Scientists who study Earth, the sun and stars have long used high-altitude scientific balloons to carry their telescopes far into the stratosphere for a better view of their targets. Not so much for planetary scientists. That's because they needed a highly stable, off-the-shelf-type system that could accurately point their instruments and then track planetary targets as they moved in the solar system. That device now exists. NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., has designed a new pointing system — the Wallops Arc Second Pointer (WASP) — that can point ...

BOSTON – While the function of eating is to nourish the body, this is not what actually compels us to seek out food. Instead, it is hunger, with its stomach-growling sensations and gnawing pangs that propels us to the refrigerator – or the deli or the vending machine. Although hunger is essential for survival, abnormal hunger can lead to obesity and eating disorders, widespread problems now reaching near-epidemic proportions around the world. Over the past 20 years, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) neuroendocrinologist Bradford Lowell, MD, PhD, has been untangling ...

Seattle, Wash. and Huntsville, Ala.—Researchers from the University of Washington and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology have developed a new method for organizing and prioritizing genetic data. The Combined Annotation–Dependent Depletion, or CADD, method will assist scientists in their search for disease-causing mutation events in human genomes. The new method is the subject of a paper titled "A general framework for estimating the relative pathogenicity of human genetic variants," published in Nature Genetics. Current methods of organizing human genetic variation ...

Vittorio Gallo, PhD, Director of the Center for Neuroscience Research at Children's National Health System, and other researchers have found a "potentially novel therapeutic target" to reduce the rate of deterioration and to promote growth of brain cells damaged by multiple sclerosis (MS). Current therapies can be effective in patients with relapsing MS, but have little impact in promoting tissue growth. The brain produces new cells to repair the damage from MS years after symptoms appear. However, in most cases the cells are unable to complete the repair, as unknown ...

PITTSBURGH, Feb. 7, 2014 – A comprehensive analysis of patient telephone records at an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) clinic revealed that 15 percent of patients account for half of all calls to the clinic. Forty-two percent of frequent-caller patients also were seen in the emergency department or hospitalized within the following year. The results, which can help doctors identify patients with the most severe disease and those at risk of potentially avoidable high-cost medical interventions, were reported in a study published online this week in the journal Clinical ...

MANHATTAN, Kan. -- A recent study in the journal Nature finds that nearly 50,000 years ago during the ice age, the landscape was not as drab as once thought -- it was filled with colorful wildflowers. These wildflowers helped sustain woolly mammoths and other giant grazing animals. The study, "Fifty thousand years of Arctic vegetation and megafauna diet," included Joseph Craine, assistant professor in the Division of Biology at Kansas State University. It was led by the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen and was a collaboration of more than 25 academic ...

Stampedes unfortunately occur on too regular a basis. Previously, physicists developed numerous models of crowd evacuation dynamics. Their analyses focused on disasters such as the yearly Muslim Hajj or of the Love Parade disaster in Germany in 2010. Unfortunately, the casualties at these events may have been linked to the limitations of the crowd dynamics models used at the time. Now, a new study outlines a procedure for quantitatively comparing different crowd models, which also helps to compare these models with real-world data. In a paper published in EPJ B, Vaisagh ...

New genetic evidence strengthens the case that one well-known type of cholesterol is a likely suspect in causing heart disease, but also casts further doubt on the causal role played by another type. The findings may guide the search for improved treatments for heart disease. Most of us have heard of "good cholesterol" and "bad cholesterol" coursing through our bloodstream. In the conventional health wisdom of the past 30 years, having more of the "good" variety (high-density lipoprotein, or HDL) lowers your risk of heart disease, while more of the bad one (low-density ...

Getting in the right shape might be just as important in a biology lab as a gym. Shape is thought to play an important role in the effectiveness of cells grown to repair or replace damaged tissue in the body. To help design new structures that enable cells to "shape up," researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have come up with a way to measure, and more importantly, classify, the shapes cells tend to take in different environments.* With the notable exception of Flat Stanley, we all live, and are shaped by, a 3-dimensional world. Biologists ...

Researchers have found that the melanopsin pigment in the eye is potentially more sensitive to light than its more famous counterpart, rhodopsin, the pigment that allows for night vision. For more than two years, the staff of the Laboratory for Computational Photochemistry and Photobiology (LCPP) at Ohio's Bowling Green State University (BGSU), have been investigating melanopsin, a retina pigment capable of sensing light changes in the environment, informing the nervous system and synchronizing it with the day/night rhythm. Most of the study's complex computations were ...

In a study published in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology on February 7, 2014, Daniel J. Pallin, MD, MPH and Jeremiah D. Schuur, MD, MS, surveyed a random sample of US emergency departments (EDs) and found substantial variation in the adoption of policies relating to contact precautions. While most EDs have policies relating to contact precautions when specific organisms are suspected, a minority have such policies for the symptoms often caused by those organisms. This indicated that institutional policies do not mirror consensus recommendations by the CDC, ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — As the Endangered Species Act (ESA) celebrated its 40th anniversary at the end of 2013, its administrative agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), was mired in controversy. At issue was a proposal to remove the gray wolf (Canis lupus) from the List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and add the Mexican gray wolf (Canis lupus baileyi). As a result, the USFWS sought an independent peer review of the science behind the proposed rule to delist the gray wolf species. The agency commissioned UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological ...

Communities across the United States experienced an unprecedented decline in crime in the 1990s. But for counties where Wal-Mart built stores, the decline wasn't nearly as dramatic. "The crime decline was stunted in counties where Wal-Mart expanded in the 1990s," says Scott Wolfe, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina and lead author of a new study. "If the corporation built a new store, there were 17 additional property crimes and 2 additional violent crimes for every 10,000 persons in a county." The study, titled ...

