Strict requirements on the use of animal manures in fresh produce production imposed by the new federal food-safety law threatened to adversely impact the mushroom industry, which relies on horse and poultry manure for a specialized growth substrate. But a new study shows that heat generated during the traditional composting process -- originally developed to kill insect and fungal pests of mushrooms -- is adequate for eliminating human pathogens that might be present, according to researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences. As a result of those findings, ...

NASA's Global Hawk 872 flew over Tropical Storm Humberto on Sept. 16 and 17 after it was reborn from remnants of its earlier life cycle. Data from NASA 872 showed that the core had a hybrid structure. NASA's Global Hawk 872 unmanned aircraft took off at 10:42 a.m. EDT from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va., Sept. 16 to investigate newly reformed Tropical Storm Humberto. NASA 872 dispersed dropsondes throughout Humberto and gathered data on the environment of the storm. A sonde is a device that measures winds, temperature, and humidity. The instrument ...

One day in 2011, undergraduate student Naomi Martisius was sorting through tiny bone remnants in the University of California, Davis, paleoanthropology lab when she stumbled across a peculiar piece. The bone fragment, from a French archaeological site, turned out to be a part of an early specialized bone tool used by a Neandertal before the first modern humans appeared in Europe. "At the time, I had no idea about the impact of my discovery," said Martisius, who is now pursuing her doctoral degree in anthropology at UC Davis. Martisius' opportunity was the result of ...

Two NASA satellites observed Hurricane Manuel as it made landfall in northwestern Mexico and brought rainfall into southwestern Texas. NASA's TRMM Satellite measured Hurricane Manuel's rainfall from space and found areas where it was falling as fast as 2 inches per hour. NASA's Aqua satellite captured both visible and infrared images that revealed strong thunderstorms associated with Manuel's remnants were streaming northeast into Texas. Those rains are expected to continue to soaking central Texas through Sept. 21. As predicted by the National Hurricane Center (NHC), ...

VIDEO: In this TRMM satellite flyover animation from Sept. 19 rain was falling at a rate of over 140mm/~5.5 inches (red) per hour in the powerful storms within Super Typhoon Usagi's... Click here for more information. The most powerful typhoon of 2013 was passing between northern Philippines and southern Taiwan on Sept. 19. When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Usagi, infrared data showed a large area of powerful thunderstorms and heavy rain surrounding the center while ...

Researchers at Saint Louis University School of Medicine have discovered a novel interaction between prostacyclin (PGI2) analogs and phosphodiesterase 5 (PDE5) inhibitors, two groups of drugs used in the treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). They found that, in combination, these drugs stimulate enhanced release of a potent vasodilator adenosine triphosphate (ATP) from human red blood cells (RBCs). Their study appears in the September 2013 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine. PAH is a chronic disorder characterized by sustained increases in pulmonary ...

DETROIT — Members of an educational organization contribute to its leadership and can blend personal and social needs to help leaders encourage cooperation, a Wayne State University researcher has found. Administrators of college preparatory programs — which are aimed at high school students but housed in colleges or universities — typically have been viewed as leaders, with students seen as followers. Recent scholarship, however, has begun to focus on the impact of followers on educational organizations' leadership and leadership practices. Michael Owens, Ph.D., assistant ...

NASA's TRMM satellite data revealed heavy rainfall and banding of thunderstorms around the southern quadrant of System 98W in the northwestern Pacific near Guam and the Marianas Islands. Those are two signs that the low pressure area may be consolidating into a tropical depression. At 1700 UTC/1 p.m. EDT on Sept. 20, System 98W was centered about 16.2 north and 146.7 east, about 195 nautical miles north-northeast of Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. System 98W had maximum sustained winds near 25 knots/28.7 mph/46.3 kph. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite ...

The sweep of a needle across the grooves of a worn vinyl record carries distinct sounds: hisses, scratches, even the echo of skips. For many years, though, those yearning to hear Frank Sinatra sing "Fly Me to the Moon" have been able to listen to his light baritone with technical clarity, courtesy of the increased signal-to-noise ratio of digital remasterings. Now, with advances in neurofeedback techniques, the signal-to-noise ratio of the brain activity underlying our thoughts can be remastered as well, according to a recent discovery in the Proceedings of the National ...

AUSTIN, Texas — A recently published study strongly suggests men succumb to sexual temptations more than women — for example, cheating on a partner — because they experience strong sexual impulses, not because they have weak self-control. Previous research has shown that men are more likely than women to pursue romantic partners that are "off limits." However, until now, the explanation for this sex difference was largely unexplored. One possible explanation for this effect is that men experience stronger sexual impulses than women do. A second possibility is that ...

After an unusually cold summer in the northernmost latitudes, Arctic sea ice appears to have reached its annual minimum summer extent for 2013 on Sept. 13, the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado in Boulder has reported. Analysis of satellite data by NSIDC and NASA showed that the sea ice extent shrunk to 1.97 million square miles (5.10 million square kilometers). This year's sea ice extent is substantially higher than last year's record low minimum. On Sept.16, 2012, Arctic sea ice reached its smallest extent ever recorded ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Sept. 19, 2013 – The medical community touts the importance of not carrying excess weight, but that has not always been the message delivered to older adults. Weight loss has been discouraged among older adults, partly because of health concerns over inadvertent reductions in muscle and bone mass, which is known to accompany overall weight loss. However, new research from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center shows that physical activity and weight loss conducted together for older, overweight and obese adults results in improved body composition, translating ...

At some point in elementary school you were shown that opposite charges attract and like charges repel. This is a universal scientific truth – except when it isn't. A research team led by chemist Richard Saykally and theorist David Prendergast of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has shown that when hydrated in water, positively charged ions (cations) can actually pair up with one another. "Through a combination of X-ray spectroscopy, liquid microjets and first principles' theory, we've observed and characterized contact pairing between guanidinium ...

