WASHINGTON, DC— By pinpointing locations on Earth from space, GPS systems have long shown drivers the shortest route home and guided airline pilots across oceans. Now, by figuring out how messed up GPS satellite signals get when bouncing around in a storm, researchers have found a way to do something completely different with GPS: measure and map the wind speeds of hurricanes. Improved wind speed measurements could help meteorologists better predict the severity of storms and where they might be headed, said Stephen Katzberg, a Distinguished Research Associate at the ...

Consuming cranberry products has been anecdotally associated with prevention of urinary tract infections (UTIs) for over 100 years. But is this popular belief a myth, or scientific fact? In recent years, some studies have suggested that cranberries prevent UTIs by hindering bacteria from sticking to the walls of the urinary tract, thanks to phytochemicals known as proanthocyanidins (PACs). Yet the mechanisms by which cranberry materials may alter bacterial behaviour have not been fully understood. Now, researchers in McGill University's Department of Chemical Engineering ...

TORONTO, July 15, 2013—Researchers at St. Michael's Hospital are asking questions about the practice of automatically transfusing large amounts of blood and blood products to trauma patients with major bleeding. Trauma patients were resuscitated primarily with blood until the second part of the 20th century when the practice was modified so that blood transfusions were given only after lab tests suggested they were needed. The idea of resuscitating primarily with blood was revived after U.S. military physicians in Iraq and Afghanistan reported in 2007 that this practice ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – If you need cardiac surgery in the future, aortic dissection in particular, reach for the moon. Or at least try to schedule your surgery around its cycle. According to a study at Rhode Island Hospital, acute aortic dissection (AAD) repair performed in the waning full moon appears to reduce the odds of death, and a full moon was associated with shorter length of stay (LOS). The study is published online in advance of print in the journal Interactive Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery. The purpose of the study was to assess the effect of natural time ...

Is space really the final frontier, or are the greatest mysteries closer to home? In cosmology, dark matter is said to account for the majority of mass in the universe, however its presence is inferred by indirect effects rather than detected through telescopes. The biological equivalent is "microbial dark matter," that pervasive yet practically invisible infrastructure of life on the planet, which can have profound influences on the most significant environmental processes from plant growth and health, to nutrient cycles in terrestrial and marine environments, the global ...

JUPITER, FL, July 14, 2013 – An international group of scientists has shown that a drug candidate designed by scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) significantly increases exercise endurance in animal models. These findings could lead to new approaches to helping people with conditions that acutely limit exercise tolerance, such as obesity, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and congestive heart failure, as well as the decline of muscle capacity associated with aging. The study was published July 14, 2013, by the journal ...

A set of proteins involved in the body's natural defenses produces a large number of mutations in human DNA, according to a study led by researchers at the National Institutes of Health. The findings suggest that these naturally produced mutations are just as powerful as known cancer-causing agents in producing tumors. The proteins are part of a group called apolipoprotein B mRNA-editing enzyme catalytic polypeptide-like (APOBEC) cytidine deaminases. The investigators found that APOBEC mutations can outnumber all other mutations in some cancers, accounting for over two-thirds ...

A type of genetic abnormality linked to cancer is more common in people with type 2 diabetes than the rest of the population, a new study has found. People with type 2 diabetes are already known to have a higher risk of cancers, especially blood cancers like lymphoma and leukaemia. The new study, led by scientists at Imperial College London and CNRS in France, suggests that mutations called clonal mosaic events (CMEs) may partly explain why this is. CMEs are defects that result in some cells having extra copies or missing copies of large chunks of DNA. They are very ...

UPTON, NY-In the search for understanding how some magnetic materials can be transformed to carry electric current with no energy loss, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cornell University, and collaborators have made an important advance: Using an experimental technique they developed to measure the energy required for electrons to pair up and how that energy varies with direction, they've identified the factors needed for magnetically mediated superconductivity-as well as those that aren't. "Our measurements distinguish energy ...

UPTON, NY-Building on earlier work exploring the complex choreography by which intricate cellular proteins interact with and copy DNA prior to cell division, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators have captured a key step-molecular images showing how the enzyme that unwinds the DNA double helix gets drawn to and wrapped around its target. Details of the research, published in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, enhance understanding of an essential biological process and may suggest ways for stopping ...

The findings, published in Nature Geoscience, underscore the need for continuous satellite monitoring of the ice sheets to better identify and predict melting and the corresponding sea-level rise. The ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland contain about 99.5 per cent of the Earth's glacier ice which would raise global sea level by some 63m if it were to melt completely. The ice sheets are the largest potential source of future sea level rise – and they also possess the largest uncertainty over their future behaviour. They present some unique challenges for predicting ...

It is not unusual for swarms of small earthquakes to precede a volcanic eruption. They can reach a point of such rapid succession that they create a signal called harmonic tremor that resembles sound made by various types of musical instruments, though at frequencies much lower than humans can hear. A new analysis of an eruption sequence at Alaska's Redoubt Volcano in March 2009 shows that the harmonic tremor glided to substantially higher frequencies and then stopped abruptly just before six of the eruptions, five of them coming in succession. "The frequency of this ...

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered that a human antiviral enzyme causes DNA mutations that lead to several forms of cancer. The discovery, reported in the July 14 issue of Nature Genetics, follows the team's earlier finding that the enzyme, called APOBEC3B, is responsible for more than half of breast cancer cases. The previous study was published in Nature in February. APOBEC3B is part of a family of antiviral proteins that Harris has studied for more than a decade. His effort to understand how these proteins work has led to these surprising ...

