AMES, Iowa – Let's say plant scientists want to develop new lines of corn that will better tolerate long stretches of hot, dry weather. How can they precisely assess the performance of those new plants in different environmental conditions? Field tests can provide some answers. Greenhouse tests can provide some more. But how can plant scientists get a true picture of a plant's growth and traits under a wide variety of controlled environmental conditions? That job has been too big and too precise for most laboratories. There are a few labs around the world that can ...

Remote acoustic monitoring among endangered whales is the subject of a major article by two doctoral students in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences. Leanna Matthews and Jessica McCordic, members of the Parks Lab in the Department of Biology, have co-authored "Remote Acoustic Monitoring of North Atlantic Right Whales Reveals Seasonal and Diel Variations in Acoustic Behavior." The article appears in the current issue of PLOS ONE, an inclusive, peer-reviewed, open-access resource from the Public Library of Science in San Francisco, Calif. Susan Parks, assistant ...

BOSTON–While the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has released guidelines for the regulation of mobile health (mHealth) apps that act as medical devices or as accessories to medical devices, the vast majority of mHealth apps remain unregulated and unevaluated. In a Viewpoint article, "In Search of a Few Good Apps", published in JAMA on March 24, 214, co-authors, David Bates, MD and Adam Landman, MD of Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Adam Powell, PhD, president of Payer+Provider Syndicate, call for the creation of mHealth (mobile health) app review and certification ...

Wild salamanders living in some of North America's best salamander habitat are getting smaller as their surroundings get warmer and drier, forcing them to burn more energy in a changing climate. That's the key finding of a new study co-authored by a Clemson University biologist and published Tuesday in the journal Global Change Biology that examined museum specimens caught in the Appalachian Mountains from 1957 to 2007 and wild salamanders measured at the same sites in 2011-2012. The salamanders studied from 1980 onward were, on average, eight percent smaller than their ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Nanotechnology is advancing tools likened to Star Trek's "tricorder" that perform on-the-spot chemical analysis for a range of applications including medical testing, explosives detection and food safety. Researchers found that when paper used to collect a sample was coated with carbon nanotubes, the voltage required was 1,000 times reduced, the signal was sharpened and the equipment was able to capture far more delicate molecules. A team of researchers from Purdue University and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras performed the study, which ...

A mathematical model created by Penn State researchers can predict with more than 90 percent accuracy the blood glucose levels of individuals with type 1 diabetes up to 30 minutes in advance of imminent changes in their levels -- plenty of time to take preventative action. "Many people with type 1 diabetes use continuous glucose monitors, which examine the fluid underneath the skin," said Peter Molenaar, Distinguished Professor of Human Development and Family Studies and of psychology. "But the glucose levels under the skin trail blood glucose levels from anywhere between ...

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 ...