The following highlights summarize research papers that have been recently published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), Journal of Geophysical Research - Biogeosciences (JGR-G), Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres (JGR-D), Water Resources Research (WRR), and Space Weather (SW). In this release: 1. Trade-offs between water for food and for curbing climate change 2. Low calcification in corals in the Great Barrier Reef 3. The Everglades still threatened by excess nutrients 4. Wetlands the primary source of Amazon Basin methane 5. Old fractures ...

Friday, Aug. 31, 2012, Cleveland: A compound developed to treat neuropathic pain has shown potential as an innovative treatment for Alzheimer's disease, according to a study by researchers at Cleveland Clinic's Lerner Research Institute and Anesthesiology Institute. "Cleveland Clinic dedicated two years of research into the examination of this compound and our findings show it could represent a novel therapeutic target in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease," said Mohamed Naguib, M.D., Professor of Anesthesiology, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. "Development ...

International collaboration is a key aspect of the globalization of science and engineering. A recent report and data evaluation released by the National Science Foundation (NSF) showed that one in six scientists and engineers in the United States reported working with individuals in other countries in a given week. International collaboration was more likely to occur among persons working in the for-profit sector, men, and those with higher levels of educational attainment. Individuals who earned postsecondary degrees both in the United States and abroad reported the highest ...

Los Angeles, (August 31, 2012) You can probably recall a customer service experience that left you feeling good. A recent study has shown not only that positive emotion from sales staff is contagious to a customer, but that a satisfied customer also improves the salesperson's mood. This research is now available in Human Relations, published by SAGE. Sandra Kiffin-Petersen, and Geoffrey Soutar from University of Western Australia and Steven Murphy from Carlton University, Canada used a qualitative diary study with 276 sales employees to shed light on the sales experience ...

Sitting still is tough for children, which makes MRI scans a challenge. The scans require that patients remain motionless for extended periods. Findings from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital showed that a brief, targeted intervention dramatically increases the likelihood that children as young as 5 years old will be able to undergo testing without sedation. That is good news for children with sickle cell disease, who were the focus of this study. Patients with sickle cell disease often undergo brain and liver MRIs to check for complications related to their disease ...

August 30, 2012 — (Bronx, NY) — Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have discovered a new "first response" mechanism that the immune system uses to respond to infection. The findings challenge the current understanding of immunity and could lead to new strategies for boosting effectiveness of all vaccines. The study, conducted in mice, published online today in the journal Immunity. Grégoire Lauvau, Ph.D.One way the immune system protects the body against microbes like bacteria and viruses is with memory CD8+ T cells, so named because ...

EVANSTON, Ill. --- "Information overload" may be an exaggerated way to describe today's always-on media environment. Actually, very few Americans seem to feel bogged down or overwhelmed by the volume of news and information at their fingertips and on their screens, according to a new Northwestern University study. The study was published in the journal The Information Society. "Little research has focused on information overload and media consumption, yet it's a concept used in public discussions to describe today's 24/7 media environment," said Eszter Hargittai, an ...

Alexandria, Va., USA – In a study titled "Prevalence of Periodontis in Adults in the United States: 2009 and 2010," lead author Paul Eke, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimates the prevalence, severity and extent of periodontitis in the adult U.S population using data from the 2009 and 2010 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) cycle. The study is published in the Journal of Dental Research, the official publication of the International and American Associations for Dental Research (IADR/AADR). Estimates were derived from a sample ...

VIDEO: An animation of NOAA's GOES-13 satellite observations from Aug. 28-30, 2012, shows Hurricane Isaac make two landfalls in southeastern Louisiana on Aug. 28 at 7:45 p.m. EDT (1145 UTC) and... Click here for more information. NASA satellites are providing forecasters with data on rainfall rates within Tropical Storm Isaac as it continues to track over Louisiana, Mississippi and spread northward into the lower Mississippi Valley. Isaac has a large supply of rain, drawing ...

Pregnant women who are highly exposed to common environmental chemicals - polyfluoroalkyl compounds (PFCs) - have babies that are smaller at birth and larger at 20 months of age, according to a study from Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health published online in the August 30 edition of Environmental Health Perspectives. PFCs are used in the production of fluoropolymers and are found widely in protective coatings of packaging products, clothes, furniture and non-stick cookware. They are persistent compounds found abundantly in the environment and human exposure ...

Leaders often use rousing speeches to evoke powerful emotions, and those emotions may predict when a group will commit an act of violence or terrorism, according to new research published in the journal Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression. Analysis of speeches delivered by government, activist and terrorist leaders found that leaders' expressions of anger, contempt and disgust spiked immediately before their group committed an act of violence. "When leaders express a combination of anger, contempt and disgust in their speeches, it seems to be instrumental ...

Small patches of ice could make up at most five to ten percent of material in walls of Shackleton crater. Scientists using the Mini-RF radar on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) have estimated the maximum amount of ice likely to be found inside a permanently shadowed lunar crater located near the moon's South Pole. As much as five to ten percent of material, by weight, could be patchy ice, according to the team of researchers led by Bradley Thomson at Boston University's Center for Remote Sensing, in Mass. "These terrific results from the Mini-RF team contribute ...

