Do wildfires influence the housing market? Is it a consideration when people buy or build?
Geoffrey Donovan, an economist at the USDA Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station in Portland, Ore., and his colleagues collaborated with the Colorado Springs Fire Department in Colorado to answer these questions.
The fire department developed a computer model to rate the wildfire risk of 35,000 parcels in the city’s wildland-urban interface. Each parcel
A new global study involving long-term data from satellites and ground stations indicates Earth’s ozone layer, while still severely depleted following decades of thinning from industrial chemicals in the atmosphere, is no longer in decline.
Betsy Weatherhead, a researcher with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, a joint institute of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and corresponding
A group of Montreal researchers has discovered that GCN2, a protein in cells that inhibits the conversion of new information into long-term memory, may be a master regulator of the switch from short-term to long-term memory. Their paper Translational control of hippocampal synaptic plasticity and memory by the eIF2a kinase GCN2, which was published in the August 25th issue of the journal Nature, provides the first genetic evidence that protein synthesis is critical for the regulation of memory f
What is the mysterious dark energy that’s causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate? Is it some form of Einstein’s famous cosmological constant, or is it an exotic repulsive force, dubbed “quintessence,” that could make up as much as three-quarters of the cosmos? Scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Dartmouth College believe there is a way to find out.
In a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters, physicists Eric L
As more parents choose home remedies for their children’s gastrointestinal complaints, the question arises, which ones really work?
Kathi J. Kemper, M.D., M.P.H., a pediatrics professor at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, and the author of “The Holistic Pediatrician,” has written the cover article for Contemporary Pediatrics magazine on which herbs and dietary supplements can help children with nausea, constipation and similar gastrointestinal (GI) problems.
Virginia Commonwealth University researchers have created highly magnetized nanoparticles based on metallic iron that could one day be used in a non-invasive therapy for cancer in which treatment would begin at the time of detection.
“We envision a potential for these materials to combine both detection and treatment into a single process,” said Everett E. Carpenter, Ph.D., an assistant professor of chemistry at VCU.
Carpenter is discussing his ongoing work of the synth
The effort required to correctly hear and identify words may diminish the resources needed to memorize them
In a new study, Brandeis University researchers conclude that older adults with mild-to-moderate hearing loss may expend so much cognitive energy on hearing accurately that their ability to remember spoken language suffers as a result.
The study, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, showed that even when older adults could hear words well enoug
Tranquilizers work better than placebos at treating the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal syndrome but they may not work better than other drugs, according to a new review of recent studies.
The class of depressant drugs known as benzodiazepines are especially effective at treating seizure in withdrawal patients, say Dr. Christos Ntais of the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and colleagues. People given benzodiazepines were 84 percent less likely to have wi
St. Jude researchers say dental problems caused by radiation, chemotherapy should be treated before a child undergoes immunosuppression as part of bone marrow transplantation therapy
Many children who undergo bone marrow transplantation (BMT) as part of cancer treatment already have dental abnormalities that leave them vulnerable to potentially life-threatening bacterial infections, according to investigators at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. A report on this study
Further results from the Cassini spacecraft’s July flyby of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, reveal more detail about the features and processes going on. Speaking at a press conference at Imperial College, London this morning (30th August) the Cassini scientists spoke about the intriguing south pole area which has a surprising hotspot and “tiger stripe” features on the surface.
Following the two distance flybys of Enceladus in February and March this year results from the Magnetome
Whether rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations will cause forests to grow faster and store more carbon is an open question and one that scientists at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), together with partners at the University of Basel, have been investigating for several years.
In a mature forest just outside Basel, researchers developed a new system to distribute CO2 to the treetops. The use of stable isotopes for studying the carbon balance under elevated CO
Schizophrenia has been attributed to everything from genetic predisposition, brain chemistry, sufferers’ home environment and even cat-borne viruses, but no consistent causal pattern has ever been identified. As a result, treatment outcomes for today’s patients are not very different from those of patients treated 100 years ago.
According to Richard Bentall, Professor in Experimental Clinical Psychology at The University of Manchester, the problem is that the psychiatri
In the face of strong competition, FOI is to take part in one of thirteen research projects to be awarded funding for research relating to the fight against terrorism under the EU’s security research programme.
— The project concerns the improvement of cooperation between countries in order to fight terrorism and organised crime more effectively, says Martin Rantzer, Head of Division at FOI.
The aim of the project is to enable the various authorities and nations to exchang
A step towards understanding cell mutations that cause a variety of human diseases, particularly in children -including that which brings about premature aging and early death – has been taken by researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Silberman Institute of Life Sciences and the John Hopkins University School of Medicine.
The scientists have focused their research on a study of induced mutations in the nuclear envelope of cells from the tiny C. elegans worm. Their aim
One of the country’s leading centres for social work research is launching a new BA in Social Work.
The new degree will be offered at the University of East Anglia from September 2006, helping to tackle the current national and local shortage of trained social workers.
There will be 27 places available on the full-time three-year course and each comes with an automatic, non-means tested bursary of £2500 per year, funded by the General Social Care Council.
The U
Repairing major damage to the derma is a difficult problem facing plastic surgeons. But now researchers at Linköping University have hit upon a highly promising method. By injecting tiny balls of gelatin, they have managed to get various types of cells to grow spontaneously in the areas where new tissue needs to be generated.
Instead of moving skin from other parts of the body or operating in prostheses of non-biological material, it is becoming more and more common for plastic s
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