The tiny pieces of rock – at 50-100 micrometers smaller than a human hair – have been captured from asteroid Itokawa by the Japanese mission Hayabusa. They were carefully unpacked by experts at the University's School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences. It is the first time samples from an asteroid have been returned to Earth. Only about 70 samples have been released for international analysis – seven of these are being studied at the University. The Hayabusa mission is part of a continuing effort to understand how asteroids, which are leftovers from ...

Take a good look around on your next nature hike. Not only are you experiencing the wonders of the outdoors – you're probably also witnessing evolution in action. New research from the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) on the effect of insects on plant populations has shown that evolution can happen more quickly than was previously assumed, even over a single generation. The study is to be published in the Oct. 5 issue of Science. "Scientists have long hypothesized that the interaction between plants and insects has led to much of the diversity we see among plants, ...

Providing birth control to women at no cost substantially reduced unplanned pregnancies and cut abortion rates by 62 percent to 78 percent over the national rate, a new study shows. The research, by investigators at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, appears online Oct. 4 in Obstetrics & Gynecology. Among a range of birth control methods offered in the study, most women chose long-acting methods like intrauterine devices (IUDs) or implants, which have lower failure rates than commonly used birth control pills. In the United States, IUDs and implants ...

Many chronically depressed and treatment-resistant patients experience immediate relief from symptoms after taking small amounts of the drug ketamine. For a decade, scientists have been trying to explain the observation first made at Yale University. Today, current evidence suggests that the pediatric anesthetic helps regenerate synaptic connections between brain cells damaged by stress and depression, according to a review of scientific research written by Yale School of Medicine researchers and published in the Oct. 5 issue of the journal Science. Ketamine works on ...

UCLA astronomers report the discovery of a remarkable star that orbits the enormous black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy in a blistering 11-and-a-half years — the shortest known orbit of any star near this black hole. The star, known as S0-102, may help astronomers discover whether Albert Einstein was right in his fundamental prediction of how black holes warp space and time, said research co-author Andrea Ghez, leader of the discovery team and a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy who holds the Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Chair in Astrophysics. ...

Climate sceptics are being given a more prominent, and sometimes uncontested, voice in UK and US newspapers in contrast to other countries around the world, new research suggests. The findings have been published today, 5 October, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, as part of a study looking at how climate scepticism manifested itself in the print media of the US, UK, Brazil, China, India and France during a 3-month period which included 'Climategate' in 2009/10 and a second period which covered the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. In ...

A new mathematical method can help to predict a couple's chances of becoming pregnant, according to how long they have been trying. The model may also shed light on how long they should wait before seeking medical help. For example, the researchers have found that, if the woman is aged 35, after just six months of trying, her chance of getting pregnant in the next cycle is then less than 10 per cent. The analysis, developed at Warwick Medical School at the University of Warwick and the London School of Economics, uses the number of menstrual cycles over which the ...

Herbivorous insects, such as aphids, damage plants and can substantially reduce yields in agricultural settings; however, they can play a major role in maintaining genetic diversity. Ecologists Tobias Züst and Lindsay Turnbull from the University of Zurich together with colleagues from California and Great Britain demonstrated the importance of variation in herbivore communities using the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, also known as wall cress. According to Züst, the work is one of the first experimental confirmations of a forty-year-old theory that herbivorous insects ...

A team of paleontologists and engineers has found that duck-billed dinosaurs had an amazing capacity to chew tough and abrasive plants with grinding teeth more complex than those of cows, horses, and other well-known modern grazers. Their study, which is published today in the journal Science, is the first to recover material properties from fossilized teeth. Duck-bill dinosaurs, also known as hadrosaurids, were the dominant plant-eaters in what are now Europe, North America, and Asia during the Late Cretaceous about 85 million years ago. With broad jaws bearing as many ...

(Edmonton) Overweight children are far more likely to take prescription medications than children of a normal weight—a trend that adds to already higher health-care costs for treating childhood obesity, according to new research from the University of Alberta. Researchers from the School of Public Health analyzed the medication use of more than 2,000 Canadian children through the 2007 to 2009 Canadian Health Measures Survey. They found that overweight and obese kids aged 12 to 19 years were 59 per cent more likely than their normal-weight peers to take prescription medication. Co-author ...

Researchers have discovered a star that whips around the giant black hole at the center of our galaxy in record time, completing an orbit every 11.5 years. The finding, appearing today in the journal Science, points ahead to groundbreaking experiments involving Einstein's general theory of relativity. Those tests will be fully enabled by the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), slated to begin observations next decade. The record-setting star, called S0-102, was detected with the twin 10-meter telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. For the past 17 years, the telescopes ...

ELECTRICITY-- Spotlight on outages . . . When a storm knocks out power, among the first questions to be answered are how many people are affected and when electricity will be restored. Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Energy Awareness and Resiliency Standardized Services application, or EARSS, uses publicly available data and can help by showing grid status in real time. The goal is to enhance situational awareness for the emergency response community, according to EARSS co-developer Steve Fernandez of ORNL's Computational Sciences and Engineering Division. "Working from ...

RICHMOND, Va. (Oct. 4, 2012) – A new study reveals that a significant amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from lakes and rivers in Southern Québec, Canada, is very old – approximately 1,000 to 3,000 years old – challenging the current models of long-term carbon storage in lakes and rivers. Previous studies have suggested that there is a tight coupling between the terrestrial and aquatic environment such that aquatic bacteria rapidly consume modern carbon. The new findings of the respiration of old carbon in aquatic systems suggests there may be significant lags ...

