During its five-year primary mission, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has given astronomers an increasingly detailed portrait of the universe's most extraordinary phenomena, from giant black holes in the hearts of distant galaxies to thunderstorms on Earth. But its job is not done yet. On Aug. 11, Fermi entered an extended phase of its mission -- a deeper study of the high-energy cosmos. This is a significant step toward the science team's planned goal of a decade of observations, ending in 2018. "As Fermi opens its second act, both the spacecraft and its instruments ...

While the 138,000-acre Silver Fire still smoldered, forest restoration specialists were on the job. They analyzed maps created using Landsat satellite data to determine where the burn destroyed vegetation and exposed soil – and where to focus emergency restoration efforts. "The map looked like a big red blob," said Penny Luehring, the U.S. Forest Service's Burned Area Emergency Response and watershed improvement program leader, based in Albuquerque, N.M. Red means high-severity fire, she explained – and the red areas were concentrated in a watershed drainage that fed ...

Food and biofuel crops could be grown and maintained in many places where it wasn't previously possible, such as deserts, landfills and former mining sites, thanks to an inexpensive, non-chemical soil additive. The additive, a simple mixture of organic waste, such as chicken manure, and zeolite, a porous volcanic rock, could be used to support agriculture in both the developed and developing world, while avoiding the serious environmental consequences associated with the overuse of chemical fertilisers. The mixture permits a controlled release of nutrients, the regulation ...

Prison inmates who receive general education and vocational training are significantly less likely to return to prison after release and are more likely to find employment than peers who do not receive such opportunities, according to a new RAND Corporation report. The findings, from the largest-ever meta-analysis of correctional educational studies, suggest that prison education programs are cost effective, with a $1 investment in prison education reducing incarceration costs by $4 to $5 during the first three years post-release. "We found strong evidence that correctional ...

Efforts to promote interdisciplinary research that addresses complex interactions between humans and their environment have become commonplace in recent years, but success is often elusive. To better understand the obstacles facing natural and social scientists attempting such work, Eric D. Roy of Louisiana State University and seven coauthors from a variety of institutions surveyed researchers at all career stages who were interested and experienced in such research. Roy and his coauthors report their findings in the September issue of BioScience. The 323 respondents, ...

A new paper co-written by UM associate professor Mark Hebblewhite details ecological changes caused by a loss of Arctic sea ice. The paper concludes that the loss of sea ice obviously will impact the marine food web and the marine mammals that depend on sea ice habitat. Other major ecological changes in adjacent land-based habitats and species also will occur because of warming oceans. The findings were published in the Aug. 2 issue of Science magazine. Wildlife species like the polar bear are symbolic of how animals are vulnerable to loss of sea ice. Other wildlife ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — More than 20,000 people in Pakistan are being tested for the potentially deadly stage of tuberculosis using a new strategy developed at UC Davis Health System to effectively detect the disease in children for the first time. At least 600 million people in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh are infected with the tuberculosis bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Each year at least three million people reach the potentially deadly stage called active TB. The condition is treatable with antibiotics, but conventional tests inevitably miss more than one ...

Powerful x-rays can now be used to rapidly and accurately detect gold in ore samples, thanks to a new technique developed by CSIRO – a move that could save Australia's minerals industry hundreds of millions of dollars each year. CSIRO has conducted a pilot study that shows that gamma-activation analysis (GAA) offers a much faster, more accurate way to detect gold than traditional chemical analysis methods. This will mean mining companies can measure what's coming in and out of their processing plants with greater accuracy, allowing them to monitor process performance ...

Access to safe drinking water is a step closer to being a reality for those in developing countries. A study paves the way for the next generation of portable water purification devices, which could provide relief to the 780 million people around the world who face every day without access to a clean water supply. An international team of researchers – led by Associate Professor Hui Ying Yang from Singapore University of Technology and Design – showed that water purification membranes enhanced by plasma-treated carbon nanotubes are ideal for removing contaminants and ...

CSIRO scientists have written software that could guide spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, show that the planet Nibiru doesn't exist … and prove that the Earth goes around the Sun. Dr George Hobbs (CSIRO) and his colleagues study pulsars — small spinning stars that deliver regular 'blips' or 'pulses' of radio waves and, sometimes, X-rays. Usually the astronomers are interested in measuring, very precisely, when the pulsar pulses arrive in the solar system. Slight deviations from the expected arrival times can give clues about the behaviour of a pulsar itself, or whether it ...

A culturally tailored HIV prevention program developed and tested by investigators at UCLA and the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science has been shown to significantly reduce unprotected sex among bisexual black men. The innovative approach, called Men of African American Legacy Empowering Self, or MAALES, is described in an article in the peer-reviewed journal AIDS. The rate of HIV/AIDS among African-Americans is significantly higher than it is among any other ethnic or racial group. (According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, African-Americans ...

Scientists at The University of Nottingham have shown that psychotic symptoms experienced by people with schizophrenia could be caused by a faulty 'switch' within the brain. In a study published today in the leading journal Neuron, they have demonstrated that the severity of symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations which are typical in patients with the psychiatric disorder is caused by a disconnection between two important regions in the brain — the insula and the lateral frontal cortex. The breakthrough, say the academics, could form the basis for better, more ...

