TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill acted as a catalyst for plankton and other surface materials to clump together and fall to the sea floor in a massive sedimentation event that researchers are calling a "dirty blizzard." Jeff Chanton, the John Widmer Winchester Professor of Oceanography in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science at Florida State University, is one of the members of the Deep-C Consortium who presented the dirty blizzard hypothesis at a recent conference in New Orleans that focused on the effects of the oil spill ...

SAN DIEGO – Injecting synthetic tau fibrils into animal models induces Alzheimer's-like tau tangles and imitates the spread of tau pathology, according to research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania being presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 65th Annual Meeting in San Diego March 16-23, 2013. This Alzheimer's research, along with additional Parkinson's research from Penn and beyond, further demonstrates the cell-to-cell transmission of neurodegenerative proteins. John Q. Trojanowski, MD, PhD, co-director of the Center for ...

West Orange, NJ. March 15, 2013. Kessler Foundation scientists and their colleagues will discuss their progress in rehabilitation research at the upcoming 65th Annual American Academy of Neurology Conference at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, CA, March 16 – 23. A.M. Barrett, MD, director of Stroke Rehabilitation at Kessler Foundation will present on Pharmacologic Enhancement of Stroke Rehabilitation on Friday March 22, 2013 as part of a Specialty in Focus session on Neurorehabilitation Enhancement Techniques. This session addresses the contribution of brain ...

Humans aren't the only species with a sweet tooth. Research from North Carolina State University shows that the invasive spotted-wing vinegar fly (Drosophila suzukii) also prefers sweet, soft fruit – giving us new insight into a species that has spread across the United States over the past four years and threatens to cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to U.S. fruit crops. "Because we know that D. suzukii prefers softer, sweeter fruit, we can focus our research efforts into which wild fruits may serve as reservoirs for this species and help identify new crops ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio—A new National Academy of Sciences report identifies tools that would help miners devise their own means of escape when trapped underground. In part, the report suggests that The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) work closely with technology companies to develop new communications and tracking devices—ones that keep working underground after a mining accident. It also suggests that NIOSH and MSHA work with mining companies to enable frequent escape drills and extensive training ...

Mindfulness is a form of meditation therapy focused on exercising 'attentiveness'. Depression is often rooted in a downward spiral of negative feelings and worries. Once a person learns to more quickly recognise these feelings and thoughts, he or she can intervene before depression sinks in. While mindfulness has already been widely tested and applied in patients with depression, this is the first time the method has been studied in a large group of adolescents in a school-based setting, using a randomised controlled design. The study was carried out at five middle schools ...

VIDEO: Animation of spin waves excited by a transient magnetic field pulse in a nanomagnet, as simulated with NIST micromagnetics software (Object Oriented MicroMagnetic Framework, or OOMMF). Click here for more information. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new microscope able to view and measure an important but elusive property of the nanoscale magnets used in an advanced, experimental form of digital memory. The new instrument ...

Today archaeologists unearthed a 'Black Death' grave in London, containing more than a dozen skeletons of people suspected to have died from the plague. The victims are thought to have died during the 14th century and archaeologists anticipate finding many more as they excavate the site. The Plague is by definition a re-emerging infectious disease which affects the lungs and is highly contagious, leading to mass outbreaks across populations. History shows us that population levels suffered globally due to the plague, with around 75 million people globally perishing during ...

The genome of an extinct Australian frog has been revived and reactivated by a team of scientists using sophisticated cloning technology to implant a "dead" cell nucleus into a fresh egg from another frog species. The bizarre gastric-brooding frog, Rheobatrachus silus – which uniquely swallowed its eggs, brooded its young in its stomach and gave birth through its mouth - became extinct in 1983. But the Lazarus Project team has been able to recover cell nuclei from tissues collected in the 1970s and kept for 40 years in a conventional deep freezer. The "de-extinction" ...

Athens, Ga. – Students who date in middle school have significantly worse study skills, are four times more likely to drop out of school and report twice as much alcohol, tobacco and marijuana use than their single classmates, according to new research from the University of Georgia. "Romantic relationships are a hallmark of adolescence, but very few studies have examined how adolescents differ in the development of these relationships," said Pamela Orpinas, study author and professor in the College of Public Health and head of the Department of Health Promotion and ...

This press release is available in German. In their experiment the researchers used a carbon nanotube that was mounted between two metal electrodes, spanned a distance of about 1 µm, and could vibrate mechanically. Then, they applied an organic molecule with a magnetic spin due to an incorporated metal atom. This spin was oriented in an external magnetic field. "In this setup, we demonstrated that the vibrations of the tube are influenced directly when the spin flips parallel or antiparallel to the magnetic field," explains Mario Ruben, head of the working group ...

Anyone who needs a reason not to overindulge on St. Patrick's Day — or on any other day of the year — can view a new American Chemical Society (ACS) video on alcohol's effects on the body at http://www.BytesizeScience.com. St. Patrick's Day is this Sunday, and there are many ways to celebrate, like Irish soda bread at breakfast or corned beef and cabbage for dinner. For those celebrating St. Patrick's Day with green beer, moderation is key. Alcohol has several negative effects on your body — many of which usually amount to a miserable morning-after. Produced by the ...