New Haven, Conn.—Dramatic shifts in the planet's climate and geography over millions of years changed the course of evolutionary history for conifer trees, according to a Yale paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Yale researchers examined the fossil record and genetic makeup of 489 out of more than 600 living conifer species and discovered that while most conifers belong to ancient lineages, most Northern Hemisphere species, including the majority of pines and spruces, appeared within the past 5 million years. They argue that the migration ...

Controlling "mixing" between acceptor and donor layers, or domains, in polymer-based solar cells could increase their efficiency, according to a team of researchers that included physicists from North Carolina State University. Their findings shed light on the inner workings of these solar cells, and could lead to further improvements in efficiency. Polymer-based solar cells consist of two domains, known as the acceptor and the donor layers. Excitons, the energy particles created by solar cells, must be able to travel quickly to the interface of the donor and acceptor ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – More than 40 percent of older breast cancer survivors are insufficiently active after leaving a supervised program. But new research shows that those women who developed behavioral skills such as self-confidence and motivation during their program were far more likely to continue exercising on their own. Regular exercise may reduce the risk of breast cancer recurrence and breast cancer-related mortality, experts say, making it crucial to effectively target breast cancer survivors who do not engage in regular physical activity for interventions. Researchers ...

At first blush, many people would probably love to get rid of insects, such as pesky mosquitoes, ants and roaches. But a new study indicates that getting rid of insects could trigger some unwelcome ecological consequences, such as the rapid loss of desired traits in plants, including their good taste and high yields. Specifically, the study--described in the Oct. 5, 2012 issue of Science and funded by the National Science Foundation showed that evening primroses grown in insecticide-treated plots quickly lost, through evolution, defensive traits that helped protect them ...

Suicide is the third-leading cause of death for teens, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now, a University of Missouri public health expert has identified factors that will help parents, medical professionals and educators recognize teens at risk for self injury and suicide. "For many young people, suicide represents an escape from unbearable situations—problems that seem impossible to solve or negative emotions that feel overwhelming," said Lindsay Taliaferro, an assistant professor of health sciences at MU. "Adults can help these teens dissect ...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Sandia National Laboratories published the second annual 2012 Wind Plant Reliability Benchmark on Monday, and the results should help the nation's growing wind industry benchmark its performance, understand vulnerabilities and enhance productivity. Until now, wind farm owners and operators had no way to compare their output with the output of similar operations. To benchmark the reliability of the U.S. wind turbine fleet and identify major causes of failures and downtime, the DOE commissioned Sandia in 2010 to build the Continuous Reliability Enhancement ...

To believe that technologies once dreamed of in science fiction novels, television shows, and comic strips may one day be a reality, or that real-world technologies might make the fantastic devices of fiction obsolete, you'd need to be either an optimist…or a futurist in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)'s Science and Technology Directorate (S&T). To keep dreams grounded, S&T maintains a team of futurists in Arlington, Va., at the Homeland Security Studies & Analysis Institute (HSSAI). There, in the Resilience and Emergency Preparedness / Response Branch, analysts ...

Tropical Storm Maliksi is putting the final touches on Japan, that is, the edge of the storm was seen brushing the country's northern coast as it pulled away on NASA satellite imagery. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Maliksi on Oct. 4 at 0329 UTC (11:29 p.m. EDT, Oct. 3, EDT) and the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured an infrared image of the storm brushing the Tohoku and Hokkaido prefectures of northern Japan. On Oct. 4, 2012 at 1500 UTC (11 a.m. EDT), the Joint Typhoon Warning Center issued their final advisory on Maliksi. At ...

NASA's Aqua satellite provided two different infrared views of the two tropical storms swirling in the Atlantic Ocean. Oscar is battling wind shear that appears destined to tear it apart, while Nadine is merging with a cold front. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over both Tropical Storm Nadine and Tropical Depression 15 (TD15) on Oct. 3 at 1553 UTC (11:53 a.m. EDT), before TD15 became Tropical Storm Oscar. While overhead, the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument aboard Aqua captured two different images of both storms. One image was near infrared and almost visible ...

Some of the most powerful thunderstorms in a tropical cyclone surround the center of circulation, and NASA's TRMM satellite noticed that rainfall is heaviest in that area of Tropical Storm Gaemi. When NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite passed over Tropical Storm Gaemi on Oct. 3 at 1241 UTC (8:41 a.m. EDT), the precipitation radar instrument detected light rainfall occurring over most of the storm. Moderate rain was falling at a rate between .78 to 1.57 inches/20 to 40 mm per hour and surrounded a small area of heavy rainfall circling tightly around ...

Researchers at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands, placed water droplets on a plate chilled to -20 degrees Celsius and captured images as a freezing front traveled up the droplet. The photos are published in the American Institute of Physics' (AIP) journal Physics of Fluids. The approximately 4-millimeter diameter droplets took about 20 seconds to freeze. During the final stage of freezing, the ice drop developed a pointy tip, as can be seen in Figure 1d. The effect, which is not observed for most other liquids, arises because water expands as it freezes. The ...

"ChiroSpring is unique in the chiropractic software industry because it combines the most advanced technology with a design that couldn't be easier to use," said Brian Albery, CEO of ChiroSpring. "Doctors want electronic chiropractic software that allows their practice to run at maximum efficiency, but is also easy and intuitive to operate. While other chiropractor software programs force you to choose between functionality and simplicity, ChiroSpring offers an unbeatable combination of both. The best chiropractic software should give doctors everything they ...