BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL, February, 18 2011– Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers have developed a unique technology that stabilizes an otherwise unstable form of calcium carbonate. This mineral form provides significantly higher biological absorption and retention rates than other sources presently used as dietary calcium supplements. Calcium is considered to be one of the most important minerals in the human body for maintaining bone mass and coronary health. Insufficient dietary calcium intake can induce osteoporosis and poor blood-clotting. "Since most ...

SANTA CRUZ, CA. -- Storm chasers have become bat watchers. A scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, working with meteorologists at the University of Oklahoma, is using mobile storm-chasing radars to follow swarms of bats as they emerge from their caves each night to forage on insects. The radar images of bats appear as distinct "blooms" of radar reflectivity and give scientists clues to their behavior, said Winifred F. Frick, a post doctoral researcher in environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz. Frick, a bat expert, is working with professor Thomas ...

University of Oklahoma researchers are part of a growing cross-disciplinary collaboration that seeks to tap the potential of radar technologies to advance aeroecology—a field that integrates atmospheric science, earth science, geography, ecology, computer science, computational biology and engineering. According to Phillip Chilson, professor in the OU School of Meteorology and Atmospheric Radar Research Center, radar technologies have the potential for detecting and monitoring organisms in the aerosphere, which requires a greater understanding of biology within the radar ...

For Northwestern University's Karen Smilowitz, the term "industrial engineering" is a bit of a misnomer. It evokes the image of the engineer in a factory with a stopwatch in hand, making sure production is as efficient as possible. Surely some industrial engineers still do that. But these days, industrial engineering has grown beyond the factory and into the world of business. Others have taken it one step further -- into nonprofits. Smilowitz has co-organized a symposium, "Doing Good with Good OR: Applying Operations Research for Societal Impact," to highlight such ...

Biodiversity loss is a growing concern. Protected areas are a instrument to counteract this trend. The UN's Convention on Biological Diversity conference of the parties in Nagoya (October 2010) set stringent new targets to be reached by 2020. At least 17% of terrestrial and inland water and 10% of coastal and marine areas have to be protected. But are protected areas really protected? Are they in the right place? Where should new protected areas be located? The European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), in collaboration with other partners, is helping decision-makers ...

Nanotechnology offers a range of benefits over traditional materials and enables the development of innovative applications and products. However, there are often concerns about the safety aspects and to what extent these have been investigated. High-quality measurements are the basis for reliable safety assessments, process improvement, quality control and the development of new nanotechnology applications. Until now, however, no certified benchmarks incorporating industrial nanoparticles were available. Some synthetic materials were available, but they were not fully ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Last July, President Obama adopted the recommendations of a White House task force charged with devising a policy to better manage the nation's oceans, coastlines and the Great Lakes. The National Ocean Council is now charged with developing a plan to put the ideas into practice. Two scientists at Brown University will speak about the ecological and social facets of marine management this month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. Heather Leslie Sharpe Assistant Professor ...

VIDEO: In 2006 a teenager played Space Invaders with the help of an electrocorticography (ECoG) grid that used signals from the area of his motor cortex that normally controlled his right... Click here for more information. Daniel Moran has dedicated his career to developing the best brain-computer interface, or BCI, he possibly can. His motivation is simple but compelling. "My sophomore year in high school," Moran says, "a good friend and I were on the varsity baseball team. ...

Once regarded as the stuff of science fiction, antimatter—the mirror image of the ordinary matter in our observable universe—is now the focus of laboratory studies around the world. While physicists routinely produce antimatter with radioisotopes and particle colliders, cooling these antiparticles and containing them for any length of time is another story. Once antimatter comes into contact with ordinary matter it "annihilates"—or disappears in a flash of gamma radiation. Clifford Surko, a professor of physics at UC San Diego who is constructing what he hopes will ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Understanding and managing how humans and nature sustainably coexist is now so sweeping and lightning fast that it's spawned a concept to be unveiled at a major scientific conference today. Meet "telecoupling." Joining its popular cousins telecommuting and television, telecoupling is the way Jack Liu, director of the Human-Nature Lab/Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability at Michigan State University, is describing how distance is shrinking and connections are strengthening between nature and humans. The "Telecoupling of Human and Natural ...

Once likened to a confusing tower of Babel, speaking more than one language can actually bolster brain function by serving as a mental gymnasium, according to researchers. Recent research indicates that bilingual speakers can outperform monolinguals--people who speak only one language--in certain mental abilities, such as editing out irrelevant information and focusing on important information, said Judith Kroll, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Penn State. These skills make bilinguals better at prioritizing tasks and working on multiple projects at one time. "We ...

BOSTON—A team of research biologists headed by Thomas H. Kunz, professor of biology and director of the Center of Ecology and Conservation Biology at Boston University, will conduct a symposium on the emerging scientific discipline of aeroecology at this year's American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting. Aeroecology is a new discipline whose unifying concept is a focus on the aerosphere and the myriad organisms that inhabit and depend on this aerial environment for their existence. The symposium is scheduled from 3:00-4:30 PM, Saturday, February ...