Boulder, Colo., USA – Geosphere has posted additions to several themed issues: History and Impact of Sea-Level Change Offshore New Jersey; Geodynamics and Consequences of Lithospheric Removal in the Sierra Nevada, California; Cenozoic Tectonics, Magmatism, and Stratigraphy of the Snake River Plain-Yellowstone Region and Adjacent Areas; Origin and Evolution of the Sierra Nevada and Walker Lane. Two other articles cover terrestrial laser scanning and the earthquake hazard of the Hat Creek fault. Abstracts for these and other Geosphere papers are available at http://geosphere.gsapubs.org/. ...

Fairbanks, Alaska— For the first time, researchers completed an extensive exploration of how quickly ice is melting underneath a rapidly changing Antarctic glacier, possibly the biggest source of uncertainty in global sea level projections. Martin Truffer, a physics professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Tim Stanton, an oceanographer with the Naval Postgraduate School, were able to look underneath the Pine Island Glacier on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and take exact measurements of the undersea melting process. "This particular site is crucial, because ...

1. Researchers at A*STAR's Singapore Immunology Network (SIgN) have discovered a new mechanism involving p53, the famous tumour suppressor, to fight against aggressive cancers. This strategy works by sabotaging the ability of the cancer cells to hide from the immune system. Published in the prestigious Nature Communications journal, this research opens a new avenue to improve targeted cancer therapy by harnessing the body's own immune system to control and eliminate cancer cells. 2. Also known as the "Guardian of the Genome", p53 fights cancer by causing damaged cells ...

A provocative new study suggests it is straightforward to predict which academics will succeed as publishing scientists. Those who publish earlier and more often while young are typically the long-term winners. "We were really surprised," said Professor William Laurance of James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, who led the study. "It doesn't matter if you go to Harvard or a low-ranked university. If you begin publishing scientific articles when you're still a graduate student, you are far more likely to succeed in the long run." Laurance's team scrutinized ...

Deadly H7N9 avian flu viruses infected people for the first time earlier this year in China, but little is known about how they evolved to become harmful to humans. In a study published by Cell Press on September 19 in Cell Host & Microbe, an in-depth evolutionary analysis of whole-genome sequences of different types of avian flu viruses has revealed that new H7N9 viruses emerged from distinct H9N2 viruses in a two-step process, first occurring in wild birds and then continuing in domestic birds. "A deep understanding of how the novel H7N9 viruses were generated is of ...

If you really want to understand why a particular human cancer resists treatment, you have to be able to study that tumor—really study it—in a way that just isn't possible in humans. Cancer biologists have been developing a new approach to this challenge, by transplanting human cancers directly from patients to mice whose crippled immune systems will allow those human tissues to grow. According to research published in the Cell Press publication Cell Reports on September 19th, this new approach permits analysis of human cancer in unprecedented detail. The new work shows ...

September 19, 2013 –Bethesda, MD – Genetic tests can now tell us whether we are at increased risk of various cancers, heart or kidney disease, asthma and a number of other conditions. Other genetic tests can tell whether you will respond to certain medicines or be harmed by side effects linked to your genetic code. But harnessing that information to benefit individual patients and prevent illnesses in others will require that doctors have access to genomic information for each patient. As health records are converted to digital form, the most likely place to store and ...

Water pours into a cup at about the same rate regardless of whether the water bottle is made of glass or plastic. But at nanometer-size scales for water and potentially other fluids, whether the container is made of glass or plastic does make a significant difference. A new study shows that in nanoscopic channels, the effective viscosity of water in channels made of glass can be twice as high as water in plastic channels. Nanoscopic glass channels can make water flow more like ketchup than ordinary H2O. The effect of container properties on the fluids they hold offers ...

A magnitude 8.3 earthquake that struck deep beneath the Sea of Okhotsk on May 24, 2013, has left seismologists struggling to explain how it happened. At a depth of about 609 kilometers (378 miles), the intense pressure on the fault should inhibit the kind of rupture that took place. "It's a mystery how these earthquakes happen. How can rock slide against rock so fast while squeezed by the pressure from 610 kilometers of overlying rock?" said Thorne Lay, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Lay is coauthor of a paper, ...

Shoppers spend over £10 billion on bananas annually and now this demand is being linked to the contamination of Central America's crocodilians. New research, published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, analyses blood samples from spectacled caiman in Costa Rica and finds that intensive pesticide use in plantations leads to contaminated species in protected conservation areas. "Banana plantations are big business in Costa Rica, which exports an estimated 1.8 million tonnes per year; 10% of the global total," said author Paul Grant from Stellenbosch University, ...

A class of proteins that controls visual system development in the young brain also appears to affect vulnerability to Alzheimer's disease in the aging brain. The proteins, which are found in humans and mice, join a limited roster of molecules that scientists are studying in hopes of finding an effective drug to slow the disease process. "People are just beginning to look at what these proteins do in the brain. While more research is needed, these proteins may be a brand new target for Alzheimer's drugs," said Carla Shatz, Ph.D., the study's lead investigator. Dr. Shatz ...

Like normal cells, cancer cells require amino acids for growth, maintenance, and cell signaling, and L-type amino acid transporters (LATs) are the delivery vehicles that supply them. Metastatic, castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) cells are highly dependent on LATs to deliver the amino acid leucine that the cells need for growth and proliferation, according to a study published September 19 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. To investigate the function of LATs in prostate cancer, Qian Wang, Ph.D., of the Origins of Cancer Laboratory, Centenary Institute, ...