The thirteenth Tropical Depression of the Northwestern Pacific Ocean season didn't last long. In fact, Tropical Depression 13W lived for less than a day as a depression before fizzled. TD13W was "born" at 1500 UTC/11 a.m. EDT on Aug. 17 with maximum sustained winds near 25 knots. Later that day at 2100 UTC/5 p.m. EDT, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center issued its final bulletin on the depression. At that time it was located near 28.0 north latitude and 126.0 east longitude, about 109 nautical miles northwest of Kadena Air Base, Japan. Before TD13W dissipated, the MODIS ...

Fires continue to ignite parts of the West. In this image, fires in Idaho and Wyoming can be seen. The Hardluck Fire was started by lightning on July 17, 2013 deep in the wilderness. The small two acre fire was discovered on July 20 by a fire detection flight, but the inaccessible terrain precluded sending crews in safely. Now the fire is almost 20,000 acres in size, and increasing in size and activity due to winds from the southwest. Warm dry weather is forecast for the next 2-3 days so the fire is expected to burn actively. Lighting also caused the Gold Pan Complex ...

NASA's Aqua satellite has been busy capturing temperature data from developing tropical cyclones around the world. Aqua captured an image of Tropical Storm Unala in the central Pacific Ocean where it formed early today, Aug. 19. Over several hours, Unala moved into the northwestern Pacific where it quickly weakened to a depression. NASA's Aqua satellite caught Unala in the same image as Typhoon Storm Pewa, which is responsible for Unala's quick weakening. The two tropical cyclones are just 184 nautical miles apart and are expected to be just 60 miles from each other later ...

Fires have been burning out of control on the Portuguese island of Madeira. The fire that broke out in the early hours of the morning on August 16, 2013 above the village of Monte became stronger towards noontime as intense heat and the wind made the flames spread. News outlets have been reporting that up to eleven houses were destroyed over the weekend. Firefighters have been battling to control the flames which reached the outskirts of the capital Funchal by Friday night. The hospital in Funchal had to be evacuated, according to reports. The original fires are reported ...

DALLAS – Aug. 19, 2013 – For the two-thirds of lung cancer patients with locally advanced or metastatic disease, tumor size is not used currently to predict overall survival times. A new study, however, led by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers has shown that even in advanced stages total tumor size can have a major impact on survival. Using data from a National Cancer Institute-sponsored Phase 3 trial involving 850 patients with advanced lung cancer, Dr. David Gerber, assistant professor of internal medicine at UT Southwestern, and colleagues from other academic ...

Contact: Bob Henson bhenson@ucar.edu 303-497-8605 University Corporation for Atmospheric Research David Hosansky hosansky@ucar.edu 303-497-8611 NCAR/UCAR Media Relations John Fasullo fasullo@ucar.edu 303-497-1712 National Center for Atmospheric Research Global sea level rise dampened by Australia floods BOULDER - When enough raindrops fall over land instead of the ocean, they begin to add up. New research led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) shows that when three atmospheric patterns came together over the Indian and Pacific ...

Scientists have discovered a vast plume of iron and other micronutrients more than 1,000 km long billowing from hydrothermal vents in the South Atlantic Ocean. The finding, soon to be published in the journal Nature Geoscience, calls past estimates of iron abundances into question, and may challenge researchers' assumptions about iron sources in the world's seas. "This study and other studies like it are going to force the scientific community to reevaluate how much iron is really being contributed by hydrothermal vents and to increase those estimates, and that has implications ...

The human body is full of tiny microorganisms—hundreds to thousands of species of bacteria collectively called the microbiome, which are believed to contribute to a healthy existence. The gastrointestinal (GI) tract—and the colon in particular—is home to the largest concentration and highest diversity of bacterial species. But how do these organisms persist and thrive in a system that is constantly in flux due to foods and fluids moving through it? A team led by California Institute of Technology (Caltech) biologist Sarkis Mazmanian believes it has found the answer, at ...

The longest and largest study of the effectiveness of insulin pumps to treat type 1 diabetes in children has shown that the pumps are more effective at controlling blood sugar than insulin injections and cause fewer complications. The research is published in Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, and is by Associate Professor Elizabeth Davis, Princess Margaret Hospital for Children, Perth, WA, Australia and colleagues. The increasing use of insulin pump therapy over the last 15 years, particularly in children, has been driven ...

A gene that helps control the ageing process by acting as a cell's internal clock has been linked to cancer by a major new study. Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, found a genetic variant that influences the ageing process among four new variants they linked to myeloma – one of the most common types of blood cancer. The study more than doubles the number of genetic variants linked to myeloma, bringing the total number to seven, and sheds important new light on the genetic causes of the disease. The research, published in the prestigious journal ...

By carefully adjusting the function of crucial immune cells, scientists may have developed a completely new type of cancer immunotherapy—harnessing the body's immune system to attack tumors. To accomplish this, they had to thread a needle in immune function, shrinking tumors without triggering unwanted autoimmune responses. The new research, performed in animals, is not ready for clinical use in humans. However, the approach, making use of a key protein to control immune function, lends itself to further study using candidate drugs that employ the same mechanisms. "This ...

A new way of analyzing data acquired in MR imaging appears to be able to identify whether or not tumors are responding to anti-angiogenesis therapy, information that can help physicians determine the most appropriate treatments and discontinue ones that are ineffective. In their report receiving online publication in Nature Medicine, investigators from the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), describe how their technique, called vessel architectural imaging (VAI), was able to identify changes in brain tumor blood vessels within ...

