape, and genetics of these minuscule snails. He is still working ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — What makes a person bipolar, prone to manic highs and deep, depressed lows? Why does bipolar disorder run so strongly in families, even though no single gene is to blame? And why is it so hard to find new treatments for a condition that affects 200 million people worldwide? New stem cell research published by scientists from the University of Michigan Medical School, and fueled by the Heinz C. Prechter Bipolar Research Fund, may help scientists find answers to these questions. The team used skin from people with bipolar disorder to derive the first-ever ...

MAYWOOD, Il. – Under new guidelines from the Institute of Medicine, the estimated number of children who are at risk for having insufficient or deficient levels of vitamin D is drastically reduced from previous estimates, according to a Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine study. The study, led by Holly Kramer, MD, MPH and Ramon Durazo-Arvizu, PhD, is published online ahead of print in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology and Metabolism. New Institute of Medicine guidelines say most people get sufficient vitamin D when their blood levels are at or ...

Black and gray markets for computer hacking tools, services and byproducts such as stolen credit card numbers continue to expand, creating an increasing threat to businesses, governments and individuals, according to a new RAND Corporation study. One dramatic example is the December 2013 breach of retail giant Target, in which data from approximately 40 million credit cards and 70 million user accounts was hijacked. Within days, that data appeared -- available for purchase -- on black market websites. "Hacking used to be an activity that was mainly carried out by individuals ...

Lick Observatory's newest telescope, the Automated Planet Finder (APF), has been operating robotically night after night on Mt. Hamilton since January, searching nearby stars for Earth-sized planets. Every night the fully autonomous system checks the weather, decides which stars to observe, and moves the telescope from star to star throughout the night, collecting measurements that will reveal the presence of planets. Its technical performance has been outstanding, making it not only the first robotic planet-finding facility but also one of the most sensitive. The search ...

The invasive brown marmorated stink bug (Halyomorpha halys) is an important pest of fruits and vegetables. To counter them, some home gardeners use pheromone-baited traps that are designed to attract, trap, and kill them. However, new research from entomologists at the University of Maryland suggests that the traps may actually increase stink bug damage to tomatoes. The research will appear in the April issue of Environmental Entomology (DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1603/EN13237). The researchers asked 15 gardeners to place stink bug traps at the ends of rows of tomatoes, ...

New Rochelle, NY, March 24, 2014—The curative and therapeutic potential of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) offers much promise, as these multipotent cells are currently being tested in more than 300 clinical trials in a range of diseases. A new, easier, and more reliable way to make large quantities of highly potent MSCs could accelerate progress toward their use in regenerative medicine, as described in an article in Stem Cells and Development, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available on the Stem Cells and Development website. Robert ...

When it comes to recognizing faces, humans are extraordinarily skillful. It's no surprise – after all, from the moment humans leave the womb, the infant brains already have a preference for faces, and over the course of a lifetime, the average person sees hundreds of thousands of faces. Among scientists, however, the question of exactly how humans came to possess this amazing ability remains a divisive one, with some researchers claiming our extraordinary abilities result from the operation of mechanisms specialized just for faces, whereas others argue that recognition ...

(Boston)--In a recently to be published study in Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, researchers have found the use of the drug allopurinol was associated with a reduced risk of death in hyperuricemic (gout) patients. The study, the first in a general population, has found the overall benefit of allopurinol on survival may outweigh the impact of rare serious adverse effects. Researchers from the Section of Rheumatology and Clinical Epidemiology at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) contributed to this study. Gout has been associated with an increased risk of ...

Crude oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster causes severe defects in the developing hearts of bluefin and yellowfin tunas, according to a new study by a team of NOAA and academic scientists. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, show how the largest marine oil spill in United States history may have affected tunas and other species that spawned in oiled offshore habitats in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Atlantic bluefin tuna, yellowfin tuna, and other large predatory ...