Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have solved the 40-year-old mystery of the origin of the Magellanic Stream, a long ribbon of gas stretching nearly halfway around the Milky Way. New Hubble observations reveal that most of this stream was stripped from the Small Magellanic Cloud some two billion years ago, with a smaller portion originating more recently from its larger neighbour. The Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting our galaxy, are at the head of a huge gaseous filament known as the Magellanic Stream. Since the Stream's discovery in ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Despite widespread cuts to physical education classes and recess, an Indiana University study has shown that schools can play an important role in helping their students live healthier lives. Schools that implemented coordinated school health programs saw increases in students' physical activity. "With support from teachers, administrators and parents, our schools can become healthier places," said Mindy Hightower King, evaluation manager at the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community at IU Bloomington. "Despite budget cuts and increasing emphasis ...

MORGANTOWN, W.Va., August 8, 2013 – The scourge of forests, the emerald ash borer, or EAB, is usually described with words like "destructive" and "pest." A recent study based on data collected by citizen scientists suggests that one more adjective might apply, at least from a bird's perspective: "delicious." In a study published this week in the journal Biological Invasions, U.S. Forest Service entomologist Andrew Liebhold and Cornell University scientist Walter Koenig and others document how an EAB invasion fueled a population boom for four species of birds in the Detroit ...

WASHINGTON D.C., August 8, 2013 -- Tumor cells circulating within a patient's bloodstream can carry cancer from a primary tumor site to distant sites of the body, spreading the disease. Now a team of researchers in China has developed a new microfluidic chip that can quickly and efficiently segregate and capture live circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from a patient's blood, with potential applications for cancer screenings and treatment assessments. The researchers describe their technique in the journal Biomicrofluidics, which is produced by AIP Publishing. Many currently ...

WASHINGTON—A landmark immigration bill passed by the Senate would create new pathways to citizenship and provide a much-needed boost to the U.S. economy but would do little to ease immigration-related disparities in health care, according to a new report. "The Senate bill represents the most significant bipartisan effort to reform immigration in many years," says Leighton Ku, PhD, MPH, the author of the new report and the director of the Center for Health Policy Research at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS). "It would ...

WASHINGTON, DC—A lot of people mix up the ozone hole and global warming, believing the hole is a major cause of the world's increasing average temperature. Scientists, on the other hand, have long attributed a small cooling effect to the ozone shortage in the hole. Now a new computer-modeling study suggests that the ozone hole might actually have a slight warming influence, but because of its effect on winds, not temperatures. The new research suggests that shifting wind patterns caused by the ozone hole push clouds farther toward the South Pole, reducing the amount of ...

CINCINNATI – New research posted online by the Nature journal Leukemia suggests blocking part of a DNA repair complex that helps some types of leukemia resist treatment can increase the effectiveness of chemotherapy and enhance survival. Scientists from Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center report that their experimental combination treatment strategy – using a small molecular inhibitor along with chemotherapy – was particularly effective at stopping a stubborn leukemia called T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or T-ALL. The study involved laboratory cell lines ...

Since 2011, the University of North Carolina has partnered with the government of Malawi to establish a pathology laboratory in the nation's capital, building on an existing decades-long collaboration. The laboratory has provided an invaluable service to patients and has also built capacity at a national teaching hospital, according to an analysis of the first 20 months of operation published (date) online by PLOS ONE. "A robust platform for cancer care and research now exists in a setting where it did not previously, and can serve as a model for similar interventions ...

NJIT Associate Professor Ali Akansu, PhD, wants to prevent another flash crash on Wall Street. An electrical and computing engineer who is an expert in the relatively new field of adapting signal processing to strengthen the security of finance markets, he fights to be heard. Among his weapons are frequent talks to colleagues at IEEE events. He believes that by using new technology—like digital signal processing (DSP) engineering--another flash crash, like the one in 2010 that almost destroyed world-wide financial markets, need never happen again. "There are DSP engineering ...

URBANA, Ill. – The use of soybean meal in diets fed to weanling pigs is limited due to the presence of anti-nutritional factors that young pigs can't tolerate. Therefore, other sources of protein, such as fish meal and plasma, are used in nursery pig diets. But there are other ingredients available to producers as well. Researchers at the University of Illinois have determined the nutritional value of three new protein products that have recently become available as feed ingredients for pigs. Hans H. Stein, a U of I professor of animal sciences, and his team measured ...

Surgery to relieve the damaging pressure caused by hemorrhaging in the brain is a perfect job for a robot. That is the basic premise of a new image-guided surgical system under development at Vanderbilt University. It employs steerable needles about the size of those used for biopsies to penetrate the brain with minimal damage and suction away the blood clot that has formed. The system is described in an article accepted for publication in the journal IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering. It is the product of an ongoing collaboration between a team of engineers ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Chemists at Oregon State University have identified a compound that could significantly reduce the cost and potentially enable the mass commercial production of silicon nanostructures – materials that have huge potential in everything from electronics to biomedicine and energy storage. This extraordinary compound is called table salt. Simple sodium chloride, most frequently found in a salt shaker, has the ability to solve a key problem in the production of silicon nanostructures, researchers just announced in Scientific Reports, a professional journal. By ...