At the end of the last Ice Age, as the world began to warm, a swath of the North Pacific Ocean came to life. During a brief pulse of biological productivity 14,000 years ago, this stretch of the sea teemed with phytoplankton, amoeba-like foraminifera and other tiny creatures, who thrived in large numbers until the productivity ended—as mysteriously as it began—just a few hundred years later. Researchers have hypothesized that iron sparked this surge of ocean life, but a new study led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists and colleagues at the University ...

Contact: Liz Williams williams@wehi.edu.au 61-428-034-089 Walter and Eliza Hall Institute Kris Van der Beken kris.vanderbeken@vib.be 32-473-783-435 VIB Scientists discover kill-switch controls immune-suppressing cells Scientists have uncovered the mechanism that controls whether cells that are able to suppress immune responses live or die. The discovery of the cell death processes that determine the number of 'regulatory T cells' an individual has could one day lead to better treatments for immune disorders. Regulatory T cells are members of a group ...

Powdery mildew is one of the most dreaded plant diseases: The parasitic fungus afflicts crops such as wheat and barley and is responsible for large harvest shortfalls every year. Beat Keller and Thomas Wicker, both plant biologists from the University of Zurich, and their team have been analyzing the genetic material of wheat mildew varieties from Switzerland, England and Israel while the team headed by Paul Schulze-Lefert at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne studies the genetic material of barley mildew. The results recently published in Nature ...

PITTSBURGH—The interior of a living cell is a crowded place, with proteins and other macromolecules packed tightly together. A team of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University has approximated this molecular crowding in an artificial cellular system and found that tight quarters help the process of gene expression, especially when other conditions are less than ideal. As the researchers report in an advance online publication by the journal Nature Nanotechnology, these findings may help explain how cells have adapted to the phenomenon of molecular crowding, which has ...

Exceptional spatial ability at age 13 predicts creative and scholarly achievements over 30 years later, according to results from a new longitudinal study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study, conducted by psychology researcher David Lubinski and colleagues at Vanderbilt University, provides evidence that early spatial ability — the skill required to mentally manipulate 2D and 3D objects — predicts the development of new knowledge, and especially innovation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics ...

BOSTON – When Georgetown University neurologist R. Scott Turner, MD, PhD, began enrolling people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease into a nationwide study last year, he expected to find only a handful of participants with undiagnosed glucose intolerance, as all the patients were already under a doctor's care and those with known diabetes were excluded. But Turner says he was "shocked" by how many study participants were found to have pre-diabetes — a finding that is triggering important questions. Turner's study examines resveratrol, a compound found in red grapes ...

CHICAGO, IL – Baseball players undergoing ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) surgery are able to return to the same or higher level of competition for an extended period of time, according to research presented today at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's (AOSSM) Annual Meeting in Chicago, IL. "Previous studies showed successful return to play after UCL surgery, but we were also able to evaluate each athlete's career longevity and reason for retirement," commented lead author, Daryl C. Osbahr, MD of MedStar Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore. "These ...

Alexandria, VA – One of the greatest controversies in science is what's underneath the Yellowstone supervolcano. The controversy surrounds a unique relationship between a mantle plume (like the one that powers Hawaiian volcanoes) and the subduction zone off the Washington-Oregon coast. Cutting-edge research using a common kitchen ingredient is explored in the latest issue of EARTH Magazine. Recently published research explores this problem in 3-D, using a model created with corn syrup, fiberglass and a series of hydraulic pistons. What the scientists saw was a plume sliced ...

CHICAGO, IL – Athletes who didn't get enough sleep the night before undergoing baseline concussion testing didn't perform as well as expected, say researchers presenting their work today at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's (AOSSM) Annual Meeting in Chicago, IL. "Our results indicate athletes sleeping less than 7 hours the night prior to baseline concussion testing did not do as well on 3 out of 4 ImPACT scores and showed more symptoms," said lead author, Jake McClure, MD from Vanderbilt University. "Because return-to-play decisions often hinge on ...

CHICAGO, IL – 40,000 high school football kids get a concussion every year, but contrary to equipment manufacturers' claims, the specific brand of helmet and helmet age were not associated with lower risk of concussion, say researchers presenting their work today at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's Annual Meeting in Chicago, IL. "According to our research, lower risks of sustaining a sports-related concussion (SRC) and its severity were not improved based on a specific manufacturer. In addition, the SRC rates were similar for players wearing new ...

BOSTON -- Although women who survived childhood cancer face an increased risk of infertility, nearly two-thirds of those who tried unsuccessfully to become pregnant for at least a year eventually conceived, according to clinical researchers at Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center and Brigham and Women's Hospital. This is comparable to the rate of eventual pregnancy among all clinically infertile women. "Most women think that if they had cancer as a child, then they'll never have children. It turns out that many of them can get pregnant. It ...

TORONTO, ON – Males and females face different challenges in accessing treatment for neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), according to a new study from researchers at the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Uganda Ministry of Health and Imperial College London. The study, published by PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases on July 11, explores the role of gender in access to treatment in the Uganda National Neglected Tropical Disease Control Program. NTDs are a group of parasitic, viral and bacterial diseases that affect at least a billion people worldwide. ...