NASA's TRMM satellite passed over the remnants of Tropical Cyclone Gillian and spotted some towering thunderstorms and areas of heavy rainfall, indicating there's still power in the former tropical storm. Over the past few days former tropical cyclone Gillian's remnants moved from the Gulf of Carpentaria into the Timor Sea. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite known as TRMM found a few strong convective thunderstorms when it passed above these remnants on March 18, 2014 at 0431 UTC. TRMM's Precipitation Radar (PR) instrument measured rain falling at a rate ...

URBANA, Ill. – Even after the agricultural reforms of 2002-03, for wheat, rice, and pearl millet farmers in India, grain markets are still pretty sticky. Two University of Illinois economists analyzed infrastructure of interstate trade for food-grain crops in three Indian states and found that grain farmers are unable to cash in on India's market reforms and take advantage of a price difference between two or more markets. "We wanted to see if there was more integration in the markets since the 2002 reforms," said Kathy Baylis. "We were surprised at how little integration ...

Technology used in video games is making its way to hospital rooms, where researchers at the University of Missouri hope to learn new ways to prevent falls among hospital patients. Between 700,000 and 1 million people each year fall in U.S. hospitals, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Hospitals nationwide are looking for ways to reduce that number. "Since 2008, we've investigated ways to detect and prevent falls by older adults living in independent senior apartments," said Marilyn Rantz, PhD, RN, a leader of the MU research team and a professor ...

A critically endangered plant known as marsh sandwort (Arenaria paludicola) is inching back from the brink of extinction thanks to the efforts of a UC Santa Cruz plant ecologist and her team of undergraduate students. Ingrid Parker, the Langenheim professor of plant ecology and evolution at UC Santa Cruz, got involved in the marsh sandwort recovery effort at the request of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). Although it used to occur all along the west coast, from San Diego to Washington state, this wetland plant with delicate white flowers had dwindled to one ...

A team of scientists from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, the Medical University of South Carolina and San Diego-based American Life Science Pharmaceuticals, Inc., report that cathepsin B gene knockout or its reduction by an enzyme inhibitor blocks creation of key neurotoxic pGlu-Aβ peptides linked to Alzheimer's disease (AD). Moreover, the candidate inhibitor drug has been shown to be safe in humans. The findings, based on AD mouse models and published online in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, support continued development of cysteine ...

People who experience chronic sleep disturbance—either through their work, insomnia or other reasons—could face an earlier onset of dementia and Alzheimer's, according to a new pre-clinical study by researchers at Temple University. "The big biological question that we tried to address in this study is whether sleep disturbance is a risk factor to develop Alzheimer's or is it something that manifests with the disease," said Domenico Praticò, professor of pharmacology and microbiology/immunology in Temple's School of Medicine, who led the study. Initially, the researchers ...

AURORA, Colo. (March 17, 2014) - Helping children learn to eat well can be a challenge. Some children happily eat whatever is put in front of them while others seem to eat like birds and exist more on air than food. A new study by a researcher at the University of Colorado School of Medicine shows that parents influence how much children eat more than they may think. In this collaborative study between the CU School of Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine and University of Alabama Birmingham, researchers observed normal, everyday mealtimes in the homes of 145 parents ...

DALLAS, March 18, 2014 — As some countries and companies roll out new rules to limit animal testing in pharmaceutical products designed for people, scientists are stepping in with a new way to test therapeutic drug candidates and determine drug safety and drug interactions — without using animals. The development of "chemosynthetic livers," which could dramatically alter how drugs are made, was presented at the 247th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society. The meeting features more than 10,000 presentations ...

STANFORD, Calif. — California sea lions exposed to a toxin in algae develop a form of epilepsy that is similar to one in humans, according to a new study led by Stanford University School of Medicine researchers. Every year, hundreds of sea lions wash up along the California coast, suffering seizures caused by exposure to domoic acid, a neurotoxin that can produce memory loss, tremors, convulsions and death. Domoic acid is produced by algae blooms that have been proliferating along the coast in recent years, accumulating in anchovies and other small fish that the sea ...

WASHINGTON D.C., March 18, 2014 -- A powerful, new three-dimensional model provides fresh insight into the turbulent death throes of supernovas, whose final explosions outshine entire galaxies and populate the universe with elements that make life on Earth possible. The model is the first to represent the start of a supernova collapse in three dimensions, said its developer, W. David Arnett, Regents Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Arizona, who developed the model with Casey Meakin and Nathan Smith at Arizona and Maxime Viallet of the Max-Planck Institut ...

A scientist has discovered 19 new species of praying mantis from Central and South America. The new species of bark mantises were discovered in tropical forests and also found among existing museum collections. Dr. Gavin Svenson, curator of invertebrate zoology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, described the new species and published a revision of the genus Liturgusa in the open access journal ZooKeys. Svenson collected the insects from eight countries in Central and South America, as well as gathered hundreds of specimens from 25 international museums in ...

A new study from researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that children treated with stimulants for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) experienced slower body mass index (BMI) growth than their undiagnosed or untreated peers, followed by a rapid rebound of BMI that exceeded that of children with no history of ADHD or stimulant use and that could continue to obesity. The study, thought to be the most comprehensive analysis of ADHD and stimulant use in children to date, found that the earlier the medication began, and the longer ...

