Globular clusters are spherical collections of stars, tightly bound to each other by their mutual gravity. Relics of the early years of the Universe, with ages of typically 12-13 billion years (the Big Bang took place 13.7 billion years ago), there are roughly 150 globular clusters in the Milky Way and they contain many of our galaxy's oldest stars. But while the stars are old and the clusters formed in the distant past, astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the ESO La Silla Observatory have found that some of these ...

Achieving a goal considered nearly impossible, JILA physicists have chilled a gas of molecules to very low temperatures by adapting the familiar process by which a hot cup of coffee cools. Evaporative cooling has long been used to cool atoms, at JILA and elsewhere, to extraordinarily low temperatures. The process was used at JILA in 1995 to create a then-new state of matter, the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of rubidium atoms. The latest demonstration, reported in the Dec. 20, 2012, issue of Nature,* marks the first time evaporative cooling has been achieved with molecules—two ...

NEW YORK, NY (December 19, 2012) – A joint team of scientists from The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Laboratory and Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) has developed a technique that may prevent the inheritance of mitochondrial diseases in children. The study is published online today in Nature. Dieter Egli, PhD, and Daniel Paull, PhD, of the NYSCF Laboratory with Mark Sauer, MD, and Michio Hirano, MD, of CUMC demonstrated how the nucleus of a cell can be successfully transferred between human egg cells. This landmark achievement carries significant implications ...

WORCESTER, MA — An international team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, the University of Bonn and the Center for Advanced European Studies and Research in Germany have shown that a well-known immune and inflammatory process plays an important role in the pathology of Alzheimer's disease. This process, which results in the mature production of the pro-inflammatory cytokine called interleukin-1 beta (IL-1B) and is involved in the body's defense against infection, has also been established as a clinical target for rheumatoid arthritis. The ...

NEW YORK, NY (December 19, 2012) – A joint team of scientists from The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Laboratory and Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) has developed a technique that may prevent the inheritance of mitochondrial diseases in children. The study is published online today in Nature. Dieter Egli, PhD, and Daniel Paull, PhD, of the NYSCF Laboratory with Mark Sauer, MD, and Michio Hirano, MD, of CUMC demonstrated how the nucleus of a cell can be successfully transferred between human egg cells. This landmark achievement carries significant implications ...

People with asthma have an increased risk of pulmonary embolism, according to new research. A new study, published online ahead of print today (20 December 2012) in the European Respiratory Journal, looked at whether people with moderate or severe asthma had an increased risk of developing deep vein thrombosis, or pulmonary embolism. Pulmonary embolism is when the main artery of the lung or the bronchi becomes blocked. It usually results from deep vein thrombosis; a blood clot in the veins, which can break off and move around the body to the lung. Previous research ...

As digital cameras become better and cheaper, ecologists are turning these ubiquitous consumer devices into scientific tools to study how forests are responding to climate change. And, they say, digital cameras could be a cost-effective way of visually monitoring the spread of tree diseases. The results – which come from 38,000 photographs – are presented at this week's British Ecological Society's Annual Meeting at the University of Birmingham. Because trees fix carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and store carbon as biomass and soil organic matter, forests play ...

Ethnically or religiously diverse countries underinvest in measures to improve their environmental performance, according to new research by an academic at the University of East Anglia (UEA). Dr Elissaios Papyrakis also found that religious diversity has a more detrimental impact on environmental performance than ethnic differences. These social differences, if they cannot be overcome, may lower collective action and reduce public spending on environmental protection and performance. The study, Environmental Performance in Socially Fragmented Countries, is published ...

[Dying to be famous: retrospective cohort study of rock and pop star mortality and its association with adverse childhood experiences doi 10.1136/bmjopen-2012-002089] Successful solo rock/pop stars are around twice as likely to die early as those in equally famous bands, indicates research published in the online journal BMJ Open. And those who died of drug and alcohol problems were more likely to have had a difficult or abusive childhood than those dying of other causes, the findings showed. The authors included 1489 North American and European rock and pop stars ...

[Family meals can help children reach their 5 A Day: a cross-sectional survey of children's dietary intake from London primary schools Online First doi 10.1136/jech-2012-201604] Regular family meals round a table boosts kids' fruit and vegetable intake, and make it easier for them to reach the recommended five portions a day, indicates research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. The World Health Organization recommends a daily intake of five 80g portions of fruit and vegetables to promote good health and stave off serious disease and ...

[Snakebite enquiries to the UK National Poisons Information Service: 2004-2010 doi 10.1136/emermed-2012-201587] Snakebite injuries account for around two phone queries every week to the UK National Poisons Information Service, indicates an audit published online in Emergency Medicine Journal. Changes in data recording mean that these figures are probably an underestimate of the true numbers of snakebite injuries in the UK, suggest the authors. They audited telephone enquiries made to the Cardiff, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Newcastle units of the UK National Poisons ...

(Embargoed) CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Results of a clinical trial that began in 2001 show that a gene therapy cocktail conveyed into the brain by a molecular special delivery vehicle may help extend the lives of children with Canavan disease, a rare and fatal neurodegenerative disorder. A report of the trial appears in the Dec. 19, 2012 online edition of the journal Science Translational Medicine. The form of gene therapy was created and developed at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. The work was spearheaded by R. Jude Samulski, PhD, a study senior author, ...