Leipzig. More than 250 international scientists will be meeting in the first week of September in Leipzig to share their experiences on the latest methods and applications using stable isotopes. Stable isotopes are a tool that can be used in a wide range of areas in natural sciences and medicine as, with their help, it is possible to establish the origin of substances, and dynamic processes can be made visible. For example, it is possible to establish where a red wine really comes from, the cause of water damage, how the concentration of carbon dioxide at the South Pole ...

As the nation's fastest-growing immigrant group, Asian Americans are likely to be a key constituency in the 2012 presidential election, but this community is far from a monolithic voting bloc, says Russell Jeung, associate professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University. Jeung has published an analysis of Asian American voting patterns in the 2008 presidential election, including a breakdown of nine ethnic groups and 11 religious affiliations that make up the Asian American vote. "Usually people act in a racial bloc or a religious bloc," Jeung ...

In the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains two closely related species of mice share a habitat and a genetic lineage, but have very different social lives. The California mouse (Peromyscus californicus) is characterized by a lifetime of monogamy; the deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus) is sexually promiscuous. Researchers at the University of California Berkeley recently showed how these differences in sexual behavior impact the bacteria hosted by each species as well as the diversity of the genes that control immunity. The results were published in the May 2012 edition ...

(CHICAGO)-- Assessment of sexual function should be incorporated into cardiovascular risk evaluation for all men, regardless of the presence or absence of known cardiovascular disease, according to Dr. Ajay Nehra, lead author of a report by the Princeton Consensus (Expert Panel) Conference, a collaboration of 22 international, multispecialty researchers. Nehra is vice chairperson, professor and director of Men's Health in the Department of Urology at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Erectile dysfunction (ED) is a red flag in younger men, less than 55 years of ...

This release is available in German. The analyses of an international team of researchers led by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, show that the genetic variation of Denisovans was extremely low, suggesting that although they were present in large parts of Asia, their population was never large for long periods of time. In addition, a comprehensive list documents the genetic changes that set apart modern humans from their archaic relatives. Some of these changes concern genes that are associated with brain function ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Bacteria in hyenas' scent glands may be the key controllers of communication. The results, featured in the current issue of Scientific Reports, show a clear relationship between the diversity of hyena clans and the distinct microbial communities that reside in their scent glands, said Kevin Theis, the paper's lead author and Michigan State University postdoctoral researcher. "A critical component of every animal's behavioral repertoire is an effective communication system," said Theis, who co-authored the study with Kay Holekamp, MSU zoologist. ...

KANSAS CITY, MO—The skin, the blood, and the lining of the gut—adult stem cells replenish them daily. But stem cells really show off their healing powers in planarians, humble flatworms fabled for their ability to rebuild any missing body part. Just how adult stem cells build the right tissues at the right times and places has remained largely unanswered. Now, in a study published in an upcoming issue of Development, researchers at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research describe a novel system that allowed them to track stem cells in the flatworm Schmidtea mediterranea. ...

FINDINGS: The Affordable Care Act will fund more community health centers, making primary care more accessible to the underserved. But this may not necessarily lead to better access to subspecialty care. In a new study, researchers from the David Geffen School of Medicine and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars program at UCLA and colleagues investigated the ways in which community health centers access subspecialty care. They identified six major models and determined which of those six offered the best access: Tin cup ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- By measuring the unique properties of light on the scale of a single atom, researchers from Duke University and Imperial College, London, believe that they have characterized the limits of metal's ability in devices that enhance light. This field is known as plasmonics because scientists are trying to take advantage of plasmons, electrons that have been "excited" by light in a phenomenon that produces electromagnetic field enhancement. The enhancement achieved by metals at the nanoscale is significantly higher than that achievable with any other material. Until ...

"There is not enough radio spectrum to account for everybody's handheld portable device," said Jeffrey Rhoads, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University. The overcrowding results in dropped calls, busy signals, degraded call quality and slower downloads. To counter the problem, industry is trying to build systems that operate with more sharply defined channels so that more of them can fit within the available bandwidth. "To do that you need more precise filters for cell phones and other radio devices, systems that reject noise and allow signals ...

VIDEO: Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have discovered a key genetic switch by which plants control their response to ethylene gas, a natural plant hormone best known for... Click here for more information. LA JOLLA, CA----Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have discovered a key genetic switch by which plants control their response to ethylene gas, a natural plant hormone best known for its ability to ripen fruit, but which, under ...

When an invading bacterium or virus starts rummaging through the contents of a cell nucleus, using proteins like tiny hands to rearrange the host's DNA strands, it can alter the host's biological course. The invading proteins use specific binding, firmly grabbing onto particular sequences of DNA, to bend, kink and twist the DNA strands. The invaders also use non-specific binding to grasp any part of a DNA strand, but these seemingly random bonds are weak. Emory University biophysicists have experimentally demonstrated, for the fist time, how the nonspecific binding of ...

Hot Towers are towering clouds that emit a tremendous amount of latent heat (thus, called "hot"). NASA research indicates that whenever a hot tower is spotted, a tropical cyclone will likely intensify. Less than 14 hours after the TRMM satellite captured an image of Ileana's rainfall and cloud heights, Ileana strengthened into a hurricane on Aug. 29. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite captured a view of Ileana's rainfall rates on Aug. 29 at 2:17 a.m. EDT and saw the heaviest rainfall rates, near 50 mm (2.0 inches) per hour in a band of thunderstorms ...