Volcanic eruptions vary from common, small eruptions that have little impact on humans and the environment to rare, large-to-gigantic eruptions so massive they can threaten civilizations. While scientists don't yet fully understand the mechanisms that control whether an eruption is large or small, they do know that eruptions are driven by the rapid expansion of bubbles formed from water and other volatile substances trapped in molten rock as it rises beneath a volcano. The mechanism is much the same as that involved in shaking a bottle of a carbonated drink and then ...

Tampa, FL (Oct. 16, 2012) -- A landmark paper identifying genetic signatures that predict which patients will respond to a life-saving drug for treating congestive heart failure has been published by a research team co-led by Stephen B. Liggett, MD, of the University of South Florida. The study, drawing upon a randomized placebo-controlled trial for the beta blocker bucindolol, apprears this month in the online international journal PLoS ONE. In addition to Dr. Liggett, whose laboratory discovered and characterized the two genetic variations, Christopher O'Connor, ...

This press release is available in German. To solve the acute, global problem of securing food resources for a continuously growing population, we must work constantly to increase the sustainability and effectiveness of modern agricultural techniques. These efforts depend on new insights from plant ecology, particularly from work on native plants that grow in the primordial agricultural niche. Based on field studies on wild tobacco plants in the Great Basin Desert, Utah, USA, researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, demonstrated that ...

An extremely brief reversal of the geomagnetic field, climate variability and a super volcano 41,000 years ago, a complete and rapid reversal of the geomagnetic field occured. Magnetic studies of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences on sediment cores from the Black Sea show that during this period, during the last ice age, a compass at the Black Sea would have pointed to the south instead of north. Moreover, data obtained by the research team formed around GFZ researchers Dr. Norbert Nowaczyk and Prof. Helge Arz, together with additional data from other studies ...

People in creative professions are treated more often for mental illness than the general population, there being a particularly salient connection between writing and schizophrenia. This according to researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, whose large-scale registry study is the most comprehensive ever in its field. Last year, the team showed that artists and scientists were more common amongst families where bipolar disorder and schizophrenia is present, compared to the population at large. They subsequently expanded their study to many more psychiatric diagnoses ...

While studying Parkinson's disease, an international research group made a discovery which can improve industrial protein synthesis for therapeutic use. They managed to understand a novel function of non-protein coding RNA: the protein synthesis activity of coding genes can be enhanced by the activity of the non-coding one called "antisense." To synthesize proteins, the DNA needs RNA molecules serving as short "transcriptions" of the genetic information. The set of all these RNA molecules is called "transcriptome." In the human transcriptome, along with around 25 thousand ...

Evolution has not only controlled human development over millions of years, it also has an impact on modern man. This is one of the conclusions of a study of Argentinian villagers in the Andes, where the water contains high levels of arsenic. A gene variant that produces efficient and less toxic metabolism of arsenic in the body was much more common among the villagers than among other indigenous groups in South or Central America. The study was a collaborative effort by Karin Broberg from Lund University and Carina Schlebusch and Mattias Jakobsson from Uppsala University ...

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have studied a giant filament of dark matter in 3D for the first time. Extending 60 million light-years from one of the most massive galaxy clusters known, the filament is part of the cosmic web that constitutes the large-scale structure of the Universe, and is a leftover of the very first moments after the Big Bang. If the high mass measured for the filament is representative of the rest of the Universe, then these structures may contain more than half of all the mass in the Universe. The theory of the Big Bang predicts ...

Dusty plasmas can be found in many places both in space and in the laboratory. Due to their special properties, dust acoustic waves can propagate inside these plasmas like sound waves in air, and can be studied with the naked eye or with standard video cameras. The RUB physicists Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Padma Kant Shukla and Dr. Bengt Eliasson from the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy have published a model with which they describe how large amplitude dust acoustic waves in dusty plasmas behave. The researchers report their new findings in the journal Physical Review E. Different ...

OTTAWA, October 16, 2012 – Few drugs are available to treat muscle injury, muscle wasting and genetic disorders causing muscle degeneration, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy. A compelling discovery that may change this was made recently by a research group led by Dr. Robert Korneluk, distinguished professor at University of Ottawa's Faculty of Medicine and founder of the CHEO Research Institute's Apoptosis Research Centre, was reported today in Science Signaling. "We know of five pharmaceutical companies pursuing phase one clinical trials with specific drugs to treat ...

Research from North Carolina State University on flower production and disease resistance in watermelon varieties should help bolster seedless watermelon harvests for farmers. Seedless watermelons are more popular than seeded watermelons, making them a more profitable crop for farmers. But the flowers of seedless watermelon plants must be fertilized with pollen from the male flowers of seeded watermelon plants, because seedless plants do not produce genetically viable pollen. This is a problem, because seeded watermelon plants take up space, nutrients and water that ...

This press release is available in German. Orangutans are the only large apes in Asia and mainly live in trees. Today, the population only includes two species: While the Borneo orangutan populates large sections of the Southeast Asian island of Borneo, nowadays the Sumatran orangutan is only found at the northern tip of the island of Sumatra. With a current population of only around 6,600 Sumatra orangutans, a figure which is dropping rapidly and constantly, this species is on the Red List of Threatened Species. When large areas of rainforest were cleared in Sumatra ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (October 16, 2012) – Electrical stimulation using extradural electrodes—placed underneath the skull but not implanted in the brain—is a safe approach with meaningful benefits for patients with Parkinson's disease, reports the October issue of Neurosurgery, official journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part ofWolters Kluwer Health. The technique, called extradural motor cortex stimulation (EMCS), may provide a less-invasive alternative to electrical deep brain stimulation (DBS) ...

