Alexandria, VA – When Apollo 17 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Dec. 19, 1972, it ended an era of manned spaceflight to the moon. The science, however, continues. Armed with analytical techniques not available in the 1970s, researchers around the country have been re-examining the more than 380 kilograms of lunar rocks collected four decades ago during the Apollo missions. Using new investigations, such as petrographic and chemical composition studies and updated solar radiation and engineering measurements, these "cold case" scientists, many of them young innovators, ...

Scientists at the Department of Physics of the University of Oulu have teamed up with scientists in France, Russia and Japan to propose a new experimental method for researching positively charged ions. The study, In the Finnish side carried out by postdoctoral researcher Saana-Maija Huttula and Professor Marko Huttula in Oulu, was published in Physical Review Letters on 12 March 2013. The study involved investigating the electronic structure of the argon ions using synchrotron radiation. The proposed theoretical simulations were done using methods developed by an electron ...

Women reaching the age of 40 tend to be less vigilant about birth control because they think the risk of pregnancy is low – or that birth control can cause health problems - but a review of the evidence by a team that includes a Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island physician recently underscored the need to be vigilant about contraception even in perimenopause. "Despite declining fertility, women over age 40 still require effective contraception if they want to avoid pregnancy," according to Rebecca H. Allen, MD, MPH, of Women & Infants' Department of Obstetrics and ...

Researchers at Aalto University, the University at Buffalo, and Texas A&M University have proven a link between customers' use of social media and higher revenue. Now there is proof that customers who engage with a business through social media contribute more to the bottom line than customers who do not, said Ashish Kumar, assistant professor of marketing at Aalto University. Our study showed that social media activities help strengthen the bond between the customer and the firm. Participating customers on a firm's social media site contribute 5.6% more revenue and ...

Well designed and planned exercises are essential to ensure that the UK can respond effectively to emergencies of all kinds, according to research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The emergencies may take the form of a terrorist attack, flooding, pandemic flu, rail or air disaster - or any major disruptive event requiring an emergency response. The number of such exercises taking place across the UK each year within what the researchers call the 'resilience community' - including emergency services, local authorities, central government departments ...

An international team of plasma physicists has used one of the world's most powerful lasers to create highly unusual plasma composed of hollow atoms. The experimental work led by scientists from the University of York, UK and the Joint Institute for High Temperatures of Russian Academy of Sciences demonstrated that it is possible to remove the two most deeply bound electrons from atoms, emptying the inner most quantum shell and leading to a distinctive plasma state. The experiment was carried out using the petawatt laser at the Central Laser Facility at the Science and ...

Two forthcoming EPJ D papers challenge established wisdom about the nature of vacuum. In one paper, Marcel Urban from the University of Paris-Sud, located in Orsay, France and his colleagues identified a quantum level mechanism for interpreting vacuum as being filled with pairs of virtual particles with fluctuating energy values. As a result, the inherent characteristics of vacuum, like the speed of light, may not be a constant after all, but fluctuate. Meanwhile, in another study, Gerd Leuchs and Luis L. Sánchez-Soto, from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Light ...

Have you ever thrown into the fire - even if you shouldn't have - an empty packet of crisps? The outcome is striking: the plastic shrivels and bends into itself, until it turns into a small crumpled and blackened ball. This phenomenon is explained by the tendency of materials to pick up their original features in the presence of the right stimulus. Hence, this usually happens when heating materials that were originally shaped at high temperatures and cooled afterwards. EPFL researchers realized that this phenomenon occurred to ultrathin quartz tubes (capillary tubes) ...

Rutile is used in ceramics and paints, but is particularly useful for finding out about the history of a rock. Where mineral deposits are found, rutile is often also present. The new methods therefore bring opportunities for strategies to find other mineral deposits, such as gold. Until now, rutile has been a relatively unknown mineral, despite not being rare. For example, rutile can be found on most sandy beaches around the world, including in Sweden. "It's incredible to see how little attention was paid to rutile until around five years ago," says geologist and ...

The blood of young and old people differs. In an article published recently in the scientific journal Blood, a research group at Lund University in Sweden explain how they have succeeded in rejuvenating the blood of mice by reversing, or re-programming, the stem cells that produce blood. Stem cells form the origin of all the cells in the body and can divide an unlimited number of times. When stem cells divide, one cell remains a stem cell and the other matures into the type of cell needed by the body, for example a blood cell.* "Our ageing process is a consequence of ...

The more choices people have, the riskier the decisions they make, according to a new study which sheds light on how we behave when faced with large amounts of information. Researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Lugano set up a gambling game in which they analysed how decision-making is affected when people are faced with a large number of potential gambles. They found that a bias in the way people gather information leads them to take more risks when they choose a gamble from a large set of options, a phenomenon which researchers have labelled ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have discovered that a protein found in the cells surrounding pancreatic cancers play a role in the spread of the disease to other parts of the body. In a finding to be published in the March 25 issue of Oncogene, researchers in the lab of Carol Otey, PhD, found that the protein palladin enhances the ability of cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) to assemble organelles known as invadopodia to break down the barriers between cells and create pathways for tumors to spread throughout the ...

Adults in India are substantially more likely to abstain from smoking at home if they are prohibited from smoking at work, a new study has found. According to data from the Global Adult Tobacco Survey India, 2009/2010, 64 per cent of adults who work in smokefree environments live in a smokefree home, compared with 42 per cent of those who work where smoking is permitted. The proportion of smokefree homes is higher in states with higher proportions of smokefree workplaces. The authors of the study, from Imperial College London and the Public Health Foundation of India ...

