They are one of the most destructive forces of nature on Earth, but now environmental scientists are working to tame the hurricane. In a paper, published in Atmospheric Science Letters, the authors propose using cloud seeding to decrease sea surface temperatures where hurricanes form. Theoretically, the team claims the technique could reduce hurricane intensity by a category. The team focused on the relationship between sea surface temperature and the energy associated with the destructive potential of hurricanes. Rather than seeding storm clouds or hurricanes directly, ...

Vancouver, BC – August 23, 2012 – Vancouver-based clinician and researcher Dr. Andrei Krassioukov is packing for the upcoming Paralympic games in London. Rather than packing sports equipment, he has a suitcase full of advanced scientific equipment funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation that he will use to monitor the cardiovascular function of athletes with spinal cord injuries. Up to 90% of people with injuries between that cervical and high thoracic vertebrae suffer from a condition that limits their ability to regulate heart rate and blood pressure. For top-level ...

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have produced hydrogen, H2, a renewable energy source, from water using an inexpensive catalyst under industrially relevant conditions (using pH neutral water, surrounded by atmospheric oxygen, O2, and at room temperature). Lead author of the research, Dr Erwin Reisner, an EPSRC research fellow and head of the Christian Doppler Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, said: "A H2 evolution catalyst which is active under elevated O2 levels is crucial if we are to develop an industrial water splitting process - a chemical reaction ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- The discovery of graphene, a material just one atom thick and possessing exceptional strength and other novel properties, started an avalanche of research around its use for everything from electronics to optics to structural materials. But new research suggests that was just the beginning: A whole family of two-dimensional materials may open up even broader possibilities for applications that could change many aspects of modern life. The latest "new" material, molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) — which has actually been used for decades, but not in its 2-D ...

ARLINGTON, Va.—The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is demonstrating the next phase of an augmented-reality project Aug. 23 in Princeton, N.J., that will change the way warfighters view operational environments—literally. ONR has completed the first year of a multi-year augmented-reality effort, developing a system that allow trainees to view simulated images superimposed on real-world landscapes. One example of augmented reality technology can be seen in sports broadcasts, which use it to highlight first-down lines on football fields and animate hockey pucks to help TV ...

Spacetime may be less like beer and more like sipping whiskey. Or so an intergalactic photo finish may suggest. Physicist Robert Nemiroff of Michigan Technological University reached this heady conclusion after studying the tracings of three photons of differing wavelengths that were recorded by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in May 2009. The photons originated about 7 billion light years away from Earth in one of three pulses from a gamma-ray burst. They arrived at the orbiting telescope just one millisecond apart, in a virtual tie. Gamma-ray bursts are ...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 23—Shortly after the Hubble Space Telescope went into orbit in 1990 it was discovered that the craft had blurred vision. Fortunately, Space Shuttle astronauts were able to remedy the problem a few years later with supplemental optics. Now, a team of Italian researchers has performed a similar sight-correcting feat for a microscope imaging technique designed to explore a universe seemingly as vast as Hubble's but at the opposite end of the size spectrum—the neural pathways of the brain. "Our system combines the best feature of one microscopy technique—high-speed, ...

Researchers from Rice University today unveiled a new multi-antenna technology that could help wireless providers keep pace with the voracious demands of data-hungry smartphones and tablets. The technology aims to dramatically increase network capacity by allowing cell towers to simultaneously beam signals to more than a dozen customers on the same frequency. Details about the new technology, dubbed Argos, were presented today at the Association for Computing Machinery's MobiCom 2012 wireless research conference in Istanbul. Argos is under development by researchers from ...

A study led by investigators from Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC), Nashville, Tenn., finds that black men with prostate cancer receive lower quality surgical care than white men. The racial differences persist even when controlling for factors such as the year of surgery, age, comorbidities and insurance status. Daniel Barocas, M.D., MPH, assistant professor of Urologic Surgery, is first author of the study published in the Aug. 17 issue of the Journal of Urology. Investigators from VICC, the Tennessee Valley Veterans Administration Geriatric Research, Education ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers have created a new type of biosensor that can detect minute concentrations of glucose in saliva, tears and urine and might be manufactured at low cost because it does not require many processing steps to produce. "It's an inherently non-invasive way to estimate glucose content in the body," said Jonathan Claussen, a former Purdue doctoral student and now a research scientist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. "Because it can detect glucose in the saliva and tears, it's a platform that might eventually help to eliminate or reduce ...

Researchers from The Wistar Institute and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) have teamed to publish the first annotated atlas of the Epstein-Barr virus genome, creating the most comprehensive study of how the viral genome interacts with its human host during a latent infection. Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), which is thought to be responsible for one percent of all human cancers, establishes a latent infection in nearly 100 percent of infected adult humans. The atlas is designed to guide researchers toward new means of creating therapies against EBV-latent infection ...

Goldilocks was on to something when she preferred everything "just right." Harvard Medical School researchers have found that when it comes to the length of mitochondria, the power-producing organelles, applying the fairy tale's mantra is crucial to the health of a cell. More specifically, abnormalities in mitochondrial length promote the development of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. "There had been a fair amount of interest in mitochondria in Alzheimer's and tau-related diseases, but causality was unknown," said Brian DuBoff, first author of the study ...