Septic shock is caused by excessive and systemic reaction of the entire body against infectious agents, in most cases of bacterial origin. The number of deaths by septic shock in intensive care units is very high and is still increasing, despite numerous large scale clinical trials. Scientists of VIB and UGent, supervised by Peter Vandenabeele, demonstrated in a mouse study that a potential novel treatment for sepsis may consist of the simultaneous neutralization of two harmful cytokines in the blood circulation, namely interleukin-1 and interleukin-18. In the VIB research ...

One of the issues of the Atapuerca sites that generates the most scientific debate is the dating of the strata where the fossils are found. Therefore, researchers at the Spanish National Research Centre for Human Evolution, among others, strive to settle the dates. A study published by the 'Journal of Archaeological Science' has clarified that the sediment of Gran Dolina, where the first remains of Homo antecessor were discovered in 1994, is 900,000 years old. The findings at the Lower Palaeolithic cave site of Gran Dolina, in the Sierra de Atapuerca mountain range (Burgos), ...

The lipid-rich membranes of cells are largely impermeable to proteins, but evolution has provided a way through – in the form of transmembrane tunnels. A new study shows in unmatched detail what happens as proteins pass through such a pore. Every cell is surrounded by a surface membrane and contains internal compartments bounded by membranes. Almost one-third of all proteins synthesized in cells must pass through these membranes or be incorporated into them in order to fulfil their functions. However, the fat-rich nature of membranes makes it impossible for most proteins ...

Zurich, 7 February 2014. Since the end of 2011 when the scientific work of Professor Don Poldermans was first scrutinized there has been controversy in the medical world about the use of beta blockers in perioperative care. The recent publication - and retraction for proper peer reviewing and revision - in the European Heart Journal (EHJ) of a paper by Professors Cole and Francis from Imperial College, questioning whether beta blockers in perioperative care could lead to a mortality increase brought the topic back into the public eye. The EHJ has published an editorial ...

The total stock of fish on the planet had been reckoned until today to be around 2,000 million tonnes. About half of them were thought to be mesopelagic fish, in other words, ones found at depths of between 200 and 1,000 metres in ocean areas. However, an international team*, in which AZTI-Tecnalia researchers are participating and which is being led by the doctor in oceanography Xabier Irigoien, has discovered that its abundance could be at least 10 times higher than the original estimate. The results have been published in the journal Nature Communications. Mesopelagic ...

Biologists working in the Andes mountains of Ecuador have described a new plant species, a wild relative of black pepper, that is in itself a mini biodiversity hotspot. The new species, Piper kelleyi, is the sole home of an estimated 40-50 insect species, most of which are entirely dependent on this plant species for survival. This discovery is part of a larger project which focuses on the influence of plant-produced chemical compounds on biodiversity. The study was published in the open access journal PhytoKeys. The chemical compounds produced by plants are source of ...

Since its first identification in Asia, highly pathogenic avian influenza—H5N1—has caused significant alarm in the scientific community. While the virus' primary target is birds—tens of millions have already died from it—it is capable of infecting mammals, including humans, causing serious illness and a frightening rate of mortality. In a new study, Matthew Scotch, a researcher at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute, tracks the spread of an H5N1 variant in Egypt—a country recently identified as a major epicenter for the virus. In results recently appearing ...

An international team of researchers led by scientists at Virginia Tech and the University of California, Berkeley has discovered that a process that turns on photosynthesis in plants likely developed on Earth in ancient microbes 2.5 billion years ago, long before oxygen became available. The research offers new perspective on evolutionary biology, microbiology, and the production of natural gas, and may shed light on climate change, agriculture, and human health. "By looking at this one mechanism that was not previously studied, we will be able to develop new basic ...

SAN ANTONIO (Feb. 6, 2014) — Scientists from the School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio have found a clue as to why muscles weaken with age. In a study published Feb. 5 in The Journal of Neuroscience, they report the first evidence that "set points" in the nervous system are not inalterably determined during development but instead can be reset with age. They observed a change in set point that resulted in significantly diminished motor function in aging fruit flies. "The body has a set point for temperature (98.6 degrees), ...

A genetic disorder that affects about 1 in every 2,500 births can cause a bewildering array of clinical problems, including brain tumors, impaired vision, learning disabilities, behavioral problems, heart defects and bone deformities. The symptoms and their severity vary among patients affected by this condition, known as neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1). Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a patient's gender as a clear and simple guidepost to help health-care providers anticipate some of the effects of NF1. The scientists ...

A new study analyses the risk factors and excess mortality among heroin and cocaine consumers admitted to treatment in Spain. The results reveal that the fatality rate among consumers of both drugs is 14.3 times higher than for the general population, while among those only using cocaine, it is 5.1 times higher. In Spain the majority of deaths related to cocaine are not correctly certified and therefore up until now very few studies have been carried out that analyse the consequences of consuming these drugs in terms of mortality. "Death certificates rarely include ...

Mexico is the fourth largest honey producer and fifth largest honey exporter in the world. A Smithsonian researcher and colleagues helped rural farmers in Mexico to quantify the genetically modified organism (GMO) soybean pollen in honey samples rejected for sale in Germany. Their results will appear Feb. 7 in the online journal, Scientific Reports. David Roubik, senior staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and colleagues developed the ability to identify pollen grains in honey in Panama and in Mexico during the 1980s and 1990s when they studied ...