WASHINGTON, DC – March 25, 2013 – Until now most experimental vaccines against the highly lethal H5N1 avian influenza virus have lacked effectiveness. But a new vaccine has proven highly effective against the virus when tested in both mice and ferrets. It is also effective against the H9 subtype of avian influenza. The research is published online ahead of print in the Journal of Virology. The strength of the new vaccine is that it uses attenuated, rather than "killed" virus. (Killed viruses are broken apart with chemicals or heat, and they are used because they are ...

Los Angeles, CA (March 25, 2012) While the media is replete with examples of "normal" men who seek out prostitutes regularly, how common are prostitute-seeking men and how much do they differ from men in the normal population? According to a new comparison study by Dr. Martin A. Monto, University of Portland, and Dr. Christine Milrod, only about 14% of men across the U.S. have ever paid for sex in their lives and only 1% of those men had done so in the previous year. In addition, the majority of these men do not possess any "peculiar" qualities that distinguish them from ...

A team of industrial and university researchers has shown that nanoparticles with sizes smaller than 10 nanometers – approximately the width of a cell membrane – can be successfully incorporated into scintillation devices capable of detecting and measuring a wide energy range of X-rays and gamma rays emitted by nuclear materials. The proof-of-concept study, described in the Journal of Applied Physics, suggests that "nanocrystals" – nanoparticles clustered together to mimic the densely-packed crystals traditionally used in scintillation devices – may one day yield radiation ...

Hybrid ribbons of vanadium oxide (VO2) and graphene may accelerate the development of high-power lithium-ion batteries suitable for electric cars and other demanding applications. The Rice University lab of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan determined that the well-studied material is a superior cathode for batteries that could supply both high energy density and significant power density. The research appears online this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters. The ribbons created at Rice are thousands of times thinner than a sheet of paper, ...

A mysterious parasitoid wasp was found in the Böhmerwald (Northeast Austria) and reared in the garden of the amateur entomologist Ewald Altenhofer of Gross Gerungs municipality, Austria. The parasitoid was identified by Kees van Achterberg, senior researcher at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, as the rare Seleucus cuneiformis. It is the first time that a tip of its biology was discovered. The study was published in the open access journal Journal of Hymenoptera Research. The parasitoids reared by Mr Altenhofer belong to the peculiar genus ...

In Robert A. Heinlein's science-fiction novel, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, one of the characters states that butterflies are just "…self-propelled flowers." While Heinlein's description of the insect's aerodynamic ability is quite poetic, it does little to scientifically explain it. Four Japanese researchers have done a bit better by developing sophisticated numerical simulations of a butterfly's forward flight. In a paper in the American Institute of Physics' journal Physics of Fluids, the researchers describe how they mathematically modeled a butterfly as a four-link ...

Collaborating scientists from Nationwide Children's Hospital, Baylor Institute for Immunology Research, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine have identified an important mechanism for stimulating protective immune responses following seasonal influenza vaccinations. The study was published in Science Translational Medicine, a journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). While seasonal influenza vaccines protect 60 to 90 percent of healthy adults from "the flu," the mechanisms providing that protection are still not well understood. The study ...

Type 1 diabetes is a condition in which the body does not produce insulin and cannot convert sugar, starches and other food into energy. Generally diagnosed during childhood or adolescence, the disease requires lifelong access to medical care and intensive daily self-management. As children with Type 1 diabetes grow into young adults, they must leave their pediatric health care providers for adult providers. But the timing of this process and its impact on the young people's health had not been fully explored. In a new study published in the April issue of the journal ...

WASHINGTON, DC – March 25, 2013 – Mice with different naturally occurring stomach bacteria have distinct susceptibilities to disease caused by Helicobacter pylori, the well-known cause of ulcers in humans, according to a study published online ahead of print in the journal Infection and Immunity. This is the first study to document (in mice) that the presence of certain bacteria in the stomach microbiota can prevent pathology from H. pylori. The gastro-intestinal tract is a veritable ecosystem packed with microbes, and over the last decade, investigators have been discovering ...

BINGHAMTON, NY – Is there a double standard for gay parents? A new study published this month by a Binghamton University research team suggests that gay parents are being judged more harshly than straight parents. Members of Binghamton University's Interdisciplinary Research Group for the Study of Sexuality and Gender conducted a study of people's reactions to the parenting behaviors of gay and straight parents. Their results showed a clear pattern of negative reactions from study participants towards a gay couple engaging in exactly the same negative parenting behaviors ...

Irvine, Calif., March 25, 2013 — UC Irvine neurobiologists have found a novel molecular mechanism that helps trigger the formation of long-term memory. The researchers believe the discovery of this mechanism adds another piece to the puzzle in the ongoing effort to uncover the mysteries of memory and, potentially, certain intellectual disabilities. In a study led by Marcelo Wood of UC Irvine's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory, the team investigated the role of this mechanism – a gene designated Baf53b – in long-term memory formation. Baf53b is one of several ...

On the morning of December 6, 1917, in the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia, near the U.S. border in Maine, a French ship, the Mont Blanc, filled with military explosives collided with another vessel. Twenty minutes later, a fire set off the Mont Blanc's volatile cargo and caused a catastrophic explosion—killing thousands and destroying an entire section of the city. Rescue efforts were dispatched immediately from the Canadian mainland as well as the United States, but confusion and lack of immediate information delayed some of the rescue efforts for hours. A recent joint ...