Flooding along the Missouri River continues as shown in recent Landsat satellite images of the Nebraska and Iowa border. Heavy rains and snowmelt have caused the river to remain above flood stage for an extended period. A Landsat 5 image of the area from May 5, 2011 shows normal flow. In contrast, a Landsat 7 image from July 17 depicts flood conditions in the same location. A national overview map of streamflow provided by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) WaterWatch graphically portrays the immense geographic extent of flooding in the Missouri River basin. Monitoring ...

In the fight to improve global health, alleviate hunger, raise living standards and empower women in the developing world, chickens have an important role to play. Jagdev Sharma, a researcher at the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute has been investigating the advantages of a more productive species of chicken for villagers in rural Uganda. He reports his findings this week at the American Veterinary Medical Association Meeting in Saint Louis, Missouri. The star of this developing story is a type of chicken ...

Scientists of the CDF collaboration at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced the observation of a new particle, the neutral Xi-sub-b. This particle contains three quarks: a strange quark, an up quark and a bottom quark (s-u-b). While its existence was predicted by the Standard Model, the observation of the neutral Xi-sub-b is significant because it strengthens our understanding of how quarks form matter. Fermilab physicist Pat Lukens, a member of the CDF collaboration, presented the discovery at Fermilab on Wednesday, July 20. The ...

The GOES-13 satellite captured a triple-header in the tropics today when it captured three tropical cyclones in one image in the Northern Hemisphere. A visible image taken from the GOES-13 satellite on July 20 at 14:45 UTC (10:45 a.m. EDT) and shows a consolidating low pressure area called System 99L in the eastern North Atlantic Ocean, Tropical Storm Bret several hundred miles east of South Carolina, and a large Hurricane Dora off the west coast of Mexico. The image was created by the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. System ...

Birds use their bills largely to forage and eat, and these behaviors strongly influence the shape and size of a bird's bill. But the bill can play an important role in regulating the bird's body temperature by acting as a radiator for excess heat. A team of scientists have found that because of this, high summer temperatures have been a strong influence in determining bill size in some birds, particularly species of sparrows that favor salt marshes. The team's findings are published in the scientific journal Ecography, July 20. Scientists at the Smithsonian Migratory ...

Take a second look at your iced or steaming tea. Guided by scientific experts, three New York City high school students using tabletop DNA technologies found several herbal brews and a few brands of tea contain ingredients unlisted on the manufacturers' package. The teen sleuths also demonstrated new-to-science genetic variation between broad-leaf teas from exported from India versus small-leaf teas exported from China. Guided by DNA "barcoding" experts at The Rockefeller University, an ethno-botanist at Tufts University and a molecular botany expert at The New York ...

Two-thirds of people with severe and otherwise untreatable epilepsy were completely cured of their frequent seizures after undergoing neurosurgery at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, according to a new study that examined 143 of these patients two years after their operations. The new study not only shows the promise of this type of neurosurgery at treating severe epilepsy, it also highlights how research into brain imaging may help to further improve results for people who have such operations. "Surgery can be a powerful way to stop this ...

July 20, 2011 – BGI (previously known as the Beijing Genomics Institute), the largest genomics organization in the world, and Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, together published the whole sequence variation map of rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) in Genome Biology on July 6th, 2011 (http://genomebiology.com/2011/12/7/R63). The study provides available resources for evolutionary and biomedical research. Rhesus macaque, also called the Rhesus monkey, is one of the best known species of old world monkeys. Human and Rhesus macaque share a most recent ...

LOS ANGELES (July 20, 2011) –Neurologist Michele Tagliati, MD, director of the Movement Disorders Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, served on an elite international task force commissioned by the Movement Disorder Society to provide insights and guidance on deep brain stimulation for dystonia, an uncommon condition that causes sustained, sometimes crippling muscle contractions. The resulting articles, describing the data reviewed and outlining the group's conclusions, recommendations and points to be addressed in future research, published online last month in ...

A recent study into the interactions between aminoglycoside antibiotics and their target site in bacteria used computer simulations to elucidate this mechanism and thereby suggest drug modifications. In the article, which will be published on July 21st in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology, researchers from University of Warsaw, Poland, and University of California San Diego, USA, describe their study of the physical basis of one bacterial resistance mechanism - mutations of the antibiotic target site, namely RNA of the bacterial ribosome. They performed ...

Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have uncovered the evolutionary mechanisms that have caused increases or decreases in the numbers of chromosomes in a group of yeast species during the last 100-150 million years. The study, to be published on July 21st in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics, offers an unprecedented view of chromosome complement (chromosome number) changes in a large group of related species. A few specific cases of chromosome number changes have been studied in plants and animals, for example the fusion of two great ape chromosomes that gave ...

HOUSTON -- (July 21, 2011) -- Over millennia, mice have thrived despite humanity's efforts to keep them at bay. A Rice University scientist argues some mice have found two ways to achieve a single goal -- resistance to common poison. New research by Michael Kohn and colleagues, reported today in the online journal Current Biology, analyzes a genetic mutation that has given the ordinary European house mouse this extraordinary ability. The gene in question, vkorc1, is present in all mammals and manages vitamin K. A mutation to vkorc1 makes mice resistant to warfarin, ...

