Amsterdam, NL, July 5, 2012 – Sensory substitution devices (SSDs) use sound or touch to help the visually impaired perceive the visual scene surrounding them. The ideal SSD would assist not only in sensing the environment but also in performing daily activities based on this input. For example, accurately reaching for a coffee cup, or shaking a friend's hand. In a new study, scientists trained blindfolded sighted participants to perform fast and accurate movements using a new SSD, called EyeMusic. Their results are published in the July issue of Restorative Neurology and ...

Critics have pointed to fainting risks and subsequent auto accidents as reasons for concern when using drive-thru influenza immunization clinics, according to Ruth Carrico, PhD, RN, FSHEA, CIC, associate professor, division of infectious diseases, University of Louisville School of Medicine. A review conducted by Carrico and UofL faculty W. Paul McKinney, MD, FACP, Timothy Wiemkan, PhD, MPH, CIC and John Myers, PhD, MSPH found these fears to be unfounded. Since the beginning of an annual drive-thru immunization program initiated 1995 at the University of Louisville Hospital, ...

A gene whose mutation results in malformed faces and skulls as well as mental retardation has been found by scientists. They looked at patients with Potocki-Shaffer syndrome, a rare disorder that can result in significant abnormalities such as a small head and chin and intellectual disability, and found the gene PHF21A was mutated, said Dr. Hyung-Goo Kim, molecular geneticist at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Health Sciences University. The scientists confirmed PHF21A's role by suppressing it in zebrafish, which developed head and brain abnormalities similar ...

BOSTON (July 5, 2012) – Based on the results of a pooled analysis of 11 unrelated randomized clinical trials investigating vitamin D supplementation and fracture risk in more than 31,000 older adults, Bess Dawson-Hughes, MD, director of the Bone Metabolism Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (USDA HNRCA) at Tufts University, says higher doses of Vitamin D may be the most beneficial in reducing bone fractures in this age group. As part of the study, published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dawson-Hughes and colleagues ...

Researchers in India are developing a new technology that will prevent truck drivers and other road users from using their cell phones while driving. The technology based on RFIDs could also be integrated with police traffic monitoring. Abdul Shabeer of the Anna University of Technology in Tamilnadu, India, and colleagues point out that globally around 20% of fatal road accidents with trucks and other heavy vehicles involved the drivers of those vehicles using a cell phone in their hand at the time of the accident. "Dialing and holding a phone while steering can be an ...

Wi-Fi is coming to our cars. Ford Motor Co. has been equipping cars with Wi-Fi transmitters since 2010; according to an Agence France-Presse story last year, the company expects that by 2015, 80 percent of the cars it sells in North America will have Wi-Fi built in. The same article cites a host of other manufacturers worldwide that either offer Wi-Fi in some high-end vehicles or belong to standards organizations that are trying to develop recommendations for automotive Wi-Fi. Two Wi-Fi-equipped cars sitting at a stoplight could exchange information free of charge, but ...

Fluorine is the most reactive chemical element. That is why it is not found in nature in its elemental form, but only in compounds, such as fluorite – that was the accepted scientific doctrine so far. A special fluorite, the "fetid fluorite" or "antozonite", has been the subject of many discussions for nearly 200 years. This mineral emits an intensive odor when crushed. Now, for the first time, scientists from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU) have successfully identified natural elemental fluorine in this fluorspar. ...

Active Region 1515 has now spit out 12 M-class flares since July 3. Early in the morning of July 5, 2012 there was an M6.1 flare. It peaked at 7:44 AM EDT. This caused a moderate – classified as R2 on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's space weather scale – radio blackout that has since subsided. Radio blackouts occur when the X-rays or extreme UV light from a flare disturb the layer of Earth's atmosphere known as the ionosphere, through which radio waves travel. The constant changes in the ionosphere change the paths of the radio waves as they move, ...

Tropical "fireworks" happened in the eastern Pacific Ocean on July 4 as Tropical Depression 04E formed off western Mexico's coast and strengthened into Tropical Storm Daniel. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite captured an image of TD 4E's rainfall and towering clouds as it passed overhead, and saw "hot towers" that suggested it would become a tropical storm. The TRMM satellite got a very good look at recently formed Tropical Depression 4E (TD 4E) at 1040 UTC (6:40 a.m. EDT) on July 4, 2012. The hot towering cumulonimbus clouds called "hot towers" ...

A new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder indicates air pollution in the form of nitrogen compounds emanating from power plants, automobiles and agriculture is changing the alpine vegetation in Rocky Mountain National Park. The emissions of nitrogen compounds to the atmosphere are being carried to remote areas of the park, altering sensitive ecosystems, said CU-Boulder Professor William Bowman, who directs CU-Boulder's Mountain Research Station west of Boulder and who led the study. "The changes are subtle, but important," he said. "They represent a first ...

VIDEO: This movie of the derecho that affected the Eastern United States in late June 2012 was created by imagery from NOAA's GOES -13 satellite. It begins on June 28 at... Click here for more information. As a powerful summertime derecho moved from Illinois to the Mid-Atlantic states on June 29, expanding and bringing destruction with it, NASA and other satellites provided a look at various factors involved in the event, its progression and its aftermath. According to ...

In the July 6 issue of Cell Stem Cell, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine describe how human epidermal progenitor cells and stem cells control transcription factors to avoid premature differentiation, preserving their ability to produce new skin cells throughout life. The findings provide new insights into the role and importance of exosomes and their targeted gene transcripts, and may help point the way to new drugs or therapies for not just skin diseases, but other disorders in which stem and progenitor cell populations are affected. Stem ...

