The PASS, short for "Personal Alert Safety System," has been used by firefighters for thirty years to help track members of their team who might be injured and need assistance to escape a fire. Though the alarm has saved many lives, there are cases in which the device is working correctly but is not heard or not recognized. In one recent incident report from 2010, firefighters inside a burning building either did not hear or heard and then stopped hearing an alarm that was easily audible from outside the building. Working with the National Fire Protection Association ...

Using the sensitive ears of a parasitic fly for inspiration, a group of researchers has created a new type of microphone that achieves better acoustical performance than what is currently available in hearing aids. The scientists will present their results at the 21st International Congress on Acoustics, held June 2-7 in Montreal. Ronald Miles, Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Binghamton University, studies the hearing of Ormia ochracea, a house fly-sized insect that is native to the southeast United States and Central America. Unlike most other ...

The ocean is naturally filled with the sounds of breaking waves, cracking ice, driving rain, and marine animal calls, but more and more, human activity is adding to the noise. Ships' propellers create low-frequency hums that can travel hundreds of kilometers or more in the deep ocean. Scientists have now modeled this shipping noise on a global scale. The world-wide maps will be presented for the first time at the 21st International Congress on Acoustics (ICA 2013), held June 2-7 in Montreal. "The most important thing about these maps is that seeing the sound can get ...

A new technology that relies on a system of inflatable sound absorbers may help make any performance hall instantly convertible into a venue for music ranging from classical to hard rock. The technology will be described at the 21st International Congress on Acoustics (ICA 2013), held June 2-7 in Montreal. Getting the right vibe for listeners from a particular kind of music is an acoustic challenge. Music genres differ radically both in the sound energy they generate and in how that sound interacts with the ceiling and walls of a performance space. A hall for classical ...

Don't let low grades haunt your students. A new study in the Journal of Animal Science shows that performance in foundational biology courses is a strong predictor of performance in high-level animal science courses. In a study of 1,516 students over 7 years, researchers from Kansas State University found that students who did well in biology also performed well in a rigorous genetics course. This result was not surprising, but the researchers were struck by the importance of timing. Undergraduate students did best when they waited at least a year to take the genetics ...

Indiana University researchers found that people in their 20s already began to demonstrate arterial stiffening -- when arteries become less compliant as blood pumps through the body -- but their highly active peers did not. The researchers made a similar discovery with middle-age men and women, finding that highly active study participants did not show the arterial stiffening that typically comes with aging, regardless of their gender or age. A reduction in compliance of the body's arteries is considered a risk factor, predictive of future cardiovascular disease, such ...

Trichloroethylene (TCE) exposure has possible links to increased liver cancer risk, and the relationship between TCE exposure and risks of cancers of low incidence and those with confounding by lifestyle and other factors need further study, according to a study published May 30 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. TCE is a chlorinated dry-cleaning solvent and degreaser that has been widely used for approximately the last 100 years and has shown carcinogenicity in rodents. Previous epidemiologic studies have shown a reported increase in cancer risk in humans ...

Boulder, Colo. — May 30, 2013 — On November 26, 2011, the Mars Science Laboratory began a 253-day, 560-million-kilometer journey to deliver the Curiosity rover to the Red Planet. En route, the Southwest Research Institute-led Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) made detailed measurements of the energetic particle radiation environment inside the spacecraft, providing important insights for future human missions to Mars. "In terms of accumulated dose, it's like getting a whole-body CT scan once every five or six days," said Dr. Cary Zeitlin, a principal scientist in SwRI's ...

Once the stuff of science fiction, a human mission to Mars may be becoming more feasible, and a new report in the 31 May issue of Science provides insight into the relevant radiation hazards. Exposure to radiation has long been known to be a problem for participants in deep space missions. Because these missions can take years, they expose anything or anyone on board to high energy particles called Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs), and also to lower-energy Solar Energetic Particles (SEPs). Characterizing the radiation that spacecraft destined for Mars or other deep space ...

This news release is available in Portuguese, French, Arabic, Japanese and Chinese. The disappearance of large, fruit-eating birds from tropical forests in Brazil has caused the region's forest palms to produce smaller, less successful seeds over the past century, researchers say. The findings provide evidence that human activity can trigger fast-paced evolutionary changes in natural populations. Mauro Galetti from the Universidade Estadual Paulista in São Paulo, Brazil, along with an international team of colleagues, used patches of rainforest that had been ...

Nicotine replacement therapy and other licensed drugs can help people quit smoking, according to a new systematic review published in The Cochrane Library. The study, which is an overview of previous Cochrane reviews, supports the use of the smoking cessation medications that are already widely licensed internationally, and shows that another drug licensed in Russia could hold potential as an effective and affordable treatment. In Europe and the US the only medications currently licensed for smoking cessation are nicotine replacement therapies (NRTs) such as nicotine ...

Probiotic supplements have the potential to prevent diarrhoea caused by antibiotics, according to a new Cochrane systematic review. The authors studied Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) infections in patients taking antibiotics and found symptoms of diarrhoea were substantially reduced when patients were also treated with probiotics. Antibiotics disturb the beneficial bacteria that live in the gut and allow other harmful bacteria like C. difficile to take hold. Although some people infected with C. difficile show no symptoms, others suffer diarrhoea or colitis. The ...