Even in a crowded room full of background noise, the human ear is remarkably adept at tuning in to a single voice — a feat that has proved remarkably difficult for computers to match. A new analysis of the underlying mechanisms, conducted by researchers at MIT, has provided insights that could ultimately lead to better machine hearing, and perhaps to better hearing aids as well. Our ears' selectivity, it turns out, arises from evolution's precise tuning of a tiny membrane, inside the inner ear, called the tectorial membrane. The viscosity of this membrane — its firmness, ...

LOS ANGELES (March 18, 2014) – Investigators at the Cedars-Sinai Regenerative Medicine Institute have discovered eye abnormalities that may help reveal features of early-stage Alzheimer's disease. Using a novel laboratory rat model of Alzheimer's disease and high-resolution imaging techniques, researchers correlated variations of the eye structure, to identify initial indicators of the disease. Alzheimer's disease is the leading cause of dementia, which is characterized by loss of memory and a progressive decline in cognitive function. To date, more than 26 million people ...

LOS ANGELES – (March 18, 2014) – In the only long-term, National Institutes of Health-funded study of prenatal methamphetamine exposure and child outcome, researchers found youngsters exposed to the potent illegal drug before birth had increased cognitive problems at age 7.5 years, highlighting the need for early intervention to improve academic outcomes and reduce the potential for negative behaviors, according to the study published online by The Journal of Pediatrics. The researchers studied 151 children exposed to methamphetamine before birth and 147 who were not ...

Farmers in Africa can increase their food production if they avoid over dependence on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and practice agricultural intensification - growing more food on the same amount of land – using natural and resource-conserving approaches such as agroforestry. According to scientists at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), crop production in Africa is seriously hampered by the degradation of soil fertility, water and biodiversity resources. Currently, yields for important cereals such as maize have stagnated at 1 tone per hectare. Climate change ...

Archaeologists have found the oldest complete example in the world of a human with metastatic cancer in a 3,000 year-old skeleton. The findings are reported in the academic journal PLOS ONE today (17 March). The skeleton of the young adult male was found by a Durham University PhD student in a tomb in modern Sudan in 2013 and dates back to 1200BC. Analysis has revealed evidence of metastatic carcinoma, cancer which has spread to other parts of the body from where it started, from a malignant soft-tissue tumour spread across large areas of the body, making it ...

Augusta, Ga. – A bacterial infection can throw off the equilibrium between two key proteins in the lungs and put patients at risk for a highly lethal acute lung injury, researchers report. Bacteria can alter a single amino acid in the protein RhoA, pushing its activity level well above that of Rac1 and prompting blood vessels to leak and flood thousands of tiny air sacs in the lungs, said Dr. Stephen Black, cell and molecular physiologist at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University. The study in The Journal of Biological Chemistry also proposes ...

Severe and sometimes fatal lung disease caused by a group of bacteria in the same family as those that cause tuberculosis is much more common than previously thought, with Caucasians 55 and older at greatest risk, report researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine. The study is published online March 14 in PLOS ONE. Nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) include more than 150 types of bacteria, found in water and soil, that can infect the lungs when inhaled. Unlike tuberculosis, NTM is not contagious and cannot spread from person to person. The ...

PITTSBURGH—So many variables can contribute to shortness of breath that no person can keep them all straight. But a computer program, capable of tracking more than 100 clinical variables for almost 400 people, has shown it can identify various subtypes of asthma, which perhaps could lead to targeted, more effective treatments. Wei Wu, a Carnegie Mellon University computational biologist who led the analysis of patient data from the federally funded Severe Asthma Research Program, said many of the patient clusters identified by the computational methods are consistent ...

A team of observational cosmologists may have found evidence that cosmic inflation occurred a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, a point predicted 18 years ago by Johns Hopkins University cosmologist and theoretical physicist Marc Kamionkowski. At a news conference earlier today at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass, researchers from the BICEP2 collaboration, a partnership between Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology, announced the first direct evidence for this sudden and vast expansion of the newborn universe. ...

The frustrated attempts of a UCLA graduate student to quantify the amount of water draining from Greenland's melting ice sheet led him to devise a new way to measure river flows from outer space, he and his professor report in a new study. The new approach relies exclusively on the measurements of a river's width over time, which can be obtained from freely available satellite imagery. Currently, hydrologists calculate a river's discharge — the volume of water running through it at any given time — by taking a series of measurements on the ground, including not ...

CHESTNUT HILL, MA (March 17th): Workplace flexibility – it's a phrase that might be appealing to job seekers or make a company look good, but a new study by the Sloan Center on Aging and Work at Boston College shows flexible work options are out of reach for most employees and that when they are offered, arrangements are limited in size and scope. "While large percentages of employers report that they have at least some workplace flexibility, the number of options is usually limited and they are typically not available to the entire workforce," says Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, ...

PRINCETON, N.J.—Kyrgyzstan, a landlocked and mountainous country in Central Asia, serves a powerful role in the Eurasian drug trade by playing the "mule" that carts heroin and other opiates between Afghanistan and Russia. Many researchers theorize that this lucrative industry has taken root in Kyrgyzstan – a country with few natural resources and industries – with significant support and leeway from its government, making it a "narco-state." In the first examination of its kind, a researcher at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School writes in the International ...

D-Wave – a special computing machine with this name has been getting computer scientists and physicists talking for a number of years now. The Canadian technology company of the same name is advertising the machine as a quantum computer. However, whether or not the machine does in fact use quantum effects is the subject of controversial debate amongst experts in the field. If it does, then this would make D-Wave the world's first commercially available quantum computer. The company sold its system to illustrious customers, piquing the interest of the scientific community ...