For female North American barn swallows, looking good pays healthy dividends. A new study conducted at the University of Colorado Boulder and involving Cornell University shows the outward appearance of female barn swallows, specifically the hue of their chestnut-colored breast feathers, has an influence on their physiological health. It has been known that in North American barn swallows, both males and females, those with darker ventral feathers have higher reproductive success than those with lighter colors, said Cornell Senior Research Associate Maren Vitousek, ...

A new study published in the prestigious PLoS One journal changes our understanding of the pathogenesis of age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The researchers found that degenerative changes and loss of vision are caused by impaired function of the lysosomal clean-up mechanism, or autophagy, in the fundus of the eye. The results open new avenues for the treatment of the dry form of AMD, which currently lacks an efficient treatment. The University of Eastern Finland played a leading role in the study, which also involved research groups from Italy, Germany and Hungary. AMD ...

"Basically we are looking at how atoms and molecules interact in biochemical materials in solution", says Professor Dr. Emad Flear Aziz, leader of the Young Investigator Group for Functional Materials in Solution at the HZB and Professor at Freie Universität Berlin. Their now published work is based on a discovery by Aziz' team made three years before: They then analyzed samples with x-ray spectroscopy and observed the disappearance of photons at some specific photon energy. These results have been replicated by other teams worldwide. To explain this effect, Aziz and colleagues ...

Certain types of video games can help to train the brain to become more agile and improve strategic thinking, according to scientists from Queen Mary University of London and University College London (UCL). The researchers recruited 72 volunteers and measured their 'cognitive flexibility' described as a person's ability to adapt and switch between tasks, and think about multiple ideas at a given time to solve problems. Two groups of volunteers were trained to play different versions of a real-time strategy game called StarCraft, a fast-paced game where players have ...

The study, by researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Miami, will help predict how coral reef distributions may change in response to changing oceans. Coral are well known as the colourful plant-like structures which form coral reefs. However, each coral is actually a colony of anemone-like animals, which start out life as tiny, free-floating larvae about the size of a full-stop. Using a computer model, the researchers simulated how these young corals disperse in the world's oceans. Coral reefs, a vital cultural and economic resource for many of the world's ...

The world's most expensive coffee can cost $80 a cup, and scientists now are reporting development of the first way to verify authenticity of this crème de la crème, the beans of which come from the feces of a Southeast Asian animal called a palm civet. Their study appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Eiichiro Fukusaki and colleagues point out that Kopi Luwak (Indonesian for "civet coffee") is the world's costliest coffee, often fetching $150-$200 per pound. Palm civets eat coffee berries, digest the soft fruit surrounding the bean and excrete the ...

A group of international experts from government, industry and academia have concluded that alternative testing strategies (ATSs) that don't rely on animals will be needed to cope with the wave of new nanomaterials emerging from the boom in nanoscience and nanotechnology. Their consensus statement from a workshop on the topic appears in the journal ACS Nano. Andre Nel and colleagues explain that many new engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) are appearing in laboratories, factories and consumer products as a result of advances in nanoscience and nanotechnology. These fields ...

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster spread significant radioactive contamination over more than 3500 square miles of the Japanese mainland in the spring of 2011. Now several recently published studies of Chernobyl, directed by Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina and Anders Møller of the Université Paris-Sud, are bringing a new focus on just how extensive the long-term effects on Japanese wildlife might be. Their work underscores the idea that, in the wake of the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986, there have been many lost opportunities to better understand ...

Almost 80 percent of air pollution involving soot that spreads from China over large areas of East Asia — impacting human health and fostering global warming — comes from city traffic and other forms of fossil-fuel combustion, such as home cooking with coal briquettes. That's the conclusion of a study in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology, which resolves long-standing questions about sources of air pollution responsible for Asia's infamous atmospheric brown clouds. Örjan Gustafsson and colleagues from China, South Korea and the United States point out in ...

For the first time in more than 100 years, drug and dietary supplement manufacturers are updating the tests used to ensure that their products contain safe levels of metal impurities, and the stringent new requirements, instruments and costs are the topic of the cover story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News. C&EN is the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. Ann Thayer, C&EN senior correspondent, explains that in 1905, the nonprofit standards-setting U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) first introduced ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Psychotherapy has issues. Evidence shows that some psychosocial treatments work well for common mental health problems such as anxiety and depression and that consumers often prefer them to medication. Yet the use of psychotherapy is on a clear decline in the United States. In a set of research review papers in the November issue of the journal Clinical Psychology Review, now available online, psychologists put psychotherapy on the proverbial couch to examine why it's foundering. Their diagnosis? Much as in many human patients, psychotherapy ...

Contact: Cassandra Aviles cmaviles@partners.org 617-724-6433 Sue McGreevey smcgreevey@partners.org 617 724-2764 Massachusetts General Hospital Use of tPA for ischemic stroke nearly doubled from 2003 to 2011 Clot-dissolving drug administered to greater variety of patients, still not fully utilized Use of the "clot-busting" drug tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) to treat patients with strokes caused by a blockage of blood flow nearly doubled between 2003 and 2011. In their paper receiving online release in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and ...

IRVINE, Penn., August 21, 2013 – Efforts to conserve declining populations of forest-interior birds have largely focused on preserving the mature forests where birds breed, but a U.S. Forest Service study suggests that in the weeks leading up to migration, younger forest habitat may be just as important. In an article published recently in the American Ornithologist Union's publication "The Auk," research wildlife biologist Scott Stoleson of the U.S. Forest Service's Northern Research Station suggests that forest regrowth in clearcuts may be vital to birds as they prepare ...