ITHACA, N.Y. — From athletes to individuals suffering from osteoporosis, bone fractures are usually the result of tiny cracks accumulating over time -- invisible rivulets of damage that, when coalesced, lead to that painful break. Using cutting-edge X-ray techniques, Cornell University researchers have uncovered cellular-level detail of what happens when bone bears repetitive stress over time, visualizing damage at smaller scales than previously observed. Their work could offer clues into how bone fractures could be prevented. Marjolein van der Meulen, professor of ...

Looking at the transformation of a fly larva into a pupa may help researchers to understand the molecular mechanisms that trigger puberty. A study conducted on the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, by scientists at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) led by ICREA research professor Marco Milán, identifies an miRNA as key to the relationship between hormones that control growth and sexual maturity. According to Milán, "accelerated growth or obesity can provoke premature puberty in humans, harming their development – and this is a growing problem in ...

SAN FRANCISCO -- Weight loss study participants who received financial incentives were more likely to stick with a weight loss program and lost more weight than study participants who received no incentives, according to Mayo Clinic research that will be presented Saturday, March 9 at the American College of Cardiology's 62nd Annual Scientific Session. Previous studies have shown that financial incentives help people lose weight, but this study examined a larger group of participants (100) over a longer period (one year), says lead author Steven Driver, M.D., an internal ...

People may more likely be exposed to the flu through airborne virus than previously thought, according to new research from the University of Maryland School of Public Health. The study also found that when flu patients wear a surgical mask, the release of virus in even the smallest airborne droplets can be significantly reduced. "People are generally surprised to learn that scientists don't know for sure how flu spreads," says Donald Milton, M.D., Dr.P.H., who directs the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health and led the study of influenza virus aerosols ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- A large randomized controlled study is among the first to rigorously demonstrate that health information technology can improve compliance with patient care guidelines by clinicians in resource-limited countries. The study was led by Regenstrief Institute investigator Martin Chieng Were, M.D., M.S., assistant professor of medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine, and Regenstrief Institute affiliated scientist Rachel Vreeman, M.D., M.S, assistant professor of pediatrics at the IU School of Medicine. The impact of this improved compliance is ...

Salmon are beginning to swim up the Elwha River for the first time in more than a century. But University of Washington marine geologists are watching what's beginning to flow downstream – sediments from the largest dam-removal project ever undertaken. The 108-foot Elwha Dam was built in 1910, and after decades of debate it was finally dismantled last year. Roughly a third of the 210-foot Glines Canyon Dam still stands, holding back a mountain of silt, sand and gravel. Removal of the upper dam was halted in January while crews repair a water-treatment plant near Port ...

UAlberta medical researchers and their American colleagues have discovered that the "gateway" known to control the movement of molecules in and out of a cell's nucleus appears to play another critically important role – one no one had noticed until now. These "gateways" have a second key job in a cell – the ability to control the structure of chromosomes and the DNA linked to those chromosomes. This impacts what genes produce or express. The discovery gives scientists a new way to investigate the triggers for various kinds of disease, says Richard Wozniak, the principal ...

Sniffing, a common behavior in dogs, cats and other animals, has been observed to also serve as a method for rats to communicate—a fundamental discovery that may help scientists identify brain regions critical for interpreting communications cues and what brain malfunctions may cause some complex social disorders. Researchers have long observed how animals vigorously sniff when they interact, a habit usually passed off as simply smelling each other. But Daniel W. Wesson, PhD, of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, whose research is published in Current ...

What makes us happy? Family? Money? Love? How about a peptide? The neurochemical changes underlying human emotions and social behavior are largely unknown. Now though, for the first time in humans, scientists at UCLA have measured the release of a specific peptide, a neurotransmitter called hypocretin, that greatly increased when subjects were happy but decreased when they were sad. The finding suggests that boosting hypocretin could elevate both mood and alertness in humans, thus laying the foundation for possible future treatments of psychiatric disorders like ...

TORONTO, ON – March 7, 2013: A new technique developed by U of T Engineering Professor Ted Sargent and his research group could lead to significantly more efficient solar cells, according to a recent paper published in the journal Nano Letters. The paper, "Jointly-tuned plasmonic-excitonic photovoltaics using nanoshells," describes a new technique to improve efficiency in colloidal quantum dot photovoltaics, a technology which already promises inexpensive, more efficient solar cell technology. Quantum dot photovoltaics offers the potential for low-cost, large-area solar ...

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Married couples who have attained higher levels of education are less likely to divorce than less-educated couples, but a new study conducted at Rutgers School of Social Work points to significant racial differences. "African-American women don't seem to enjoy the same degree of protection that education confers on marriage," said Jeounghee Kim, assistant professor at the school. "For white Americans, higher education is related to a lower chance of divorce, and this protective effect of education on marriage increased consistently among the recent ...

FROSTBURG, MD (March 7, 2013)—Prairie dogs pull up stakes and look for a new place to live when all their close kin have disappeared from their home territory--a striking pattern of dispersal that has not been observed for any other species. This is according to a new study published in Science by behavioral ecologist John Hoogland, Professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science's Appalachian Laboratory. He has been studying the ecology and social behavior of prairie dogs in national parks in Arizona, South Dakota, and Utah for the last 40 years. For ...

