Where there's wildfire, there's smoke—a lot of it. And those vast, carbon-laden clouds released by burning biomass can play a significant role in climate change. However, not much is known about the different types of particles in wildfire smoke and how they affect climate. Now two Michigan Technological University researchers have uncovered some of their secrets. In particular, they studied an important component of smoke that has so far been absent from most models of climate change. A team including Claudio Mazzoleni, an associate professor of physics, PhD student ...

An international team of researchers presents fresh evidence that confirms the existence of the superheavy chemical element 115. The experiment was conducted at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research, an accelerator laboratory located in Darmstadt. Under the lead of physicists from Lund University in Sweden, the group, which included researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM), was able to present a way to directly identify new superheavy elements. Elements beyond atomic number 104 are referred to as superheavy ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – A new study on mentholated cigarette use in the U.S. finds an increase in menthol cigarette smoking among young adults and concludes that efforts to reduce smoking likely are being thwarted by the sale and marketing of mentholated cigarettes, including emerging varieties of established youth brands. "Our findings indicate that youth are heavy consumers of mentholated cigarettes, and that overall menthol cigarette smoking has either remained constant or increased in all three age groups we studied, while non-menthol smoking has decreased," says lead researcher ...

The following highlights summarize research papers that have been recently published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres (JGR-D), Journal of Geophysical Research-Earth Surface (JGR-F) and Paleoceanography. In this release: 1. Parts of Amazon on the verge of forest-to-grassland shift 2. Hawaiian Islands formed through extrusive volcanic activity 3. Shifts of the Subtropical Shelf Front controlled by atmospheric variations 4. Atmosphere's emission fingerprint affected by how clouds are stacked 5. Loess landscapes could ...

Washington, DC (August 29, 2013) — Socioeconomic status is a more important barrier to living kidney donation than cultural factors, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). The findings may be useful for determining ways to increase living kidney donation in the United States. Living donor kidney transplantation is the treatment of choice for patients with kidney failure. It is well described that African American patients with kidney failure have reduced access to kidney transplantation. Therefore, ...

Washington, DC (August 29, 2013) — The presence of protein in the urine may be a marker of risk for future cognitive decline in patients with type 2 diabetes and normal kidney function, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN). The finding suggests that urinary protein may be an early warning sign regarding patients' cognitive abilities. Individuals with diabetes have an increased risk of experiencing cognitive impairment, especially impairment due to vascular causes. Joshua Barzilay, MD ...

The canyon is at least 750km long and in places as much as 800m deep and is on the same scale as parts of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, USA. This remarkable, previously unknown, feature is thought to predate the ice sheet that has covered Greenland for the last few million years and has the characteristics of a meandering river channel. By comparison, the longest river in the UK, the River Severn, is about 350km long and much less wide and deep. Professor Jonathan Bamber of Bristol's School of Geographical Sciences, lead author of the study, said: "With Google Streetview ...

It's a fiercely debated question amongst palaeontologists: was the giant 'terror bird', which lived in Europe between 55 to 40 million years ago, really a terrifying predator or just a gentle herbivore? New research presented at the Goldschmidt conference in Florence today (Thursday 29th August) may finally provide an answer. A team of German researchers has studied fossilised remains of terror birds from a former open-cast brown coal mine in the Geiseltal (Saxony-Anhalt, Germany) and their findings indicate the creature was most likely not a meat eater. The terror ...

COLLEGE PARK, Md – Scientists have studied bird migration for centuries, but it remains one of nature's great mysteries. How do birds find their way over long distances between breeding and wintering sites? Is their migration route encoded in their genes, or is it learned? Working with records from a long-term effort to reintroduce critically endangered whooping cranes in the Eastern U.S., a University of Maryland-led research team found evidence that these long-lived birds learn their migration route from older cranes, and get better at it with age. Whooping crane ...

A person's intensity of Facebook use can be predicted by activity in a reward-related area of the brain, according to a new study published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. In the first study to relate brain activity to social media use, Meshi and colleagues observed activity in the brain's reward circuitry, the nucleus accumbens, in 31 participants. Researchers focused on the nucleus accumbens, a small but critical structure located deep in the center of the brain, because previous research has shown that rewards —including food, money, ...

Boston, MA — Eating more whole fruits, particularly blueberries, grapes, and apples, was significantly associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, according to a new study led by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers. Greater consumption of fruit juices was associated with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes. The study is the first to look at the effects of individual fruits on diabetes risk. "While fruits are recommended as a measure for diabetes prevention, previous studies have found mixed results for total fruit consumption. Our findings provide novel ...

The human body has hundreds of different cell types, all with the same basic DNA, and all of which can ultimately be traced back to identical stem cells. Despite this fundamental similarity, a bone cell has little in common with a brain cell when it comes to appearance or function. The fact that bone is rigid and mechanically distinct from soft fat or brain had been speculated to play some role in differentiation to new cells in those parts of the body, but mechanisms have been unclear. Now, a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that ...

Several key elements in systems of care can reduce stroke deaths and disabilities, according to a new American Heart Association/American Stroke Association policy statement published in its journal Stroke. Stroke is the number four cause of death and a leading cause of adult disability in the United States. On average, every 4 minutes someone dies of a stroke. The policy statement addresses patients' care from the time stroke symptoms are identified, to the emergency medical services' (EMS) response, to the transport and treatment in the hospital and rehabilitation. Recommendations ...

