The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua spacecraft captured this infrared image of Tropical Storm Barry in the Gulf of Mexico's Bay of Campeche at 07:53 UTC (3:53 a.m. EDT) on June 20, 2013, as the storm was about to make landfall in southern Mexico. At the time, Barry had maximum sustained winds of 40 knots (46 miles per hour, or 74 kilometers per hour), gusting to 50 knots (58 miles per hour, or 93 kilometers per hour). The AIRS image shows Barry's cloud top temperatures, with the coldest clouds and most powerful thunderstorms ...

On June 19, 2013, NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites captured striking images of smoke billowing from illegal wildfires on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The smoke blew east toward southern Malaysia and Singapore, and news media reported that thick clouds of haze had descended on Singapore, pushing pollution levels to record levels. Singapore's primary measure of pollution, the Pollutant Standards Index (PSI)—a uniform measure of key pollutants similar to the Air Quality Index (AQI) used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—spiked to 371 on the afternoon of June ...

This news release is available in French. Imagine being able to zoom into the brain to see various cells the way we zoom into Google maps of the world and can see houses on a street. And keep in mind that the brain is considered the most complex structure in the universe with 86 billion neurons. Zooming in is now possible thanks to a new brain atlas with unprecedented resolution. BigBrain is the first 3D microstructural model of the entire human brain, and is free and publicly available to researchers world-wide. The results of the BigBrain model, created at the ...

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara, in collaboration with University of Notre Dame, have recently demonstrated the highest reported drive current on a transistor made of a monolayer of tungsten diselenide (WSe2), a 2-dimensional atomic crystal categorized as a transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD). The discovery is also the first demonstration of an "n-type" WSe2 field-effect-transistor (FET), showing the tremendous potential of this material for future low-power and high-performance integrated circuits. Monolayer WSe2 is similar to graphene in that it has a hexagonal atomic ...

Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have demonstrated that sensory regions in the brain develop in a fundamentally different way than previously thought, a finding that may yield new insights into visual and neural disorders. In a paper published June 7, in Science, Salk researcher Dennis O'Leary and his colleagues have shown that genes alone do not determine how the cerebral cortex grows into separate functional areas. Instead, they show that input from the thalamus, the main switching station in the brain for sensory information, is crucially required. O'Leary ...

Twitter has become a visible player in the sport media industry and a recently published journal article illustrates how sports journalists' social network developed and enlarged over the beginning phases of the Jerry Sandusky saga. Using social network analysis methods, a core network of 151 journalists was identified. The results of the study reveal how quickly sports journalists joined the Twitter discussion around Sandusky. On the day the Sandusky news broke, 12 journalists were in the network and shared 43 relationships in the network. The next day, 42 more journalists ...

SAN ANTONIO (June 20, 2013) — A synthetic compound is able to turn off "secondary" vacuum cleaners in the brain that take up serotonin, resulting in the "happy" chemical being more plentiful, scientists from the School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio have discovered. Their study, released June 18 by The Journal of Neuroscience, points to novel targets to treat depression. Serotonin, a neurotransmitter that carries chemical signals, is associated with feelings of wellness. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are commonly ...

Boulder, Colo., USA – These ten new Geology articles confront geologic conundrums and capture evidence toward answering even the most difficult questions on topics such as strain localization; atmospheric CO2; ultra-high pressure metamorphism; white chalk cliffs; lithospheric dripping; retreating trenches; microbial diversity beneath glaciers and ice-sheets; salt-marsh ecosystems; New Zealand glaciers -- biggest well before Europe's Little Ice Age; rock mechanics; tsunami hazards; and tracking the impact of the 2011 Tohoku-oki earthquake. Highlights are provided below. ...

University of Delaware chemist Joel Rosenthal is driven to succeed in the renewable energy arena. Working in his lab in UD's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Rosenthal and doctoral student John DiMeglio have developed an inexpensive catalyst that uses the electricity generated from solar energy to convert carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, into synthetic fuels for powering cars, homes and businesses. The research is published in the June 19 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Gold and silver represent the "gold standard" in the world ...

Scientists have long known that seeds gobbled by birds and dispersed across the landscape tend to fare better than those that fall near parent plants where seed-hungry predators and pathogens are more concentrated. Now it turns out it might not just be the trip through the air that's important, but also the inches-long trip through the bird. Seeds from a wild chili pepper plant found in South America, after being eaten and passed through the digestive tract of small-billed Elaenias, emerge with less of the odor that attracts seed-eating ants, and carrying fewer pathogens ...

Stereoscopic panoramas promise an inviting, immersive experience for viewers but, at high resolutions, distortions can develop that make viewing unpleasant or even intolerable. A team at Disney Research Zurich has found methods to correct these problems, yielding high-quality panoramas at megapixel resolutions. The researchers will present findings related to their so-called Megastereo project at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 25-27, in Portland, Oregon. Using software to digitally stitch overlapping images together into ...

JUPITER, FL, June 21, 2013 – Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have shown in animal models that brain damage caused by the loss of a single copy of a gene during very early childhood development can cause a lifetime of behavioral and intellectual problems. The study, published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience, sheds new light on the early development of neural circuits in the cortex, the part of the brain responsible for functions such as sensory perception, planning and decision-making. The research also pinpoints ...

