A new hypothesis concerning a crucial step in the anthrax infection process has been advanced by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md. The research teams have explored the behavior of the toxins that rapidly overwhelm the body as the often-fatal disease progresses. Their findings suggest a new possible mechanism by which anthrax bacteria deliver the protein molecules that poison victims. Anthrax is easily weaponized; the findings could ...

A new report* by biometric researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) uses data from thousands of frequent travelers enrolled in an iris recognition program to determine that no consistent change occurs in the distinguishing texture of their irises for at least a decade. These findings inform identity program administrators on how often iris images need to be recaptured to maintain accuracy. For decades, researchers seeking biometric identifiers other than fingerprints believed that irises were a strong biometric because their one-of-a-kind ...

PHILADELPHIA – In 2005, the Institute of Medicine, surveying the outlook for the growing number of American cancer survivors, first described the idea of a survivorship care plan: a roadmap for the group of patients, today numbering nearly 12 million, who are beginning new lives as cancer survivors. Care plans aims to arm cancer survivors with a customized road map for their lives as cancer survivors: tips for follow-up screenings, information about possible late effects of their therapies, and pointers on fertility or financial issues they may face in the future. The ...

Researchers have long known that high levels of a specific protein in human cells are linked to tumor growth – but no one has fully understood how. Now, a groundbreaking discovery by UC Davis graduate student Kateryna Feoktistova and Assistant Professor Christopher Fraser illuminates the way that the protein, eukaryotic initiation factor 4E (eIF4E), acts upon cancer-promoting messenger RNA molecules. When translated, this type of mRNA can trigger the runaway cell replication that results in malignancies. Published in the August 13 edition of the Proceedings of the National ...

The ancient cycad lineage has been around since before the age of the dinosaurs. More recently, cycads also co-existed with large herbivorous mammals, such as the ice age megafauna that only went extinct a few tens of thousands of years ago. Cycads that are living today have large, heavy seeds with a fleshy outer coating that suggests they rely on large bodied fruit-eating animals to disperse their seeds. Yet there is little evidence that they are eaten and dispersed by today's larger-bodied animals, such as emus or elephants. If these plants are adapted for dispersal ...

Tropical Storm Pewa weakened temporarily while facing adverse atmospheric conditions in the Northwestern Pacific, and NASA's Aqua satellite captured the storm in infrared light. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured an infrared image of Tropical Storm Pewa on Aug. 20 at 01:47 UTC/9:47 p.m. EDT, Aug. 19 as it weakened. The coldest cloud top temperatures and strongest storms were confined to a small area around the storm's center and in a band of thunderstorms northeast of the center. Cloud top temperatures in both of ...

The Central Pacific Ocean has generated a third tropical depression this year and NOAA's GOES-West satellite captured an image of Tropical Depression 03C far to the west of Hawaii. NOAA's GOES-West satellite imagery from Aug. 20 at 1200 UTC/8 a.m. EDT showed a rounded tropical depression about 1,310 miles/2,105 km west of Lihue, Hawaii. The GOES image was created by the NASA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The GOES image shows the strongest thunderstorms around the depression's center. The depression was centered near 19.5 north ...

Tropical Storm Trami may not be making landfall in the Philippines, but it was close enough to bring heavy rainfall when combined with monsoon rains. NASA's Aqua satellite captured those extensive rains in an infrared image when it passed overhead from space. Tropical Storm Trami enhanced rainfall from the monsoon, and caused flooding in the northern Philippines, including Manila, the capital city. The northern Philippines were hit with two nights of heavy rainfall, but Trami is now moving to the northwest and away from the northern Philippines. According to reports from ...

This fall, NASA's Operation IceBridge will base its annual Antarctic campaign out of National Science Foundation's McMurdo Station, a change from the mission's previous four campaigns that were based in Punta Arenas, Chile. By switching bases of operations, IceBridge will be able to expand its reach by measuring parts of Antarctica previously unavailable to the mission. "Antarctica is a big place and there are many science targets for us to hit," said Tom Wagner, cryosphere program scientist at NASA headquarters, Washington. This change comes after nearly a year of planning ...

Berkeley -- A new theory by fluid dynamics experts at the University of California, Berkeley, shows how "zombie vortices" help lead to the birth of a new star. Reporting today (Tuesday, Aug. 20) in the journal Physical Review Letters, a team led by computational physicist Philip Marcus shows how variations in gas density lead to instability, which then generates the whirlpool-like vortices needed for stars to form. Astronomers accept that in the first steps of a new star's birth, dense clouds of gas collapse into clumps that, with the aid of angular momentum, spin ...

On August 20, 2013 at 4:24 am EDT, the sun erupted with an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection or CME, a solar phenomenon which can send billions of tons of particles into space that can reach Earth one to three days later. These particles cannot travel through the atmosphere to harm humans on Earth, but they can affect electronic systems in satellites and on the ground. Experimental NASA research models, based on observations from NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory show that the CME left the sun at speeds of around 570 miles per second, which is a fairly ...

PISCATAWAY, NJ – People with alcohol dependence may be more genetically susceptible to certain types of eating disorders, and vice-versa, according to a study in the September issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. In a study of nearly 6,000 adult twins, researchers found that common genetic factors seemed to underlie both alcoholism and certain eating disorder symptoms—namely, binge eating and purging habits, such as self-induced vomiting or laxative abuse. Genes appeared to explain 38 percent to 53 percent of the risk of developing those disorders. "This ...