STANFORD, Calif. - You can't resurrect a dead cell anymore than you can breathe life into a brick, regardless of what you may have gleaned from zombie movies and Dr. Frankenstein. So when heart cells die from lack of blood flow during a heart attack, replacing those dead cells is vital to the heart muscle's recovery. But muscle tissue in the adult human heart has a limited capacity to heal, which has spurred researchers to try to give the healing process a boost. Various methods of transplanting healthy cells into a damaged heart have been tried, but have yet to yield ...

Poverty consumes so much mental energy that those in poor circumstances have little remaining brainpower to concentrate on other areas of life, new research finds. As a result, those with few resources are more likely to make bad decisions that perpetuate their financial woes. Published in the journal Science, the study suggests our cognitive abilities can be diminished by the exhausting effort of tasks like scrounging to pay bills. As a result, less “mental bandwidth” remains for education, training, time-management, and other steps that could help break out of the ...

Poverty and all its related concerns require so much mental energy that the poor have less remaining brainpower to devote to other areas of life, according to research based at Princeton University. As a result, people of limited means are more likely to make mistakes and bad decisions that may be amplified by -- and perpetuate -- their financial woes. Published in the journal Science, the study presents a unique perspective regarding the causes of persistent poverty. The researchers suggest that being poor may keep a person from concentrating on the very avenues that ...

Eating more whole fruits, particularly blueberries, grapes and apples, is associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, with greater fruit juice consumption having an adverse effect, a paper published today on bmj.com suggests. Increasing fruit consumption has been recommended for the prevention of many chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes. However, studies have generated some mixed results. Researchers from the UK, USA and Singapore therefore looked to examine the association of individual fruit consumption in relation to type 2 diabetes risk. Data were ...

In a call to action on the sorry comparative state of U.S. health, researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health are urging President Obama to "remove the public veil of ignorance" and confront a pressing question: Why is America at the bottom? The report, published in the journal Science, appeals to the President to mobilize government to create a National Commission on the Health of Americans. The researchers underscore the importance of this effort in order for the country to begin reversing the decline in the comparative status of U.S. health, ...

For people struggling to live paycheck-to-paycheck, daily life can sometimes seem like a gauntlet of impossible-to-answer questions – Can I afford to put food on the table? Will I make rent this month? What will happen if I lose my job? What if my kids get sick, or my car breaks down? For many, those questions become so persistent it's hard to concentrate on anything else. And that's exactly the problem, says Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan. The accumulation of those money woes and day-to-day worries leaves many low-income individuals not only struggling financially, ...

Bacteria living in the Gulf of Mexico beaches were able to 'eat up' the contamination from the Deep Water Horizon oil spill by supplementing their diet with nitrogen, delegates at the Goldschmidt conference will be told today, Friday 30th August. Professor Joel Kostka will tell geochemists gathered in Florence for the conference that detailed genetic analysis showed some of the bacteria thrived on a diet of oil because they were able to fix nitrogen from the air. The research -- the first to use next generation sequencing technologies to dig into the detail of how the ...

In a materials science laboratory at Harvard University, a transparent disk connected to a laptop fills the room with music—it's the "Morning" prelude from Peer Gynt, played on an ionic speaker. No ordinary speaker, it consists of a thin sheet of rubber sandwiched between two layers of a saltwater gel, and it's as clear as a window. A high-voltage signal that runs across the surfaces and through the layers forces the rubber to rapidly contract and vibrate, producing sounds that span the entire audible spectrum, 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz. But this is not an electronic ...

AMHERST, Mass. – Using NASA's super-sensitive Chandra X-ray space telescope, a team of astronomers led by Q. Daniel Wang at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has solved a long-standing mystery about why most super massive black holes (SMBH) at the centers of galaxies have such a low accretion rate—that is, they swallow very little of the cosmic gases available and instead act as if they are on a severe diet. "In principle, super massive black holes suck in everything," Wang says, "but we found this is not correct." Astronomers once thought SMBHs with their intense ...

SAMOSIR, NORTH SUMATRA (30 August 2013)—With governments, loggers, miners and palm oil producers poaching their lands with impunity, indigenous leaders from 17 countries gathered on a remote island in Sumatra this week to launch a global fight for their rights that will take advantage of powerful mapping tools combined with indigenous knowledge to mark traditional boundaries. "It's amazing to see indigenous groups from all over the world coming here armed with hundreds of detailed maps they have created with things like handheld GPS devices and Internet mapping apps," ...

VIDEO: This is a short-term animation showing the motion of 2011 QF99, as seen from above the north pole of the solar system. Click here for more information. BC astronomers have discovered the first Trojan asteroid sharing the orbit of Uranus, and believe 2011 QF99 is part of a larger-than-expected population of transient objects temporarily trapped by the gravitational pull of the Solar System's giant planets. Trojans are asteroids that share the orbit of a planet, ...

University of Arizona researchers led a team that has discovered that venom of spiders in the genus Loxosceles, which contains about 100 spider species including the brown recluse, produces a different chemical product in the human body than scientists believed. The finding has implications for understanding how these spider bites affect humans and development of possible treatments for the bites. One of few common spiders whose bites can have a seriously harmful effect on humans, brown recluse spider venom contains a rare protein that can cause a blackened lesion at ...