A shift in the global research landscape will reposition the United States as a major partner, but not the dominant leader, in science and technology research in the coming decade, according to a Penn State researcher. However, the U.S. could benefit from this research shift if it adopts a policy of knowledge sharing with the growing global community of researchers. "What is emerging is a global science system in which the U.S. will be one player among many," said Caroline Wagner, associate professor of international affairs, who presented her findings today (Feb. 18) ...

Fierce debate over teaching evolution in public schools has raged across the United States since the epic courtroom battle between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow during the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial (State of Tennessee v. John Scopes). Science education researchers are now turning their attention to the Islamic world to determine whether teaching of evolution in schools spawns similar social controversy and what that means for the future of scientific thought across the globe. Jason Wiles, assistant professor of biology in Syracuse University's College of ...

A central challenge facing the planet is how to preserve forests while providing enough food to feed the world's population. It's really a "bad news/good news" story, says Eric Lambin, professor of environmental Earth system science and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford; and professor of geography at the University of Louvain. The bad news: The world might run out of productive agricultural land by 2050, thanks to rising global demand for food, biofuels, and forest products, along with land degradation and urbanization. The good news: ...

Researchers need to use all available resources in an integrated approach to put agriculture on a path to solve the world's food problems while reducing pollution, according to a Penn State biologist. Changes in national and international regulations will be necessary to achieve this goal. "Using resources more efficiently is what it will take to put agriculture on a path to feed the expected future population of nine billion people," said Nina Fedoroff, Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and Willaman Professor of Life Sciences, Penn State. "We especially need to do a better ...

Novel green chemical technologies will play a key role helping society move towards the elimination of waste while offering a wider range of products from biorefineries, according to a University of York scientist. Professor James Clark, Director of the University's Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence, will tell a symposium at the Annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that the use of low environmental impact green chemical technologies will help ensure that products are genuinely and verifiably green and sustainable. He says ...

In her search to understand one of the most basic human senses – touch – Mitra Hartmann turns to what is becoming one of the best studied model systems in neuroscience: the whiskers of a rat. In her research, Hartmann, associate professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, uses the rat whisker system as a model to understand how the brain seamlessly integrates the sense of touch with movement. Hartmann will discuss her research in a daylong seminar "Body and Machine" ...

Sonja Kotz leads the Minerva research group "Neurocognition of Rhythm in Communication" at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. She will present evidence from neuroimaging on the impact of cognitive functions on bilingual processing at the AAAS symposium "Crossing Borders in Language Science: What Bilinguals Tell Us About Mind and Brain". Rhythm, as the recurrent patterning of events in time, underlies most human behavior such as speech, music, and body movements. Sonja Kotz investigates how temporal patterns in di!erent languages ...

One of the goals of the European Research Council, ERC, is to bring the world's leading researchers to work in Europe. American Juleen Zierath is one of those who have received funds from the ERC. She found the best environment for her research at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. It's more usual that scientists leave Europe to work in the US. But Juleen Zierath, Professor of Clinical Integrative Physiology at Karolinska Institutet, has travelled in the opposite direction. An American who was educated in the US, she travelled to Sweden to carry out research. She is one ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — When obsessive-compulsive disorder is of crippling severity and drugs and behavior therapy can't help, there has been for just over a year a thread — or rather a wire — of hope. By inserting a thin electrode deep into the brain, doctors can precisely deliver an electrical current to a cord of the brain's wiring and soften the severity of the symptoms. "Deep brain stimulation" therapy for OCD won Food and Drug Administration approval in 2009 for extreme cases under its humanitarian device exemption. On Feb. 18 at the annual meeting ...

The United States' preoccupation with national security, including counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cyber security, is also a concern of higher education, according to Graham Spanier, president of Penn State University. Spanier, who chairs the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board (NSHEAB), addressed attendees today (Feb. 18) at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., stressing that higher education is part of the national security solution. "The National Security Higher Education Advisory ...

Hackensack, NJ (Feb 18, 2011) – James C. Wittig, M.D., chief of the division of skin and sarcoma cancer at the John Theurer Cancer Center at Hackensack University Medical Center will present eleven different educational videos on innovative approaches to orthopedic oncology at the upcoming American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons Conference. Dr. Wittig is known for inventing some of the most-used best practices in limb-sparing surgery. In 2009, he and his colleagues began filming their surgeries so that other surgeons across the globe could use their radically innovative ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Asthma diagnosis and management vary dramatically around the world, said David Van Sickle, an honorary associate fellow at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, during a presentation today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Asthma affects an estimated 8 percent of Americans, and about 300 million people around the world, but varying practices in diagnosis and treatment have global implications in understanding a widespread, chronic condition, says Van Sickle, who applies ...

Infants raised in households where Spanish and Catalan are spoken can discriminate between English and French just by watching people speak, even though they have never been exposed to these new languages before, according to University of British Columbia psychologist Janet Werker. Presented today at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, Werker's latest findings provide further evidence that exposure to two native languages contributes to the development of perceptual sensitivity that extends beyond their mother ...