Distant, dust-filled galaxies were bursting with newborn stars much earlier in cosmic history than previously thought, according to newly published research. So-called "starburst galaxies" produce stars at the equivalent of a thousand new suns per year. Now, astronomers have found starbursts that were churning out stars when the universe was just a billion years old. "I find that pretty amazing," said Joaquin Vieira, a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology and leader of the study. "These aren't normal galaxies. These galaxies [reveal star formation] ...

Swarming is the spontaneous organised motion of a large number of individuals. It is observed at all scales, from bacterial colonies, slime moulds and groups of insects to shoals of fish, flocks of birds and animal herds. Now physicists Maksym Romenskyy and Vladimir Lobaskin from University College Dublin, Ireland, have uncovered new collective properties of swarm dynamics in a study just published in EPJ B. Ultimately, this could be used to control swarms of animals, robots, or human crowds by applying signals capable of emulating the underlying interaction of individuals ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Imagine driving down a road a few times and obtaining in an hour more data about the surrounding landscape than a crew of surveyors could obtain in months. Such is the potential of mobile LIDAR, a powerful technology that's only a few years old and promises to change the way we see, study and record the world around us. It will be applied in transportation, hydrology, forestry, virtual tourism and construction – and almost no one knows anything about it. That may change with a new report on the uses and current technology of mobile LIDAR, which has ...

The dry, barren prairie around Alberta's Drumheller area was once a lush and subtropical forest on the shores of a large inland sea, with loads of wetlands inhabited by dinosaurs, turtles, crocodiles and small mammals. But that changed about 71-million-years ago, according to a new study by researchers Annie Quinney and Darla Zelenitsky in paleontology at the University of Calgary. The researchers' calculations show that drastic climate change occurred during a five-million-year period in Alberta's badlands. At this time, the wetlands dried up and the warm humid climate ...

The brain's prefrontal cortex is thought to be the seat of cognitive control, working as a kind of filter that keeps irrelevant thoughts, perceptions and memories from interfering with a task at hand. Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that inhibiting this filter can boost performance for tasks in which unfiltered, creative thoughts present an advantage. The research was conducted by Sharon Thompson-Schill, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology and director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and Evangelia ...

Geoengineering, the use of human technologies to alter the Earth's climate system — such as injecting reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to scatter incoming sunlight back to space — has emerged as a potentially promising way to mitigate the impacts of climate change. But such efforts could present unforeseen new risks. That inherent tension, argue two professors from UCLA and Harvard, has thwarted both scientific advances and the development of an international framework for regulating and guiding geoengineering research. In an article to be published March ...

Mindfulness — paying attention to one's current experience in a non-judgmental way — might help us to learn more about our own personalities, according to a new article published in the March 2013 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Recent research has highlighted the fact that we have many blind spots when it comes to understanding our patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Despite our intuition that we know ourselves the best, other people have a more accurate view of some traits (e.g., intellect) ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers have identified an elusive anti-cancer property of vitamin E that has long been presumed to exist, but difficult to find. Many animal studies have suggested that vitamin E could prevent cancer, but human clinical trials following up on those findings have not shown the same benefits. In this new work, researchers showed in prostate cancer cells that one form of vitamin E inhibits the activation of an enzyme that is essential for cancer cell survival. The loss of the enzyme, called Akt, led to tumor cell death. The vitamin had no negative ...

While poverty and under-education continue to dampen contraception use in Nepal, exacerbating the country's efforts to reduce maternal and child mortality rates, researchers say another, more surprising factor may be more intractable: Deeply held cultural preferences for sons over daughters. Writing in the March 7, 2013 online International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics, scientists from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine found that geography (urban versus rural), age and levels of education, wealth and social status all predictably influenced ...

For deer mice living in the Nebraska Sandhills, color can literally be the difference between life and death. When they first colonized the region, the dark-coated mice stood out starkly against the light-colored, sandy soil, making them easy prey for predators. Over the next 8,000 years, however, the mice evolved a new system of camouflage – lighter coats, changes in the stripe on their tails and changes in the extent of pigment across their body – that allowed them to blend into their new habitat. Now Harvard researchers are using their example to answer one of ...

TORONTO, ON (date) – A team of international scientists including a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory astrophysicist has made the most detailed examination yet of the atmosphere of a Jupiter-size like planet beyond our solar system. The finding provides astrophysicists with additional insight into how planets are formed. "This is the sharpest spectrum ever obtained of an extrasolar planet," said co-author Bruce Macintosh, an astronomer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "This shows the power of directly imaging a planetary system - the exquisite resolution ...

In the swirling canopy of Jupiter's atmosphere, cloudless patches are so exceptional that the big ones get the special name "hot spots." Exactly how these clearings form and why they're only found near the planet's equator have long been mysteries. Now, using images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, scientists have found new evidence that hot spots in Jupiter's atmosphere are created by a Rossby wave, a pattern also seen in Earth's atmosphere and oceans. The team found the wave responsible for the hot spots glides up and down through layers of the atmosphere like a carousel ...

A new NASA-developed, laser-based space communication system will enable higher rates of satellite communications similar in capability to high-speed fiber optic networks on Earth. The space terminal for the Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD), NASA's first high-data-rate laser communication system, was recently integrated onto the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. LLCD will demonstrate laser communications from lunar orbit to Earth at six times the rate of the best modern-day ...