A new study reveals that just as different soldiers in the field have different jobs, subsets of a type of immune cell that polices the barriers of the body can promote unique and opposite immune responses against the same type of infection. The research, published online on July 21st by Cell Press in the journal Immunity, enhances our understanding of the early stages of the immune response and may have important implications for vaccinations and treatment of autoimmune diseases. Dendritic cells serve as sentries of the immune system and are stationed at the body's ...

For the conservation of species, hostile territory might sometimes have its advantages. That's according to a study of pollen flow among trees found only in remnant patches of native Chilean forest. The data show that the pollinators those rare trees rely on can be waylaid by the abundance of resources found in agricultural lands. As a result, trees growing in native forest patches are more likely to mate successfully when separated by resource-poor pine plantations than by those more attractive farmlands. The finding reported in the July 21st Current Biology, a Cell ...

Since the 1950s, people have tried to limit the numbers of mice and rats using a poison known as warfarin. But, over the course of evolution, those pesky rodents have found a way to make a comeback, resisting that chemical via changes to a gene involved in vitamin K recycling and blood clotting. Now, researchers reporting online on July 21 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, show that European mice have in some cases acquired that resistance gene in a rather unorthodox way: they got it secondhand from an Algerian mouse. "House mice not only have become resistant ...

Chemical reactions happen all of the time: some things burn or rust, others react to light exposure--even batteries use chemical reactions to supply electricity. One of the big challenges chemists continually face is finding new ways to control these reactions or create conditions that promote desirable reactions and limit undesirable ones. Recently, researchers at New York University demonstrated an ability to make new materials with empty space on the inside, which could potentially control desired and unwanted chemical reactions. Mike Ward, of NYU's Department ...

Washington, D.C.—Jewelers abhor diamond impurities, but they are a bonanza for scientists. Safely encased in the super-hard diamond, impurities are unaltered, ancient minerals that can tell the story of Earth's distant past. Researchers analyzed data from the literature of over 4,000 of these mineral inclusions to find that continents started the cycle of breaking apart, drifting, and colliding about 3 billion years ago. The research, published in the July 22, 2011, issue of Science, pinpoints when this so-called Wilson cycle began. Lead author Steven Shirey at the ...

Chemists have created a molecular polyhedron, a ground-breaking assembly that has the potential to impact a range of industrial and consumer products, including magnetic and optical materials. The work, reported in the latest issue of the journal Science, was conducted by researchers at New York University's Department of Chemistry and its Molecular Design Institute and the University of Milan's Department of Materials Science. Researchers have sought to coerce molecules to form regular polyhedra—three-dimensional objects in which each side, or face, is a polygon—but ...

UPTON, NY - A team of scientists studying the parent compound of a cuprate (copper-oxide) superconductor has discovered a link between two different states, or phases, of that matter - and written a mathematical theory to describe the relationship. This work, appearing in the July 22, 2011, issue of Science, will help scientists predict the material's behavior under varying conditions, and may help explain how it's transformed into a superconductor able to carry current with no energy loss. "The ultimate goal is to use what we learn to design copper-oxide materials with ...

A new study by Harvard Medical School researchers published today [July 21] in the Annals of Emergency Medicine finds that access to outpatient psychiatric care in the greater Boston area is severely limited, even for people with reputedly excellent private health insurance. Given that the federal health law is modeled after the Massachusetts health reform, the findings have national implications, the researchers say. Study personnel posed as patients insured by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts PPO, the largest insurer in Massachusetts. They called every Blue Cross-contracted ...

Washington, DC – A Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) scientist who has previously discovered antimicrobial compounds in the skin of frogs and in the dogfish shark has now turned his attention to the remarkable wound healing abilities of dolphins. A dolphin's ability to heal quickly from a shark bite with apparent indifference to pain, resistance to infection, hemorrhage protection, and near-restoration of normal body contour might provide insights for the care of human injuries, says Michael Zasloff, M.D., Ph.D. For a "Letter" published today in the Journal ...

Obese people with high levels of abdominal fat and liver fat may face increased risks for heart disease and other serious health problems, according to research published in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology: Journal of the American Heart Association. Obesity is commonly associated with heart disease risk and problems called cardiometabolic abnormalities, including insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, cholesterol disorders, hypertension and gout. Researchers in Sweden and Finland found that obese people at the highest risk have increased secretion of ...

The same artery-clogging process (atherosclerosis) that causes heart disease can also result in age-related vascular cognitive impairments (VCI), according to a new American Heart Association/American Stroke Association scientific statement published online in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association. Cognitive impairment, also known as dementia, includes difficulty with thinking, reasoning and memory, and can be caused by vascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, a combination of both and other causes. Atherosclerosis is a build- up of plaque in the arteries ...

A positive outlook on life might lower your risk of having a stroke, according to new research reported in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association. In an observational study, a nationally representative group of 6,044 adults over age 50 rated their optimism levels on a 16-point scale. Each point increase in optimism corresponded to a 9 percent decrease in acute stroke risk over a two-year follow-up period. "Our work suggests that people who expect the best things in life actively take steps to promote health," said Eric Kim, study lead author and a clinical ...

In 2007, nearly two million children in the United States had at least one parent serving in the military. Military families and children, in particular, suffer from mental health problems related to long deployments. A new study from researchers at the University of Washington (UW) concludes that parental military deployment is associated with impaired well-being among adolescents, especially adolescent boys. The study, "Adolescent well-being in Washington state military families," was published online in the American Journal of Public Health. Lead author Sarah ...