Boost for Efforts to Prevent Microbial Stowaways on Interplanetary Spacecraft Efforts to expunge micro-organisms from spacecraft assembly cleanrooms, and the spacecraft themselves, inadvertently select for the organisms that are often the most fit to survive long journeys in space. This has the risk of thwarting the goal of avoiding contaminating other celestial bodies, as well as samples brought back to earth, according to Myron La Duc of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, and his collaborators. Their research is published in the ...

Data from the 1970s and 1980s show that people affected by cancer survived significantly longer in West Germany than cancer patients behind the Iron Curtain. Looking at a diagnosis period from 1984 to 1985 in the former German Democratic Republic, 28 percent of colorectal cancer patients, 46 percent of prostate cancer patients, and 52 percent of breast cancer patients survived the first five years after diagnosis. By contrast, 5-year survival rates for people in West Germany affected by these types of cancer were 44 percent, 68 percent, and 68 percent in the years from ...

VIDEO: An animation of satellite observations from Aug. 20-23, 2012, shows Tropical Storm Isaac moving through the eastern Caribbean Sea. This visualization was created by the NASA GOES Project at NASA's... Click here for more information. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite captured rainfall data from Tropical Storm Isaac as it continues moving through the Caribbean Sea. After a quiet July, the Atlantic has seen a sharp increase in tropical activity. ...

A new record of past temperature change in the tropical Atlantic Ocean's subsurface provides clues as to why the Earth's climate is so sensitive to ocean circulation patterns, according to climate scientists at Texas A&M University. Geological oceanographer Matthew Schmidt and two of his graduate students teamed up with Ping Chang, a physical oceanographer and climate modeler, to help uncover an important climate connection between the tropics and the high latitude North Atlantic. Their new findings are in the current issue of PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy ...

The opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games captivated countless viewers all over the world in front of their televisions, astounding them with a gigantic show. Relatively few people were able to have a live experience of the spectacle at the London stadium. Still, some of the fans watching the show felt as if they were there live, even though they were only sitting in front of a large cinema screen. That's because a few movie theaters showed the opening ceremonies in 8K-resolution, which corresponds to 33 megapixels. The resolution on home televisions will soon be enhanced ...

Just a few more meters to the finish line. The mountain biker jumps over the last hill and takes the final curve, with the rest of the competition close at his heels. At such moments, you do not want to just watch, you would really love to put yourself in the same shoes as the athlete. How does he push the pace on the final stretch? How fast is his pulse racing? What does he feel like? Viewers will soon be able to obtain this information in real time, directly with the images. Because the INCA intelligent camera, engineered by Fraunhofer researchers in Erlangen, makes completely ...

WASHINGTON – Scientists have long suspected that the Sun's 11-year cycle influences climate of certain regions on Earth. Yet records of average, seasonal temperatures do not date back far enough to confirm any patterns. Now, armed with a unique proxy, an international team of researchers show that unusually cold winters in Central Europe are related to low solar activity – when sunspot numbers are minimal. The freezing of Germany's largest river, the Rhine, is the key. Although the Earth's surface overall continues to warm, the new analysis has revealed a correlation ...

When you are hit with the flu, you know it immediately -- fever, chills, sore throat, aching muscles, fatigue. This is your body mounting an immune response to the invading virus. But less is known about what is happening on the molecular level. Now Northwestern University scientists have discovered one of the ways the influenza virus disarms our natural defense system. The virus decreases the production of key immune system-regulating proteins in human cells that help fight the invader. The virus does this by turning on the microRNAs -- little snippets of RNA -- that ...

Cameleon Software (www.cameleon-software.com), today announced it will be a Gold sponsor of salesforce.com's Dreamforce 2012 conference (www.dreamforce.com). The conference will be held September 18-21, 2012, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Cameleon Software provides a multichannel, multi-device CPQ (configure, price, quote) and eCommerce software that tightly integrates with Salesforce CRM. Cameleon CPQ enables sales and marketing teams to quickly design, configure and price offers, and generate accurate quotes and proposals on every sales channel, including tablets ...

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 22, 2012 — With nearly 55 million students, teachers and school staff about to return to elementary and secondary school classrooms, scientists today described a new hand-held sensor ― practical enough for wide use ― that could keep classroom air fresher and kids more alert for learning. They reported on the device at the 244th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, being held here this week. The sensor detects the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in classroom air. The average ...

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 22, 2012 — The corn industry produces almost 4,000 products from every bushel. Oil refineries produce fuels and ingredients for an estimated 6,000 products with a thoroughness that actually squeezes 44 gallons of products from every 42-gallon barrel of crude. Scientists today unveiled new technology intended to move soybeans, second only to corn as the top food crop in the U.S., along that same use-to-all path as a raw material for a wider portfolio of products. They described it ― a new integrated soybean biorefinery ― at the 244th National ...

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 22, 2012 — Like recruiters pitching military service to a throng of people, scientists are developing drugs to recruit disease-fighting proteins present naturally in everyone's blood in medicine's war on infections, cancer and a range of other diseases. They reported on the latest advances in this new approach here today at the 244th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. David Spiegel, M.D., Ph.D., who heads one of the major research teams developing "antibody-recruiting molecules" (or ...

August 23, 2012 – Over the last 50 years, the spotting of newborn's blood onto filter paper for disease screening, called Guthrie cards, has become so routine that since 2000, more than 90% of newborns in the United States have had Guthrie cards created. In a study published online in Genome Research, researchers have shown that epigenetic information stored on archived Guthrie cards provides a retrospective view of the epigenome at birth, a powerful new application for the card that could help understand disease and predict future health. DNA methylation, an epigenetic ...