Scientists at the University of Sheffield have found that high quality science by female academics is underrepresented in comparison to that of their male counterparts. The researchers analysed the genders of invited speakers at the most prestigious gatherings of evolutionary biologists in Europe - six biannual congresses of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) and found that male speakers outnumbered women. Even in comparison to the numbers of women and men among world class scientists – from the world top ranked institutions for life sciences, and ...

Scientists discovered a new species of burying beetle, Nicrophorus efferens. Burying beetles are well known to most naturalists because of their large size, striking black and red colors, and interesting reproductive behaviors - they bury small vertebrate carcasses which their offspring eat in an underground crypt, guarded by both parents. The study was published in the open access journal Zookeys. This new species, known from only 6 specimens collected in 1968, sat unrecognized as an undescribed species for over 40 years. "It was a bit of good luck that led to our realization ...

Domestic dogs have been closely associated with humans for about 15,000 years. The animals are so well adapted to living with human beings that in many cases the owner replaces conspecifics and assumes the role of the dog's main social partner. The relationship between pet owners and dogs turns out to be highly similar to the deep connection between young children and their parents. The importance of the owner to the dog One aspect of the bond between humans and dogs is the so-called "secure base effect". This effect is also found in parent-child bonding: human infants ...

PHILADELPHIA-- The brain-preserving cooling treatment known as therapeutic hypothermia is rarely being used in patients who suffer cardiac arrest while in the hospital, despite its proven potential to improve survival and neurological function, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania report in the June issue of Critical Care Medicine. The authors suggest that scarce data about in-hospital cardiac arrest patients and guidelines that only call for health care providers to consider use of therapeutic hypothermia, rather than explicitly ...

When green algae "can't breathe", they get rid of excess energy through the production of hydrogen. Biologists at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum have found out how the cells notice the absence of oxygen. For this, they need the messenger molecule nitric oxide and the protein haemoglobin, which is commonly known from red blood cells of humans. With colleagues at the UC Los Angeles, the Bochum team reported in the journal "PNAS". Haemoglobin – an old protein in a new look In the human body, haemoglobin transports oxygen from the lungs to the organs and brings carbon dioxide, ...

For decades, electronic devices have been getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller. It's now possible—even routine—to place millions of transistors on a single silicon chip. But transistors based on semiconductors can only get so small. "At the rate the current technology is progressing, in 10 or 20 years, they won't be able to get any smaller," said physicist Yoke Khin Yap of Michigan Technological University. "Also, semiconductors have another disadvantage: they waste a lot of energy in the form of heat." Scientists have experimented with different materials and ...

Materials scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory have found an accurate way to explain the magnetic properties of a compound that has mystified the scientific community for decades. The compound of lanthanum, cobalt and oxygen (LaCoO3) has been a puzzle for over 50 years, due to its strange behavior. While most materials tend to lose magnetism at higher temperatures, pure LaCoO3 is a non-magnetic semiconductor at low temperatures, but as the temperature is raised, it becomes magnetic. With the addition of strontium on the La sites the magnetic ...

HEIDELBERG, 21 June 2013 – Researchers in Berlin and Munich, Germany and Oxford, United Kingdom, have revealed that a protein well known for its role in Alzheimer's disease controls spindle development in muscle and leads to impaired movement in mice when the protein is absent or treated with inhibitors. The results, which are published in The EMBO Journal, suggest that drugs under development to target the beta-secretase-1 protein, which may be potential treatments for Alzheimer's disease, might produce unwanted side effects related to defective movement. Alzheimer's ...

Washington, DC (June 20, 2013) — While intravenous iron is critical for maintaining the health of many dialysis patients, administering large doses over a short period of time increases patients' risk of developing serious infections, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). Smaller doses given for a longer period of time appears to be much safer. Dialysis patients often develop anemia, or low levels of red blood cells, and must receive intravenous treatments of iron to correct the condition. Unfortunately, ...

A landmark three-dimensional (3-D) digital reconstruction of a complete human brain, called the BigBrain, now for the first time shows the brain anatomy in microscopic detail—at a spatial resolution of 20 microns, smaller than the size of one fine strand of hair—exceeding that of existing reference brains presently in the public domain. The new tool is made freely available to the broader scientific community to advance the field of neuroscience. Researchers from Germany and Canada, who collaborated on the ultra-high resolution brain model, present their work in the ...

Cities have long been likened to organisms, ant colonies, and river networks. But these and other analogies fail to capture the essence of how cities really function. New research by Santa Fe Institute Professor Luis Bettencourt suggests a city is something new in nature – a sort of social reactor that is part star and part network, he says. "It's an entirely new kind of complex system that we humans have created," he says. "We have intuitively invented the best way to create vast social networks embedded in space and time, and keep them growing and evolving without ...

This news release is available in German. "BigBrain helps us to generate new knowledge on the healthy and also the diseased brain," says Katrin Amunts, director at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) and the C. and O. Vogt Institute of Brain Research at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. For example: "As a consequence of its evolution, the human cerebral cortex is very heavily folded," says the neuroscientist. She explains that this is the reason why, in some areas, the thickness of the cerebral cortex can only be determined very imprecisely using ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Men who are diagnosed as azoospermic — infertile because of an absence of sperm in their ejaculate — are more prone to developing cancer than the general population, a study led by a Stanford University School of Medicine urologist has found. And a diagnosis of azoospermia before age 30 carries an eight-fold cancer risk, the study says. "An azoospermic man's risk for developing cancer is similar to that for a typical man 10 years older," said Michael Eisenberg, MD, PhD, assistant professor of urology at the medical school and director of male reproductive ...