BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A new Arctic study in the journal Science is helping to unravel an important mystery surrounding climate change: How quickly glaciers can melt and grow in response to shifts in temperature. According to the new research, glaciers on Canada's Baffin Island expanded rapidly during a brief cold snap about 8,200 years ago. The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence showing that ice sheets reacted rapidly in the past to cooling or warming, raising concerns that they could do so again as the Earth heats up. "One of the questions scientists have been ...

Boston, Sept. 13, 2012-- A growing body of research shows that children who suffer severe neglect and social isolation have cognitive and social impairments as adults. A study from Boston Children's Hospital shows, for the first time, how these functional impairments arise: Social isolation during early life prevents the cells that make up the brain's white matter from maturing and producing the right amount of myelin, the fatty "insulation" on nerve fibers that helps them transmit long-distance messages within the brain. The study also identifies a molecular pathway ...

A transient ischemic attack, TIA or a "mini stroke," can lead to serious disability, but is frequently deemed by doctors too mild to treat, according to a study in the American Heart Association journal Stroke. "Our study shows that TIA and minor stroke patients are at significant risk of disability and need early assessment and treatment," said Shelagh Coutts, M.D., lead author of the study at Foothills Hospital in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. "We should be imaging patients earlier and be more aggressive in treating patients with thrombolysis if we can see a blockage no ...

VIDEO: This shows southern resident killer whales in the waters around the San Juan Islands, USA and British Columbia. Both male and female killer whales will remain with their mothers throughout... Click here for more information. Scientists have found the answer to why female killer whales have the longest menopause of any non-human species - to care for their adult sons. Led by the Universities of Exeter and York and published in the journal Science (14 September 2012) ...

An ultra-low cost scanner that can be plugged into any computer or laptop to reveal vital information about the unborn child has been developed by engineers at Newcastle University, UK. The hand-held USB device – which is roughly the size of a computer mouse – works in a similar way to existing ultrasound scanners, using pulses of high frequency sound to build up a picture of the unborn child on the computer screen. However, unlike the technology used in most hospitals across the UK costing anywhere from £20,000-£100,000, the scanner created by Jeff Neasham and Research ...

MADISON -- Stress has long been pegged as the enemy of attention, disrupting focus and doing substantial damage to working memory — the short-term juggling of information that allows us to do all the little things that make us productive. By watching individual neurons at work, a group of psychologists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has revealed just how stress can addle the mind, as well as how neurons in the brain's prefrontal cortex help "remember" information in the first place. Working memory is short-term and flexible, allowing the brain to hold a large ...

LA JOLLA, CA, September 13, 2012--Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have determined the structure of a critical protein from the Marburg virus, a close cousin of Ebola virus. These viruses cause similar diseases and are some of the deadliest pathogens on the planet, each killing up to 90 percent of those infected. Described in the September 13, 2012 publication of the journal PLoS Pathogens, the new research reveals how a key protein component of the Marburg virus, called VP35, blocks the human immune system, allowing the virus to grow unchecked. The structure ...

Researchers have taken a key step towards recovering specific brain functions in sufferers of brain disease and injuries by successfully restoring the decision-making processes in monkeys. By placing a neural device onto the front part of the monkeys' brains, the researchers, from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre, University of Kentucky and University of Southern California, were able to recover, and even improve, the monkeys' ability to make decisions when their normal cognitive functioning was disrupted. The study, which has been published today, 14 September, in ...

New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Cell Communication and Signaling describes a large set of interactions (interactome) which maps the range of phosphotyrosine (pTyr)-dependent interactions with SH2 domains underlying insulin (Ins), insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) and fibroblast growth factor (FGF) signaling pathways. In the control of cell signaling pathways SH2 domains can be thought of as a master connector and tyrosine kinases the switch. SH2 domains interact with phosphorylated tyrosine containing peptides on receptors and other ...

Severe UK winters, like the 'big freeze' of 2009/10, can now be better forecast months in advance using the Met Office's latest model, new research suggests. A new study, published today, Friday 14 September, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, compares the latest seasonal forecast system to the one previously used and shows that it can better warn the UK of extreme winter weather conditions. Dubbed the 'high-top' system, it is different from the previous system as it takes into account phenomenon known as sudden stratospheric warmings (SSWs), ...

In a study published today in The American Naturalist, a group of scientists led by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) have used a technique developed to study human consumer choices to investigate what influences a baboon's foraging decisions. The technique, known as discrete choice modelling, has rarely been used before in animal behaviour research. It showed how baboons not only consider many social and non-social factors when making foraging decisions, but also how they change these factors depending on their habitat and their own social traits. Over a six month ...

Standards of care in children's intensive care units come under scrutiny in a new audit report published today by the University of Leeds and the University of Leicester. The report, commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership and carried out by the Paediatric Intensive Care Audit Network (PICANet) showed that death rates in children's intensive care units are low and continue to fall. However, there continues to be a higher risk of mortality for children of south Asian origin observed in earlier years. This national audit also found that only 5 children's ...

Montreal, September 13, 2012 – Share and share alike is a concept we all learn as youngsters. Of course, when it comes to something as personal – and expensive – as a car, sharing's not so easy. Due to rising fuel costs hitting hard, increased concerns about the environment and overcrowded cities, car-sharing services like Communauto are becoming a popular way to get around. Can they be more popular still? Researchers from the Concordia Institute of Information Systems Engineering can answer this question with a resounding "yes." They have piloted a computer model that ...