A multi-national team of researchers has identified genetic markers that predict educational attainment by pooling data from more than 125,000 individuals in the United States, Australia, and 13 western European countries. The study, which appears in the journal Science, was conducted by the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC), which includes researchers at NYU, Erasmus University, Cornell University, Harvard University, the University of Bristol, and the University of Queensland, among other institutions. The SSGAC conducted what is called a genome-wide ...

When Felix Fischer of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) set out to develop nanostructures made of graphene using a new, controlled approach to chemical reactions, the first result was a surprise: spectacular images of individual carbon atoms and the bonds between them. "We weren't thinking about making beautiful images; the reactions themselves were the goal," says Fischer, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division (MSD) and a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. "But ...

Researchers have found that conditions in the womb can affect kidney development and have serious health implications for the child not only immediately after birth, but decades later. In a paper published today in The Lancet an international team, including Monash University's Professor John Bertram and the University of Queensland's Professor Wendy Hoy, reviewed existing, peer-reviewed research on kidney health and developmental programming - the effects of the in utero environment on adult health. The accumulated evidence linked low birth weight and prematurity ...

There is a lack of evidence regarding the effectiveness of technologies used to reduce arsenic contamination finds research in BioMed Central's open access journal Environmental Evidence. More studies assessing the technologies themselves and how they are used in the community are needed to ensure that people have access to safe, clean water. Arsenic is now recognised to be one of the world's greatest environmental hazards, threatening the lives of several hundred million people. Naturally occurring arsenic leaches into water from surrounding rocks and once in the water ...

Given the option, many women with symptoms of urinary tract infections are choosing to avoid antibiotics and give their bodies a chance to heal naturally, finds research in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Family Practice. The research shows that 70% of women with symptoms of uncomplicated urinary tract infections who did not use antibiotics for a week were cured or showed improvement. Antimicrobial-resistant bacteria are already a big problem and the incidence of 'superbugs', which are resistant to several antibiotics, is on the rise. Over use of antibiotics ...

This is the first study to examine the effectiveness of higher doses of oseltamivir in cases of hospitalized severe human influenza (seasonal, pandemic and bird flu strains). The authors say their findings have implications for global guidelines, clinical management and pandemic preparedness, including for the current H7N9 outbreak. Human influenza is usually a self-limiting illness. Occasionally, however, it can lead to respiratory complications, admission to hospital, and death. Some studies suggest that, if given early, oseltamivir can help reduce mortality. This has ...

According to standard theory, the best response to current circumstances should be unaffected by what has happened in the past. But the Bristol study, published in the leading journal Science, shows that in a changing, unpredictable world it is important to be sensitive to past conditions. The research team, led by Professor John McNamara in Bristol's School of Mathematics, built a mathematical model to understand how animals should behave when they are uncertain about the pattern of environmental change. They found that when animals are used to rich conditions but ...

Frontiers in Psychology When language switching has no apparent cost: Lexical access in sentence context Bilinguals have the remarkable ability to switch from one language to the other. In a new study, Jason Gullifer and colleagues from Pennsylvania State University, USA, looked at whether language switching incurs a processing cost. They show that the mind has little difficulty in preventing such mix-ups between languages. When 26 North American Latino people were asked to read aloud an underlined word within a text that mixed English and Spanish, they did not think ...

Rounded pebbles on the surface of Mars indicate that a stream once flowed on the red planet, according to a new study by a team of scientists from NASA's Curiosity rover mission, including a University of California, Davis, geologist. The study will be published in the May 31 issue of the journal Science. Rounded pebbles of this size are known to form only when transported through water over long distances. They were discovered between the north rim of the planet's Gale Crater and the base of Mount Sharp, a mountain inside the crater. The finding represents the first ...

Every chemist's dream, to snap an atomic-scale picture of a chemical before and after it reacts, has now come true, thanks to a new technique developed by chemists and physicists at the University of California, Berkeley. Using a state-of-the-art atomic force microscope, the scientists have taken the first atom-by-atom pictures – including images of the chemical bonds between atoms – clearly depicting how a molecule's structure changed during a reaction. Until now, scientists have only been able to infer this type of information from spectroscopic analysis. "Even though ...

Sharks are worth more in the ocean than in a bowl of soup, according to researchers from the University of British Columbia. A new study, published today in Oryx – The International Journal of Conservation, shows that shark ecotourism currently generates more than US$314 million annually worldwide and is expected to more than double to US$780 million in the next 20 years. In comparison, the landed value of global shark fisheries is currently US$630 million and has been in decline for the past decade. An estimated 38 million sharks are killed per year to feed the global ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — A mystery of the moon that imperiled astronauts and spacecraft on lunar missions has been solved by a Purdue University-led team of scientists as part of NASA's GRAIL mission. Large concentrations of mass lurk on the lunar surface hidden like coral reefs beneath the ocean waves - an unseen and devastating hazard. These concentrations change the gravity field and can either pull a spacecraft in or push it off course, sealing its fate to a crash on the face of the moon. "In 1968 these mass concentrations were an unwelcome discovery as scientists ...

South American rainforests thrived during three extreme global warming events in the past, say paleontologists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in a new report published in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Science. No tropical forests in South America currently experience average yearly temperatures of more than 84 degrees Fahrenheit (29 degrees Celsius). But by the end of this century, average global temperatures are likely to rise by another 1 F (0.6 C), leading some scientists to predict the demise of the world's most diverse terrestrial ecosystem. ...