Extreme weather and climate events like storms, heavy precipitation and droughts and heat waves prevent the update of 3 giga-tonnes of carbon by the global vegetation. A team of scientists under the lead of Markus Reichstein, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, investigated the effect of extremes on the carbon cycle from the terrestrial ecosystem perspective for the first time. In the current issue of Nature (14th of August 2013), they use Earth observation methods and numerical models to show that especially extreme droughts lead ...

Preschool children who showed less ability to estimate the number of objects in a group were 2.4 times more likely to have a later mathematical learning disability than other young people, according to a team of University of Missouri psychologists. Parents may be able to help their children develop their skills at approximating group sizes by emphasizing numerals while interacting with young children. "Lacking skill at estimating group size may impede a child's ability to learn the concept of how numerals symbolize quantities and how those quantities relate to each other," ...

The damage scientists expect climate change to do to crop yields can differ greatly depending on which type of model was used to make those projections, according to research based at Princeton University. The most dire scenarios can loom large in the minds of the public and policymakers, yet neither audience is usually aware of how the model itself influenced the outcome, the researchers said. The report in the journal Global Change Biology is one of the first to compare the agricultural projections generated by empirical models — which rely largely on field observations ...

Medical testimonials on the Internet and elsewhere present powerful personal stories and useful information, but they can also be dangerous to your health if distracting, irrelevant information leads to inappropriate treatment decisions, say researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Distracted by Details: Narrative Influence Following Conflicting Stories" was published in July in the journal Media Psychology. Authors were Joseph P. Simons, a 2013 Ph.D. graduate in social psychology, and Melanie C. Green, assistant professor of psychology, in UNC's ...

WASHINGTON D.C. August 14, 2013 -- What happens to renewable energy programs in a country that gets whacked by a full-scale debt crisis, like the one that struck Greece beginning in 2009 -- do the programs whither and die in the winds of austerity? And how do people view such programs when many of them can't afford to heat their houses? The answers to these two questions are actually linked, according to a new analysis in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, which is produced by AIP Publishing. Renewable energy programs, particularly solar, may be more ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- Researchers at the University of North Carolina and the National Institutes for Health have defined the role of the protein vinculin in enabling cell movement. In a paper published in the Journal of Cell Biology, Sharon Campbell, PhD, professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics and member of UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Clare Waterman of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health showed that cell mobility occurs through the interactions between the protein vinculin and the cytoskeletal lattice ...

The Ecological Society of America's first online-only Special Issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment showcases prescribed burns around the globe, some of them drawing on historical practices to manage forests and grasslands in fire-prone regions. The Online Special Issue looks at fire practices in the United States, Australia, southern Europe, South Africa and South America. One review article focuses on the cooperative efforts of US ranchers in the Great Plains using fire to beat back juniper encroachment on native grasslands. Another features traditional ...

Financial incentives can be a very effective tool in encouraging employees to lose weight at companies that offer their workers those types of programs, research from a University of Texas at Arlington economics assistant professor shows. Joshua Price, a UT Arlington assistant professor of economics, teamed with Cornell University Professor John Cawley to perform a case study on an employer-sponsored program that offered financial incentives for weight loss. The study was accepted for publication in The Journal of Health Economics and was featured recently on its website. ...

Athens, Ga. – Researchers at the University of Georgia are developing a new treatment technique that uses nanoparticles to reprogram immune cells so they are able to recognize and attack cancer. The findings were published recently in the early online edition of ACS Nano. The human body operates under a constant state of martial law. Chief among the enforcers charged with maintaining order is the immune system, a complex network that seeks out and destroys the hordes of invading bacteria and viruses that threaten the organic society as it goes about its work. The ...

MADISON, Wis. — Children who are exposed to lead are nearly three times more likely to be suspended from school by the 4th grade than children who are not exposed, according to a new University of Wisconsin-Madison study funded jointly by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Wisconsin Partnership Program Education and Research Committee. "Students who are suspended from school are at greater risk of dropping out, twice as likely to use tobacco, and more likely to engage in violent behavior later in life," says first author Michael Amato, a doctoral candidate in ...

LA JOLLA, CA ---- Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have discovered a powerful mechanism by which viruses such as influenza, West Nile and Dengue evade the body's immune response and infect humans with these potentially deadly diseases. The findings may provide scientists with an attractive target for novel antiviral therapies. Published in the August issue of the journal Cell Host and Microbe, the findings describe a novel mechanism that this group of so-called "enveloped viruses" uses to disarm the host's innate immune response. The mechanism ...

University of Washington geographer Kam Wing Chan is in China this week, explaining how that country can dismantle its 55-year-old system that limits rural laborers from moving to and settling in cities and qualifying for basic social benefits. It's an idea that he says makes economic and moral sense. China's "hukou" household registration system was established in 1958 as a way of maintaining cheap farm labor to grow food for urban dwellers. Ever since, rural residents wanting to move to urban areas must receive permission from the police – and with it, the right to ...

In a rare opportunity to directly compare plant communities in the same area now with a survey taken 50 years ago, a University of Arizona-led research team has provided the first on-the-ground evidence that Southwestern plants are being pushed to higher elevations by an increasingly warmer and drier climate. The findings confirm that previous hypotheses are correct in their prediction that mountain communities in the Southwest will be strongly impacted by an increasingly warmer and drier climate, and that the area is already experiencing rapid vegetation change. In ...

