Researchers from USC and Nanjing University in China have documented evidence suggesting that part of the reason that the Earth has become neither sweltering like Venus nor frigid like Mars lies with a built-in atmospheric carbon dioxide regulator – the geologic cycles that churn up the planet's rocky surface. Scientists have long known that "fresh" rock pushed to the surface via mountain formation effectively acts as a kind of sponge, soaking up the greenhouse gas CO2. Left unchecked, however, that process would simply deplete atmospheric CO2 levels to a point that would ...

Berkeley — Academic research sponsored by industry has a strong track record of leading to innovative patents and licenses, challenging assumptions that corporate support skews science toward inventions that are less accessible and less useful to others than those funded by the government or non-profit organizations, according to a new analysis. The findings, to be published in a Wednesday, March 19, commentary in the journal Nature, are based upon a study of two decades of records from the University of California system. The authors, led by Brian Wright, UC Berkeley ...

New research shows an alternative DNA test offers clinically relevant genetic information to identify why a miscarriage may have occurred years earlier. Researchers were able to identify chromosomal variants and abnormalities in nearly 50 percent of the samples. This first-of-its-kind study was conducted by researchers from Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. The results were published in the March issue of Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology. The technique used in this study, called rescue karyotyping, allows ...

Building a strong connection to a social group helps clinically depressed patients recover and helps prevent relapse, according to a new study. For the paper, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Senior Fellow Alexander Haslam, lead author Tegan Cruwys and their colleagues at the University of Queensland conducted two studies of patients diagnosed with depression or anxiety. The patients either joined a community group with activities such as sewing, yoga, sports and art, or partook in group therapy at a psychiatric hospital. In both cases, patients responding ...

Scientists have discovered a new, persistent structure in Earth's inner radiation belt using data from the twin NASA Van Allen Probes spacecraft. Most surprisingly, this structure is produced by the slow rotation of Earth, previously considered incapable of affecting the motion of radiation belt particles, which have velocities approaching the speed of light. Data from the Van Allen Probes Ion Composition Experiment (RBSPICE) on board each of the twin spacecraft orbiting Earth revealed that the highly energized population of electrons of the inner radiation belt is ...

PHOENIX, Ariz. — March 19, 2014 — In a scientific first, the fusion of two genes, ALK and EML4, has been identified as the genetic driver in an aggressive type of thyroid cancer, according to a study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen). These groundbreaking findings are based on genetic sequencing of tumor cells from a 62-year-old patient with an aggressive tall cell variant of papillary thyroid cancer, according to the study published Tuesday, March 18, in the World Journal of Surgery, the official journal of the International Society of Surgery. The ...

Lotteries of different kinds have been part of the human culture since remote times. Apparently, the initial idea was to use the money gained through the game to finance government projects. This seems to be how the Great Wall of China was built. Then, lotteries started to be used as a simple form of entertainment. The first known European lottery dates back to the Roman Empire and since then many countries have created different types of lottery. According to Scientific Games, an authority in the global lottery and regulated gaming industry, lottery sales worldwide totaled ...

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 19, 2014 ─ Students who begin their postsecondary education at a community college and successfully transfer to a four-year college have BA graduation rates equal to similar students who begin at four-year colleges, according to new research published today. That rate would actually increase – to 54 percent from 46 percent – if not for the loss of academic credits when students transfer, said study authors. "The Community College Route to the Bachelor's Degree," by Paul Attewell and David Monaghan, both of the Graduate Center of the City ...

Irvine, Calif., March 19, 2014 – Titanium alloy golf clubs can cause dangerous wildfires, according to UC Irvine scientists. When a club coated with the lightweight metal is swung and strikes a rock, it creates sparks that can heat to more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit for long enough to ignite dry foliage, according to findings published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Fire and Materials. Orange County, Calif., fire investigators asked UC Irvine to determine whether such clubs could have caused blazes at Shady Canyon Golf Course in Irvine and Arroyo Trabuco Golf ...

Glasgow, UK: Genetic analyses of results from 1125 postmenopausal women being treated for oestrogen responsive breast cancer have shown that some of them are more likely than others to have a late recurrence of their cancer and might benefit from ten years of hormone therapy rather than five. Prof Mitch Dowsett told the opening press conference at the European Breast Cancer Conference (EBCC-9) that his research had shown that women who had tumours that were negative for the human epidermal growth factor protein (HER2-) but which were very sensitive to the oestrogen hormone, ...

Using a powerful data-crunching technique, Johns Hopkins researchers have sorted out how a protein keeps defective genetic material from gumming up the cellular works. The protein, Dom34, appears to "rescue" protein-making factories called ribosomes when they get stuck obeying defective genetic instructions, the researchers report in the Feb. 27 issue of Cell. "We already knew that binding to Dom34 makes a ribosome split and say 'I'm done,' and that without it, animals can't survive," says Rachel Green, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics ...

Scientists working on the world's leading particle collider experiments have joined forces, combined their data and produced the first joint result from Fermilab's Tevatron and CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), past and current holders of the record for most powerful particle collider on Earth. Scientists from the four experiments involved—ATLAS, CDF, CMS and DZero—announced their joint findings on the mass of the top quark on March 19, 2014 at the Rencontres de Moriond international physics conference in Italy. Together the four experiments pooled their data analysis ...

Verbal interactions between parents and children create a social feedback loop important for language development, according to research forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. That loop appears to be experienced less frequently and is diminished in strength in interactions with autistic children. "This loop likely has cascading impacts over the course of a child's development," says psychological scientist and study author Anne S. Warlaumont of the University of California, Merced. "Understanding how it works and ...