Dinosaurs were not only the largest animals to roam the Earth - they also had a greater number of larger species compared to all other back-boned animals - scientists suggest in a new paper published in the journal PLOS ONE today. The researchers, from Queen Mary, University of London, compared the size of the femur bone of 329 different dinosaur species from fossil records. The length and weight of the femur bone is a recognised method in palaeontology for estimating a dinosaur's body mass. They found that dinosaurs follow the opposite pattern of body size distribution ...

Boston – Results from eleven independent ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) research studies are giving hope to the ALS community – showing for the first time that the disease may be treatable by targeting new mechanisms revealed by neural stem cell-based studies. A decade of research conducted at multiple institutions, shows that when neural stem cells were transplanted into multi-levels of the spinal cord of a mouse model with familial ALS, disease onset and progression slowed, motor and breathing function improved and treated mice survived three to four times longer than untreated ...

A new study by Douglas Mental Health University Institute researchers shows altered body rhythms of the hormone melatonin in Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) women with insomnia. This finding may help explain some of the sleep disruptions experienced by women with PMDD, also known as premenstrual syndrome. PMDD is a mood disorder which appears in the week preceding menses, and affects about 3-8% of women. PMDD sufferers can experience depression, tension, and irritability of sufficient intensity to interfere with daily activities and relationships. Disturbed sleep ...

HOUSTON -- (Dec. 19, 2012) -- A new report in the journal Nature unveils three of the first genomes from a vast, understudied swath of the animal kingdom that includes as many as one-quarter of Earth's marine species. By publishing the genomes of a leech, an ocean-dwelling worm and a kind of sea snail creature called a limpet, scientists from Rice University, the University of California-Berkeley and the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute (JGI) have more than doubled the number of genomes from a diverse group of animals called lophotrochozoans (pronounced: LOH-foh-troh-coh-zoh-uhns). Lophotrochozoans ...

An international team of scientists, including PhD student Stephan Lautenschlager and Dr Emily Rayfield of the University of Bristol, found that the senses of smell, hearing and balance were well developed in therizinosaurs and might have affected or benefited from an enlarged forebrain. These findings came as a surprise to the researchers as exceptional sensory abilities would be expected from predatory and not necessarily from plant-eating animals. Therizinosaurs are an unusual group of theropod dinosaurs which lived between 145 and 66 million years ago. Members ...

The number of Alzheimer's patients will continue to dramatically increase in the next several decades. Various teams of researchers worldwide are feverishly investigating precisely how the illness develops. A team of scientists under the guidance of the University of Bonn and University of Massachusetts (USA) and with the participation of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases have discovered a new signaling pathway in mice which is involved in the development of chronic inflammation which causes nerve cells in the brain to malfunction and die off. The results ...

DURHAM, NC -- Humpback whales are famed for their songs, most often heard in breeding season when males are competing to mate with females. In recent years, however, reports of whale songs occurring outside traditional breeding grounds have become more common. A new study may help explain why. Humpbacks sing for their supper -- or at least, they sing while they hunt for it. The research, published December 19 in PLoS ONE, uncovers the whales' little-understood acoustic behavior while foraging. It also reveals a previously unknown behavioral flexibility on their ...

Our eyes may be our window to the world, but how do we make sense of the thousands of images that flood our retinas each day? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the brain is wired to put in order all the categories of objects and actions that we see. They have created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings. The result – achieved through computational models of brain imaging data collected while the subjects watched hours of movie clips – is what researchers call "a continuous semantic space." Some relationships ...

Over the last half decade, it has become increasingly clear that the normal gastrointestinal (GI) bacteria play a variety of very important roles in the biology of human and animals. Now Vic Norris of the University of Rouen, France, and coauthors propose yet another role for GI bacteria: that they exert some control over their hosts' appetites. Their review was published online ahead of print in the Journal of Bacteriology. This hypothesis is based in large part on observations of the number of roles bacteria are already known to play in host biology, as well as their ...

AUSTIN, Texas — Raising the minimum wage to a living wage begins the cycle of lifting single mothers out of poverty, according to a policy report released by the Institute for Urban Policy Research & Analysis (IUPRA) at The University of Texas at Austin. The U.S. census shows more Americans — 46.2 million people — are living in poverty than ever before. And for African American and Hispanic women, a full-time minimum wage job isn't enough to break out of the poverty cycle. According to the report, working women of color make $0.64 and $0.56, respectively, for every dollar ...

The humble soybean could become an inexpensive new source of a widely used chemical for plastics, textiles, drugs, solvents and as a food additive. Succinic acid, traditionally drawn from petroleum, is one focus of research by Rice chemists George Bennett and Ka-Yiu San. In 2004, the Department of Energy named succinic acid one of 12 "platform" chemicals that could be produced from sugars by biological means and turned into high-value materials. Several years ago, Rice patented a process by Bennett and San for the bio-based production of succinic acid that employed ...

JUPITER, FL, December 19, 2012 – Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed the first synthetic compound that can reverse the effects of a serious metabolic condition known as fatty liver disease. True to its name, the disease involves an abnormal buildup of fat in the liver. The compound—known as SR9238—is the first to effectively suppress lipid or fat production in the liver, eliminating inflammation and reversing fat accumulation in animal models of fatty liver disease. The new compound also significantly lowered total ...

Continued high use of marijuana by the nation's eighth, 10th and 12th graders combined with a drop in perceptions of its potential harms was revealed in this year's Monitoring the Future survey, an annual survey of eighth, 10th, and 12th-graders conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan. The survey was carried out in classrooms around the country earlier this year, under a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health. The 2012 survey shows that 6.5 percent of high school seniors smoke marijuana daily, up ...