PHILADELPHIA—Men who had high levels of the activated Stat5 protein in their prostate cancer after a radical prostatectomy were more likely to have a recurrence or die from the disease compared to men who had little to no presence of the growth protein, according to a recent study published in Human Pathology by Jefferson's Kimmel Cancer Center researchers. This suggests, Stat5, a protein that when activated signals cancer cells to grow and survive, could be an ideal biomarker to help guide patients and physicians for future treatment. The research team, led by ...

Washington, DC (October 16, 2012) Viewer impressions of political candidates are heavily weighted to the content of their speech rather than the body language, a new study published in the Journal of Communication has found. The research, conducted by a trio of German scholars, presents a shift from past research showing that nonverbal communication plays a larger role than verbal in presidential debates. Marcus Maurer (Friedrich-Schiller-Universitaet), Friederike Nagel (Johannes Gutenberg-Universitaet), and CarstenReinemann (Ludwig Maxillians-Universitaet) conducted ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- People 70 and older who eat food high in carbohydrates have nearly four times the risk of developing mild cognitive impairment, and the danger also rises with a diet heavy in sugar, Mayo Clinic researchers have found. Those who consume a lot of protein and fat relative to carbohydrates are less likely to become cognitively impaired, the study found. The findings are published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. The research highlights the importance of a well-rounded diet, says lead author Rosebud Roberts, M.B., Ch.B., a Mayo Clinic epidemiologist. "We ...

DALLAS – Oct. 15, 2012 – A study by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers finds that a starvation hormone markedly extends life span in mice without the need for calorie restriction. "Restricting food intake has been shown to extend lifespan in several different kinds of animals. In our study, we found transgenic mice that produced more of the hormone fibroblast growth factor-21 (FGF21) got the benefits of dieting without having to limit their food intake. Male mice that overproduced the hormone had about a 30 percent increase in average life span and female mice ...

ANN ARBOR—American presidential campaigns provide a unique window into our society, according to a University of Michigan anthropologist. "It says a lot about our culture that we pay so much attention to the clothing, gestures and hair styles of presidential candidates and to their performances in highly theatrical situations, like debates," said Michael Lempert, a linguistic anthropologist at the U-M. Lempert is the co-author with University of Chicago anthropologist Michael Silverstein of "Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency," just ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — A few minutes of exercise can help children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder perform better academically, according to a new study led by a Michigan State University researcher. The study, published in the current issue of the Journal of Pediatrics, shows for the first time that kids with ADHD can better drown out distractions and focus on a task after a single bout of exercise. Scientists say such "inhibitory control" is the main challenge faced by people with the disorder. "This provides some very early evidence that exercise might ...

NEW ORLEANS — Trauma in infancy and childhood shapes the brain, learning, and behavior, and fuels changes that can last a lifetime, according to new human and animal research released today. The studies delve into the effects of early physical abuse, socioeconomic status (SES), and maternal treatment. Documenting the impact of early trauma on brain circuitry and volume, the activation of genes, and working memory, researchers suggest it increases the risk of mental disorders, as well as heart disease and stress-related conditions in adulthood. The findings were presented ...

PITTSBURGH—Crude oil extraction could be improved significantly and accessible domestic oil reserves could be expanded with an economical CO2 thickener being developed by University of Pittsburgh engineers, thanks to a $1.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. Current oil-extraction methods across the United States involve oil being "pushed" from underground layers of porous sandstone or limestone reservoirs using a first-water-then-CO2 method known as the water-alternating-gas method. CO2—which is obtained from natural CO2 reservoirs and pipelined to oil ...

A computerized checklist system designed to help physicians identify and use the best methods of preventing potentially deadly blood clots in hospitalized trauma patients dramatically reduced the number of these dangerous venous thromboembolisms (VTEs), new Johns Hopkins research suggests. When a doctor enters medical orders for such patients, the automated checklist recommends evidence-based best treatments for each patient's needs, usually the regular administration of low-dose blood thinners or the use of compression devices to keep blood flowing in the legs. The researchers ...

Neuroscientists from New York University and the University of California, Irvine have isolated the "when" and "where" of molecular activity that occurs in the formation of short-, intermediate-, and long-term memories. Their findings, which appear in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer new insights into the molecular architecture of memory formation and, with it, a better roadmap for developing therapeutic interventions for related afflictions. "Our findings provide a deeper understanding of how memories are created," explained the ...

CHICAGO – Men who were diagnosed as children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) appeared to have significantly worse educational, occupational, economic and social outcomes in a 33-year, follow-up study that compared them with men without childhood ADHD, according to a report published Online First by Archives of General Psychiatry, a JAMA Network publication. ADHD has an estimated worldwide prevalence of 5 percent, so the long-term outcome of children with ADHD is a major concern, according to the study background. Rachel G. Klein, Ph.D., of the ...

CHICAGO – Patients who undergo bariatric weight loss surgery may be at increased risk for substance use (drug use, alcohol use and cigarette smoking) following surgery, particularly among patients who undergo laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery who appear to be at increased risk for alcohol use following surgery, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Surgery, a JAMA Network publication. "Studies have shown that drugs, alcohol, and food trigger similar responses in the brain and that bariatric surgery candidates whose condition has been ...