Boulder, Colo., USA – Geosphere articles posted online 17 Mar. 2014 include additions to two series: "CRevolution 2: Origin and Evolution of the Colorado River System II" and "Origin and Evolution of the Sierra Nevada and Walker Lane." Other articles present new seismic data for the Slate Range of California, USA; the first detailed geologic map from the Likhu Khola region of east central Nepal; and a review of pre-21st century ideas about the origin of Grand Canyon. Abstracts for these and other Geosphere papers are available at http://geosphere.gsapubs.org/. Representatives ...

New research in mice suggests that autism is characterized by reduced activity of inhibitory neurons and increased activity of excitatory neurons in the brain, but balance can be restored with low doses of a well-known class of drugs currently used in much higher doses to treat anxiety and epileptic seizures. The findings, which are reported in the March 19th issue of the Cell Press journal Neuron, point to a new therapeutic approach to managing autism. "These are very exciting results because they suggest that existing drugs—called benzodiazepines—might be useful in ...

March 19, 2014 – The open-access International Journal of Alcohol and Drug Research has released a special issue on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD), with the intention of increasing awareness of the negative effects of alcohol use in pregnancy and improving prevention, treatment and care for those living with FASD. "In most countries, FASD is not well recognized by health professionals," says guest editor Dr. Svetlana (Lana) Popova, Senior Scientist in the Social and Epidemiological Research Department at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). "If ...

In a study published today (19/3/2014) in the scientific journal Neuron, neuroscientists at the Champalimaud Foundation, in collaboration with neuroscientists from Harvard University, describe the first activity maps at the resolution of single cells and throughout the entire brain of behaving zebrafish. "This opens up new possibilities for studying neural circuits in the brain," says Michael Orger, principal investigator at the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme. "In order to understand how the brain works, it is imperative that we can record the activity of the cells ...

While many are stocking up on allergy medicine in preparation for spring, a new study from researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center has uncovered a new connection between allergy and cancer that could potentially lead to therapies involving common antihistamines. Recently published in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology, the study was led by Daniel H. Conrad, Ph.D., member of the Cancer Cell Signaling research program at Massey and professor of microbiology and immunology at the VCU School of Medicine, with substantial contributions from Ph.D. ...

In a world facing the challenges of climate change, demographic boom and deficit in food resources, the word "sustainable" and the concept behind it become increasingly relevant. Sustainability in the way humanity uses available resources is key to a brighter and greener future. In the context of sustainable food production, there is a clear need for crop productivity increases and diversification. Optimising rice ecosystem functions and services in Southeast Asia and their stabilisation under future land use and climate change, is the main focus of the project LEGATO ...

Radiological damage to microbes near the site of the Chernobyl disaster has slowed the decomposition of fallen leaves and other plant matter in the area, according to a study just published in the journal Oecologia. The resulting buildup of dry, loose detritus is a wildfire hazard that poses the threat of spreading radioactivity from the Chernobyl area. Tim Mousseau, a professor of biology and co-director of the Chernobyl and Fukushima Research Initiatives at the University of South Carolina, has done extensive research in the contaminated area surrounding the Chernobyl ...

Planting cover crops in rotation between cash crops -- widely agreed to be ecologically beneficial -- is even more valuable than previously thought, according to a team of agronomists, entomologists, agroecologists, horticulturists and biogeochemists from Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences. "As society places increasing demands on agricultural land beyond food production to include ecosystem services, we needed a new way to evaluate 'success' in agriculture," said Jason Kaye, professor of biogeochemistry. "This research presents a framework for considering ...

DALLAS – March 19, 2014 – A UT Southwestern Medical Center study has identified a new potential therapeutic target for controlling high blood sugar, a finding that could help the estimated 25 million Americans with type 2 diabetes. Researchers showed that lipid molecules called phosphatidic acids enhance glucose production in the liver. These findings suggest that inhibiting or reducing production of phosphatidic acids may do the opposite. “This study establishes a role for phosphatidic acids in enhancing glucose production by the liver and identifies enzymes involved ...

The remnants of former Tropical Cyclone Gillian moved out of the Southern Pacific Ocean and into the Indian Ocean only to trigger warnings and watches for part of Indonesia on March 19. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the stubborn storm and took a visible image of the re-organizing tropical low pressure area. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Gillian's remnants on March 19 at 05:30 UTC/1:30 a.m. EDT and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument took a visible picture of the storm. The image showed that the storm appeared to be well-defined, ...

NOAA's GOES-West satellite caught the birth of Tropical Storm Mike in the Southern Pacific Ocean on March 19. Mike's formation has generated warnings for the Southern Cook Islands. NOAA's GOES-West or GOES-15 satellite captured an infrared image of newborn Tropical Storm Mike in the Southwestern Pacific Ocean on March 19 at 1200 UTC/8 a.m. EDT. Mike appeared to be a compact, rounded tropical storm with bands of thunderstorms wrapping into it. NOAA's GOES-West satellite sits in a fixed orbit in space capturing visible and infrared imagery of all weather over the western ...

Colonial legacy has a significant impact on scientific productivity across the continent of Africa, according to a study by researchers at the University of Lomé, in Togo. Writing in the International Journal of Education Economics and Development, the team suggests that Africa performs relatively poorly compared with other regions of the world. Moreover, their analysis of data for the period 1994 to 2009 shows that African nations with a British colonial legacy are much more productive than countries with French or other history. This, the team adds, correlates with superior ...