University of British Columbia researchers have successfully normalized the production of blood vessels in the brain of mice with Alzheimer's disease (AD) by immunizing them with amyloid beta, a protein widely associated with the disease. While AD is typically characterized by a build-up of plaques in the brain, recent research by the UBC team showed a near doubling of blood vessels in the brain of mice and humans with AD. The new study, published online last week in Scientific Reports, a Nature journal, shows a reduction of brain capillaries in mice immunized with ...

Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and Google have developed a novel approach that allows the massive infrastructure powering cloud computing as much as 15 to 20 percent more efficiently. This novel model has already been applied at Google. Researchers presented their findings at the IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture conference Feb. 23 to 27 in China. Computer scientists looked at a range of Google web services, including Gmail and search. They used a unique approach to develop their model. Their first ...

Recently Science Magazine invited JQI fellow Chris Monroe and Duke Professor Jungsang Kim to speculate on ion trap technology as a scalable option for quantum information processing. The article is highlighted on the cover of this week's issue, which is dedicated to quantum information. The cover portrays a photograph of a surface trap that was fabricated by Sandia National Labs and used to trap ions at JQI and Duke, among other laboratories. Trapped atomic ions are a promising architecture that satisfies many of the critical requirements for constructing a quantum computer. ...

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite noticed areas of heavy rainfall in low pressure System 92P hours before it became the nineteenth tropical cyclone of the Southern Pacific Ocean. NASA's TRMM satellite captured a look at the rainfall rates within low pressure System 92P on March 7 at 0023 UTC (March 6 at 7:23 p.m. EST), just hours before it became Tropical Cyclone 19P (TC 19P). TRMM data indicated that heavy rain was falling at a rate of 2 inches/50 mm per hour around the center of circulation, and that some of the thunderstorms were powerful as they ...

This press release is available in French. Montreal, March 7, 2013 – Just hours after the tragic shooting of 27 victims at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Twitter was overloaded with messages slamming reporters for interviewing children involved in the tragedy. While some of the journalists probably knew better but wanted the story at all costs, others were rookie reporters facing ethical decisions for the first time and unaware of the impact these interviews might have on the young survivors. Past studies have documented that new journalists can cause a number of ...

A team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken an important step closer to finding the birth certificate of a star that's been around for a very long time. "We have found that this is the oldest known star with a well-determined age," said Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pa., and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. The star could be as old as 14.5 billion years (plus or minus 0.8 billion years), which at first glance would make it older than the universe's calculated age of about 13.8 billion ...

Ann Arbor, Mich. — Primary care practices around the country are being encouraged and even paid to become "medical homes," but small practices might be at a significant disadvantage in this race to improve health care for children, according to a new study by child health experts at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital. Efforts around the country to improve health care for children have increasingly focused on the medical home as a model to make primary care practices more accessible, comprehensive, and focused on quality improvement. Since 2008, practices could become officially ...

What can green algae do for science if they weren't, well, green? That's the question biologists at UC San Diego sought to answer when they engineered a green alga used commonly in laboratories, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, into a rainbow of different colors by producing six different colored fluorescent proteins in the algae cells. While fluorescent green, red, blue and yellow may be all the rage this year for running shoes and other kinds of sporting gear, fluorescent algae hasn't been a style trend yet in scientific laboratories. But in announcing their achievement in ...

WACO, Texas (March 7, 2013) - A genetic analysis by Baylor University biologists suggests that the stocking of Florida bass in Texas reservoirs impacts bass populations far beyond the actual stocking location. The native largemouth bass has a long and nearly continuous stocking history in Texas. However, the Florida bass is widely considered a better sport fish because it grows to a greater size. Subsequently, stocking efforts in Texas reservoirs have transitioned from largemouth bass to Florida bass. The Baylor researchers analyzed the genetic composition of 69 largemouth ...

Malaria, the leading cause of death among children in Africa, could be eliminated if three-fourths of the population used insecticide-treated bed nets, according to a new study from the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS). The study, which uses a mathematical model, found that use of insecticide-treated bed nets or ITNs positively affected the infection's reproduction number, or R, which is the primary epidemiological number used to determine the degree which a disease can spread through a population. The model concludes that if 75 percent ...

VIDEO: This animation of NOAA GOES-13 satellite imagery from March 5-7, 2013, shows the progression of a cold front from the west associated with a low pressure system that brought snow... Click here for more information. The merging of two low pressure areas into a large Nor'easter on March 6 brought winter weather advisories and warnings to the Mid-Atlantic. NASA's Aqua satellite captured an infrared and near infrared image of the storm's power, and NASA created an animation ...

The star Eta Carinae is ready to blow. 170 years ago, this 100-solar-mass object belched out several suns' worth of gas in an eruption that made it the second-brightest star after Sirius. That was just a precursor to the main event, since it will eventually go supernova. Supernova explosions of massive stars are common in spiral galaxies like the Milky Way, where new stars are forming all the time. They are almost never seen in elliptical galaxies where star formation has nearly ceased. As a result, astronomers were surprised to find a young-looking supernova in an old ...

With data from 73 ice and sediment core monitoring sites around the world, scientists have reconstructed Earth's temperature history back to the end of the last Ice Age. The analysis reveals that the planet today is warmer than it's been during 70 to 80 percent of the last 11,300 years. Results of the study, by researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) and Harvard University, are published this week in a paper in the journal Science. Lead paper author Shaun Marcott of OSU says that previous research on past global temperature change has largely focused on the ...