Every year, nervous high school juniors and seniors, clutching #2 pencils and armed with hours of test preparation, sit down and take the SAT. At their most basic, these tests focus on verbal, math, and writing ability, and performance on these tests has been linked to subsequent academic performance. As a result, college admissions teams use SAT scores along with other information, such as high school grades, in choosing their incoming freshman classes. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the SAT has been the subject of much scrutiny. Some researchers have asserted ...

CHICAGO --- More can be done to properly manage the care of American children with food allergies, especially when it comes to diagnostic testing and recognizing non-visual symptoms of severe allergic reactions, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study. "Every child with a food allergy should be diagnosed by a physician, have access to life-saving medication such as an epinephrine autoinjector and receive confirmation of the disease through diagnostic testing," said lead author Ruchi Gupta, M.D., an associate professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg ...

Toronto – Tax collectors and insurance agencies trying to boost honest reporting could improve compliance simply by asking people to sign their forms at the beginning instead of at the end. That's because attesting to the truthfulness of the information before a form is filled out tends to activate people's moral sense, making it harder for them to fudge their numbers after, says a new paper. "Based on our previous research we knew that an honour code is useful, but we were wondering how much the location mattered," says Nina Mazar, an assistant professor of marketing ...

Tropical Storm Sanba exploded in intensity between Sept. 12 and 13, becoming a major Category 4 Typhoon on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. NASA's Aqua satellite captured infrared data that showed a large area of powerful thunderstorms around the center of circulation, dropping heavy rain over the western North Pacific Ocean. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Super Typhoon Sanba on Sept. 13 at 0447 UTC (12:47 a.m. EDT). The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured an infrared image of Sanba and found an eye about 20 nautical miles (23 miles/37 km) wide, surrounded ...

AMHERST, Mass. – In the fight against cancer, knowing the enemy's exact identity is crucial for diagnosis and treatment, especially in metastatic cancers, those that spread between organs and tissues. Now chemists led by Vincent Rotello at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a rapid, sensitive way to detect microscopic levels of many different metastatic cell types in living tissue. Findings appear in the current issue of the journal ACS Nano. In a pre-clinical non-small-cell lung cancer metastasis model in mice developed by Frank Jirik and colleagues ...

A new study finds that smart growth approaches to urban planning could substantially reduce the number of miles that residents drive in a year. The research was published this week in The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy. Smart growth focuses on the development of compact, walkable cities with houses and jobs located close together. By shortening residents' commutes, this form of urban design aims to cut transportation-related energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. California is already pursuing smart growth in order to meet emissions reductions set by the ...

Tropical Storm Nadine is struggling against wind shear and some dry air. Infrared satellite imagery from NASA showed that Nadine's most powerful thunderstorms were being pushed east of the center. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Nadine early on Sept. 13 and saw several factors that indicated the storm was still struggling to achieve hurricane status. Infrared data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) that flies aboard Aqua found the strongest thunderstorms with very cold cloud temperatures (colder than -63F/-52C) were being pushed east of Nadine's ...

Gardeners and landscapers may want to rethink their fall tree plantings. Warming temperatures have already made the U.S. Department of Agriculture's new cold-weather planting guidelines obsolete, according to Dr. Nir Krakauer, assistant professor of civil engineering in The City College of New York's Grove School of Engineering. Professor Krakauer developed a new method to map cold-weather zones in the United States that takes rapidly rising temperatures into account. Analyzing recent weather data, he overhauled the Department of Agriculture's latest plant zone map released ...

Researchers have developed new software that can rapidly calculate the carbon footprints of thousands of products simultaneously, a process that up to now has been time consuming and expensive. The methodology should help companies to accurately label products, and to design ways to reduce their environmental impacts, said Christoph Meinrenken, the project's leader and associate research scientist at Columbia University's Earth Institute and Columbia Engineering. A new study, published online in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, describes the methodology. The project ...

In a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Sept. 12, 2012, the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) unveiled a new laboratory designed to demonstrate that a typical-looking suburban home for a family of four can generate as much energy as it uses in a year. Following an initial year-long experiment, the facility will be used to improve test methods for energy-efficient technologies and develop cost-effective design standards for energy-efficient homes that could reduce overall energy consumption and harmful pollution, and save families money ...

Nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego have developed a novel technology that can fabricate, in mere seconds, microscale three dimensional (3D) structures out of soft, biocompatible hydrogels. Near term, the technology could lead to better systems for growing and studying cells, including stem cells, in the laboratory. Long-term, the goal is to be able to print biological tissues for regenerative medicine. For example, in the future, doctors may repair the damage caused by heart attack by replacing it with tissue that rolled off of a printer. Reported ...

Children of immigrants are outperforming children whose family trees have deeper roots in the United States, learning more in school and then making smoother transitions into adulthood, according to sociologists at The Johns Hopkins University. Researchers Lingxin Hao and Han S. Woo tracked nearly 11,000 children from as young as age 13 into their early 30s, coming from families with diverse backgrounds. When comparing children with similar socioeconomic status and school conditions, Hao and Woo found that the best students, and later the most successful young adults, ...