MINNEAPOLIS – Drinking two cups of hot chocolate a day may help older people keep their brains healthy and their thinking skills sharp, according to a study published in the August 7, 2013, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study involved 60 people with an average age of 73 who did not have dementia. The participants drank two cups of hot cocoa per day for 30 days and did not consume any other chocolate during the study. They were given tests of memory and thinking skills. They also had ultrasounds tests to measure ...

SEATTLE -- A joint Group Health–University of Washington (UW) study in the New England Journal of Medicine has found that higher blood sugar levels are associated with higher dementia risk, even among people who do not have diabetes. Blood sugar levels averaged over a five-year period were associated with rising risks for developing dementia, in this report about more than 2,000 Group Health patients age 65 and older in the Adult Changes in Thought (ACT) study. For example, in people without diabetes, risk for dementia was 18 percent higher for people with an average ...

Five-to-six-year olds are more likely to be kind to peers after observing them interacting with other children in positive ways, suggesting that children establish a sense of their peers' 'reputation' early in life. The results are published August 7 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Kenji Onishi and colleagues from Osaka University, Japan. The researchers observed kindergarteners' day-to-day behavior and found that bystanders in a playground were more likely to offer an object or help a child whom they had seen being helpful to another child. Children were more ...

People given scientific evidence supporting our ability to predict the future feel a greater sense of control over their lives, according to research published August 7 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Katharine Greenaway and colleagues from the University of Queensland, Australia. One group of study participants read a paragraph stating that researchers had found evidence supporting the existence of precognition, while another group read a related paper that refuted these findings. Both papers were published in the same issue of a scientific journal. On a subsequent ...

A physical handicap like being tied down makes men over-estimate an opponent's size and under-estimate their own, according to research published August 7 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Daniel Fessler and Colin Holbrook from the University of California, Los Angeles. Participants who were tied down in a chair envisioned an angry man in a picture as being taller than when they made the same type of guess while simply sitting in the chair without being restrained. In a second test where they were asked to state their own height based on visual marks on a wall, ...

Some optical illusions look like they're in motion even though the picture is static. A new map of the fly brain also suggests motion—or at least how the fly sees movement. The new research, published in the August 8 issue of Nature, takes advantage of a high-throughput approach that speeds the charting of neuronal connections involved in motion detection. Neurons snake through the brain, each reaching out and touching many other neurons. In the human brain, 100 billion neurons make on average 1,000 connections each. That intricate network is the secret behind all the ...

A newly discovered fossil reveals the evolutionary adaptations of a 165-million-year-old proto-mammal, providing evidence that traits such as hair and fur originated well before the rise of the first true mammals. The biological features of this ancient mammalian relative, named Megaconus mammaliaformis, are described by scientists from the University of Chicago in the Aug 8 issue of Nature. "We finally have a glimpse of what may be the ancestral condition of all mammals, by looking at what is preserved in Megaconus. It allows us to piece together poorly understood details ...

The National Institutes of Health today announced in Nature that it has reached an understanding with the family of the late Henrietta Lacks to allow biomedical researchers controlled access to the whole genome data of cells derived from her tumor, commonly known as HeLa cells. These cells have already been used extensively in scientific research and have helped make possible some of the most important medical advances of the past 60 years. These include the development of modern vaccines, cancer treatments, in vitro fertilization techniques, and many others. HeLa cells ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- Researchers from Indiana University, the University of Michigan, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have identified and validated a biomarker accessible in blood tests that could be used to predict which stem cell transplant patients are at highest risk for a potentially fatal immune response called graft-versus-host disease. Although transplant specialists have been able to reduce its impact, graft-versus-host disease remains a leading cause of death among patients who receive a stem cell transplant from another ...

The range of helpful bacteria in the guts of infants delivered by caesarean section, during their first two years of life, is narrower than that of infants delivered vaginally, indicates a small study published online in the journal Gut. This has implications for the development of the immune system, say the researchers, particularly as the C-section infants had lower levels of the major group of gut bacteria associated with good gut health, Bacteroidetes phylum, as well as chemicals that help curb allergic responses. The researchers assessed the patterns of bacterial ...

Rheumatoid arthritis significantly increases the risk of potentially fatal blood clots in the legs and lungs, reveals a large nationwide study published online in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases. Between 11% and 30% of people who develop a blood clot in the legs, known as a deep vein thrombosis or DVT, or a blood clot in the lungs, known as a pulmonary embolism, or PE, die within 30 days of their diagnosis, the evidence suggests. Several studies have shown that chronic inflammation, which typifies rheumatoid arthritis, is linked to a heightened risk of thickened ...

A team from the University of Washington has unveiled a comprehensive portrait of the genome of the world's first immortal cell line, known as HeLa. The cell line was derived in 1951 from an aggressive cervical cancer that killed Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old African-American tobacco farmer and mother of five – the subject of the 2010 New York Times bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. They will also be the first group to publish under a new National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy for HeLa genomic data, established through discussions with Lacks' family. The ...

In a discovery that further demonstrates just how unexpected and unusual nature can be, scientists have found two strains of bacteria whose symbiotic relationship is unlike anything seen before. Long, thin, hairlike Thioploca (meaning "sulfur braids" in Spanish) trichomes form chains down into marine sediment, which tiny anammox cells ride down like an elevator. At the bottom, the anammox cells consume the waste products of the Thioploca: nitrite and ammonium, or "fixed" nitrogen. Nitrogen is a crucial building block of life, a prerequisite for photosynthesis. While ...