University of Arizona scientists have discovered an unknown mechanism that establishes polarity in developing nerve cells. Understanding how nerve cells make connections is an important step in developing cures for nerve damage resulting from spinal cord injuries or neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. In a study published on Aug. 12 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, UA doctoral student Sara Parker and her adviser, assistant professor of cellular and molecular medicine Sourav Ghosh, report that the decision which will be the "plus" ...

For a new study in the Journal of Animal Science, researchers evaluated how different levels of selenium affect the immune system of adult horses. According to the researchers, the effects of selenium supplementation on the immune system have been evaluated in other species but not extensively in horses. Dr. Laurie Lawrence, animal science professor at the University of Kentucky, said the amount of selenium in soil and forages varies across the United States. She said that they wanted to know whether horses grazing pasture that was marginal in selenium would react differently ...

A study by Johns Hopkins researchers shows that a fifth of U.S. neurologists appear unaware of serious drug safety risks associated with various anti-epilepsy drugs, potentially jeopardizing the health of patients who could be just as effectively treated with safer alternative medications. The findings suggest that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration needs a better way to communicate information to specialists about newly discovered safety risks, the researchers say, since the warnings are in many cases not getting through to doctors making important prescribing decisions. ...

Atmospheric physicist Nick Gorkavyi missed witnessing an event of the century last winter when a meteor exploded over his hometown of Chelyabinsk, Russia. From Greenbelt, Md., however, NASA's Gorkavyi and colleagues witnessed a never-before-seen view of the atmospheric aftermath of the explosion. Shortly after dawn on Feb. 15, 2013, the meteor, or bolide, measuring 59 feet (18 meters) across and weighing 11,000 metric tons, screamed into Earth's atmosphere at 41,600 mph (18.6 kilometers per second). Burning from the friction with Earth's thin air, the space rock exploded ...

A neonatologist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia is the senior author of a large new study that found that current non-invasive techniques for respiratory support are less effective than widely assumed, in reducing the incidence of severe lung injury in very premature infants. Neonatologists commonly use non-invasive nasal ventilation instead of mechanical ventilation via a breathing tube, in hopes of avoiding bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD). Frequently a by-product of intubation, BPD--scarring and inflammation of the lungs--is a leading cause of death or neurological ...

A new analysis has found that breastfeeding for more than six months may safeguard nonsmoking mothers against breast cancer. The same does not seem to hold true for smoking mothers, though. Published early online in the Journal of Clinical Nursing, the findings add to the list of benefits of breastfeeding for women and their babies. To look at the relationship between breast cancer and certain aspects of pregnancy and breastfeeding, Emilio González-Jiménez, PhD, of the University of Granada in Spain, and his colleagues analyzed the medical records of 504 female patients ...

CHICAGO --- Exercise is a common prescription for insomnia. But spending 45 minutes on the treadmill one day won't translate into better sleep that night, according to new Northwestern Medicine® research. "If you have insomnia you won't exercise yourself into sleep right away," said lead study author Kelly Glazer Baron, a clinical psychologist and director of the behavioral sleep program at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "It's a long-term relationship. You have to keep at it and not get discouraged." This is the first long-term study to show ...

[EMARGOED UNTIL THURSDAY, AUG. 15] Diabetic patients taking oral fluoroquinolones, a frequently prescribed class of antibiotics, were found to have a higher risk of severe blood sugar-related problems than diabetic patients taking other kinds of antibiotics, according to a recent study from Taiwan published in Clinical Infectious Diseases. The increased risk was low—hyperglycemia (high blood sugar) or hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) related to the drugs occurred in fewer than one in 100 patients studied—but clinicians should consider the higher risk when treating diabetic ...

Philadelphia, August 15, 2013 – Research suggests that a patient's chronic pain affects a spouse's emotional well-being and marital satisfaction. In a novel study of behavioral health outcomes published in the journal PAIN®, researchers examined the effects of patients' daily knee osteoarthritis pain on their spouses' nightly sleep. They determined that couples who expressed a high degree of closeness in their marriage experienced a stronger association between pain levels and the spouse's ability to sleep restfully. Findings further illustrated that chronic pain may place ...

Infection by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a debilitating disorder in which progressive weakening of the immune system makes affected individuals more susceptible to potentially life-threatening infections and chronic diseases. Despite advances in the treatment and management of AIDS, there is no cure, and HIV infection remains a major global health problem. According to the WHO, there were an estimated 34 million infected individuals in 2011. Over the last three decades, a number of animal models have been developed ...

Adults increasingly are conveying their personal experiences with serious disease online, but do such chronicles help the authors or their audience? In the first known study of its kind, UCLA researchers discovered that creating a personal website to chronicle the cancer experience and communicate with one's social network can reduce depressive symptoms, increase positive mood and enhance appreciation for life among women diagnosed with breast cancer. The study, published online Aug. 12 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (and scheduled for print publication at ...

Energy consumption is growing rapidly in the 21st century, with rising energy costs and sustainability issues greatly impacting the quality of human life. Harvesting energy directly from sunlight to generate electricity using photovoltaic technologies is considered to be one of the most promising opportunities to produce electricity in an environmentally benign fashion. Among the various photovoltaic technologies, polymer (plastic) solar cells offer unique attractions and opportunities. These solar cells contain Earth-abundant and environmentally benign materials, can ...