The Boston Marathon bombing brought international attention back to the devastating effects of terrorism. There were numerous victims with severe injuries that needed immediate attention. A novel study in Arthritis Care & Research, a journal published by Wiley on behalf of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), presents cases from Boston-area hospitals where victims were treated, examining the medical response and imaging technologies used to save lives and limbs. On April 15, 2013, at approximately 2:49 p.m. two pressure-cooker bombs exploded one after the other ...

Medical organizations are participating in a campaign to help clinicians and patients avoid wasteful and sometimes harmful medical interventions. Recently, experts in pediatric and adult health from diverse geographic locations of the United States and from a mix of academic and non- academic settings shared their experiences, consulted their colleagues, and analyzed numerous studies in the medical literature to determine the top recommendations for improving healthcare value. Following these recommendations, which are outlined in a new study published today in the Journal ...

Getting kids to share their toys is a never-ending battle, and compelling them to do so never seems to help. New research suggests that allowing children to make a choice to sacrifice their own toys in order to share with someone else makes them share more in the future. The new findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. These experiments, conducted by psychological scientists Nadia Chernyak and Tamar Kushnir of Cornell University, suggest that sharing when given a difficult choice leads children to see themselves ...

UC San Francisco scientists working in the lab used a chemical found in an anti-wrinkle cream to prevent the death of nerve cells damaged by mutations that cause an inherited form of Parkinson’s disease. A similar approach might ward off cell death in the brains of people afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, the team suggested in a study reported online in the journal Cell on August 15. The achievement marks a pharmacologic milestone as the first highly specific targeting of a member of an important class of enzymes called kinases to increase rather than to inhibit ...

Boulder, Colo., USA – New Geology postings discuss a vanished link between Antarctica and Australia; the West Salton Detachment fault in California, USA; chemical interaction between peridotite and intruding melts in the Northern Apennines, Italy; calving barchan dunes; the nature of black shale in the Late Devonian Appalachian Basin; the August 2008 avulsion belt of the Kosi River, India; reef island formation; and a one-year record of eight quakes within dune deposits of the Navajo Sandstone, Utah, USA. Highlights are provided below. GEOLOGY articles published ahead ...

Research calling for the use of a wearable computing system installed in a helmet to protect construction workers from carbon monoxide poisoning, a serious lethal threat in this industry, has garnered the Virginia Tech investigators a Best Paper Award from a prestigious scientific and engineering community. This award will be presented at the August 17-21, 2013 Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Conference on Automation Science and Engineering. Carbon monoxide poisoning is a significant problem for construction workers in both residential and industrial ...

Philadelphia, PA, August 15, 2013 – A team of investigators systematically analyzed the effect of calcium and vitamin D supplementation on joint symptoms in a rigorous and controlled study of postmenopausal women. They found that supplementation did not reduce the severity of joint symptoms reported by the participants. Their results are published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. The influence of low calcium and vitamin D deficiency on joint symptoms has been studied with mixed results. Only some observational studies have associated vitamin D ...

PHILADELPHIA — A phase I clinical trial showed diffuse, large B-cell lymphomas (DLBCLs) resistant to chemotherapy can be reprogrammed to respond to treatment using the drug azacitidine, according to a study published in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. Patients whose lymphomas recur after initial chemotherapy are treated with a combination of approaches, including high-dose chemotherapy followed by a stem cell transplant. However, some patients have tumors that do not respond to these extensive second treatments, and many of ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- MIT researchers have engineered a new rechargeable flow battery that doesn't rely on expensive membranes to generate and store electricity. The device, they say, may one day enable cheaper, large-scale energy storage. The palm-sized prototype generates three times as much power per square centimeter as other membraneless systems -- a power density that is an order of magnitude higher than that of many lithium-ion batteries and other commercial and experimental energy-storage systems. The device stores and releases energy in a device that relies on a ...

High cholesterol levels are much more risky for middle-aged men than middle-aged women when it comes to having a first heart attack, a new study of more than 40,000 Norwegian men and women has shown. The study, just published in the September issue of Epidemiology, shows that being a middle-aged male and having high cholesterol levels results in a negative synergistic effect that the researchers did not observe in women. However, current clinical guidelines for treating high cholesterol levels do not differentiate between men and women. "Our results suggest that in ...

Giving men with testicular cancer a single dose of chemotherapy alongside radiotherapy could improve the effectiveness of treatment and reduce the risk of long-term side-effects, a new study reports. As many as 96% of men with testicular cancer now survive at least ten years from diagnosis (1), but more advanced forms need to be treated with combination chemotherapy – which can have serious long-term complications. Researchers at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust have therefore been searching for new treatments that would ...

VIDEO: University of East Anglia scientists have revealed how females select the 'right' sperm to fertilize their eggs when faced with the risk of being fertilized by wrong sperm from a... Click here for more information. University of East Anglia scientists have revealed how females select the 'right' sperm to fertilize their eggs when faced with the risk of being fertilized by wrong sperm from a different species. Researchers investigated salmon and trout, which fertilize ...

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite detected dozens of fires burning in southeastern Africa in mostly Mozambique and Malawi. The fires are outlined in red. The location, widespread nature, and number of fires suggest that these fires were deliberately set to manage land. Farmers often use fire to return nutrients to the soil and to clear the ground of unwanted plants. While fire helps enhance crops and grasses for pasture, the fires also produce smoke that degrades air quality. The main growing season starts with the first ...