New University of British Columbia research reveals that workers who witness bullying can have a stronger urge to quit than those who experience it firsthand. The findings of the study conducted by the Sauder School of Business at UBC indicate bullying's corrosive effects in the workplace may be more dramatic and costly than suspected. "We tend to assume that people experiencing bullying bear the full brunt. However, our findings show that people across an organization experience a moral indignation when others are bullied that can make them want to leave in protest," ...

A University of Saskatchewan-led international research team has discovered that aerosols from relatively small volcanic eruptions can be boosted into the high atmosphere by weather systems such as monsoons, where they can affect global temperatures. The research appears in the July 6 issue of the journal Science. Adam Bourassa, from the U of S Institute of Space and Atmospheric Studies, led the research. He explains that until now it was thought that a massively energetic eruption was needed to inject aerosols past the troposphere, the turbulent atmospheric layer closest ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Loss of a particular microRNA in chronic lymphocytic leukemia shuts down normal cell metabolism and turns up alternative mechanisms that enable cancer cells to produce the energy and build the molecules they need to proliferate and invade neighboring tissue. The findings come from a new study led by researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James). The study shows that microRNA-125b (miR-125b) by itself regulates many enzymes and other molecules ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Living in the guts of worms are seemingly innocuous bacteria that contribute to their survival. With a flip of a switch, however, these same bacteria transform from harmless microbes into deadly insecticides. In the current issue of Science, Michigan State University researchers led a study that revealed how a bacteria flips a DNA switch to go from an upstanding community member in the gut microbiome to deadly killer in insect blood. Todd Ciche, assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, has seen variants like this emerge sometimes ...

A study led by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found Chinese teenagers have a rate of diabetes nearly four times greater than their counterparts in the United States. The rise in the incidence of diabetes parallels increases in cardiovascular risk, researchers say, and is the result of a Chinese population that is growing increasingly overweight. The study led by Barry Popkin, Ph.D., W.R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of nutrition at UNC's Gillings School of Global Public Health, and Chinese researchers, used data from the China Health ...

A special issue of the journal Botany is set to showcase to the world the multipronged-approach that Canadian researchers are bringing to the study of pollination biology. The journal's July issue features seven articles from NSERC-CANPOLIN researchers, examining topics that range from the effect of flower structure on pollinator activity to the impacts of recent climate change on pollinator ranges. The issue also includes two review papers, one exploring pollen limitation and pollinator diversity, and the other assessing the value of network biology studies in pollinator ...

More of the United States is in moderate drought or worse than at any other time in the 12-year history of the U.S. Drought Monitor, officials from the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln said today. Analysis of the latest drought monitor data revealed that 46.84 percent of the nation's land area is in various stages of drought, up from 42.8 percent a week ago. Previous records were 45.87 percent in drought on Aug. 26, 2003, and 45.64 percent on Sept. 10, 2002. Looking only at the 48 contiguous states, 55.96 percent of the country's ...

It's well known in conventional biology that during the process of mammalian cell division, or mitosis, a mother cell divides equally into two daughter cells. But when it comes to cancer, say UCLA researchers, mother cells may be far more prolific. Bioengineers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science developed a platform to mechanically confine cells, simulating the in vivo three-dimensional environments in which they divide, and found that, upon confinement, cancer cells often split into three or more daughter cells. "We hope that this ...

WASHINGTON – Stick a shovel in the ground and scoop. That's about how deep scientists need to go in order to find evidence for ancient life on Mars, if there is any to be found, a new study suggests. That's within reach of Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover expected to land on the Red Planet next month. The new findings, which suggest optimal depths and locations to probe for organic molecules like those that compose living organisms as we know them, could help the newest Mars rover scout for evidence of life beneath the surface and within rocks. The results ...

July 4, 2012 - Physicists on experiments at the Large Hadron Collider announced today that they have observed a new particle. Whether the particle has the properties of the predicted Higgs boson remains to be seen. Hundreds of scientists and graduate students from American institutions have played important roles in the search for the Higgs at the LHC. More than 1,700 people from U.S. institutions--including 89 American universities and seven U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories--helped design, build and operate the LHC accelerator and its four particle ...

Astronomers report a baffling discovery never seen before: An extraordinary amount of dust around a nearby star has mysteriously disappeared. "It's like the classic magician's trick — now you see it, now you don't," said Carl Melis, a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego and lead author of the research. "Only in this case, we're talking about enough dust to fill an inner solar system, and it really is gone!" "It's as if the rings around Saturn had disappeared," said co-author Benjamin Zuckerman, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy. "This is even more shocking ...

University of Oklahoma high-energy physicists were among the 1,700 U.S. scientists from 89 American universities who collaborated on the international effort in the search for the Higgs boson. Results announced this week from CERN indicate discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson. Professors Patrick Skubic, Mike Strauss, Brad Abbott and Phillip Gutierrez, OU College of Arts and Sciences, Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, work on projects at both Fermilab and CERN. The group concurs the discovery of the Higgs is one of the most important ...

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Scientists at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine have used injections of antibodies to rapidly reverse the onset of Type I diabetes in mice genetically bred to develop the disease. Moreover, just two injections maintained disease remission indefinitely without harming the immune system. The findings, published online ahead of print (June 29, 2012) in the journal Diabetes, suggest for the first time that using a short course of immunotherapy may someday be of value for reversing the onset of Type I diabetes in recently diagnosed people. ...