Part of the risk for alcohol dependence is genetic, and the same is true for eating disorders. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found it's likely some of the same genes are involved in both. In the September issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, the researchers report that people with alcohol dependence may be more genetically susceptible to certain types of eating disorders and vice versa. "In clinical practice, it's been observed that individuals with eating disorders also have high rates of alcohol abuse ...

HUNTSVILLE, TX (09/21/13) -- Weapons were involved in 40 percent of domestic violence cases in Houston, and researchers discovered distinct patterns on when and where each type of weapon was used, according to a recent study at Sam Houston State University. The study, "Profiling weapon use in domestic violence: Multilevel analysis of situational and neighborhood factors," was based on 9,450 detailed reports of domestic violence cases that occurred in 2005 throughout Houston, the nation's fourth largest city. While the majority of cases – 60 percent -- reported the use ...

New York, NY, August 21, 2013—An estimated 7.8 million of the 15 million young adults who were enrolled in a parent's health plan last year likely would not have been eligible for this coverage without the health reform law's dependent coverage provision, according to a new Commonwealth Fund survey. However, the survey also found that only 27 percent of young adults were aware of the state health insurance marketplaces that are launching October 1. Moreover, millions of low-income young adults are at risk of remaining uninsured if the states they live in choose not to expand ...

On the Monday following a big football game, fans of the losing team seem to load up on saturated fats and sugars, whereas supporters of the winning team opt for healthier foods, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Although prior studies had shown that sport outcomes influence reckless driving, heart attacks, and even domestic violence, no one had examined how they influence eating," says Yann Cornil, researcher at INSEAD Business School and lead author of the study. By comparing the ...

August 21, 2013—The HIV/AIDS epidemic is changing in unexpected ways in countries around the world, showing that greater attention and financial investment may be needed in places where the disease has not reached epidemic levels, according to a new study from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of disease burden in 21 countries concentrated in four regions: Eastern and Southern Africa, Central Africa, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. In another seven countries, it's the second leading ...

This news release is available in French. While children of all ages will be heading back to school in a few days, a new study from the Université de Montréal may encourage their parents to return to the classroom themselves ... at least for a few evenings! The results of a study in developmental psychology published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies show that the How-to Parenting Program improves the mental health of children. "Did you know that certain ways of talking to your child are more effective? Certain ways of listening make a real difference?" These ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– When you share your lunch with someone less fortunate or give your friend half of your dessert, does that act of generosity flow from the milk of human kindness, or is it a subconscious strategy to assure reciprocity should you one day find yourself on the other side of the empty plate? And how do those actions among humans compare to those of our chimpanzee cousins and other nonhuman primates? Through two separate studies, UC Santa Barbara anthropologists Adrian Jaeggi and Michael Gurven found that reciprocity is similar among monkeys, apes, ...

EILAT, ISRAEL, August 20 – In 2007, an artificial reef designed by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers was placed in the Gulf of Eilat to reduce environmental pressure on the region's natural reef. Now teeming with life, a new study using the "Tamar Reef" shows that divers assign economic importance to aspects of reef biodiversity. These findings could help underwater conservation efforts. According to the study published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, divers were willing to pay to improve the reef's attributes and were able to differentiate and ...

HOUSTON -- (Aug. 19, 2013) -- Two proteins have been identified as prime suspects in the proliferation of breast cancer in a study by an international consortium of researchers from Rice University, the University of North Texas, Denton (UNT); the University of California, San Diego (UCSD); and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The research, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' Online Early Edition, may offer a path to therapies that could slow or stop tumors from developing. Rice's Center for Theoretical Biological Physics ...

Singapore, August 19, 2013 – Researchers at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) have developed a simple method of organizing cells and their microenvironments in hydrogel fibers. Their unique technology provides a feasible template for assembling complex structures, such as liver and fat tissues, as described in their recent publication in Nature Communications1. According to IBN Executive Director Professor Jackie Y. Ying, "Our tissue engineering approach gives researchers great control and flexibility over the arrangement of individual cell types, ...

Charlottesville, VA (August 20, 2013). Researchers at Duke University conducted a randomized clinical trial in patients with subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). In this study, the researchers compared two approaches to intracranial pressure management—continuous and intermittent drainage of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)—and outcomes associated with those methods, focusing specifically on the incidence of cerebral vasospasm. The study had to be closed approximately midway due to a high rate of complications (52.9%) in the group of patients in whom CSF was drained continuously. Details ...

A healthy ear is much better at detecting and transmitting sound than even the most advanced hearing aid. But now researchers reporting in the August 20 issue of the Biophysical Journal, a Cell Press publication, have uncovered new insights into how the ear -- in particular, the cochlea -- processes and amplifies sound. The findings could be used for the development of better devices to improve hearing. Sound-sensing cells within the cochlea -- called hair cells due to the presence of cilia on their membrane surfaces -- vibrate strongly at different sound frequencies ...

Young stars are violent objects that eject material at speeds as high as one million kilometres per hour. When this material crashes into the surrounding gas it glows, creating a Herbig-Haro object [1]. A spectacular example is named Herbig-Haro 46/47 and is situated about 1400 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sails). This object was the target of a study using ALMA during the Early Science phase, whilst the telescope was still under construction and well before the array was completed. The new images reveal fine detail in two jets, one ...