Events rare, but scientists call for public awareness, warning system
A dozen major earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater have occurred in the Caribbean near Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the island of Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in the past 500 years, and several have generated tsunamis. The most recent major earthquake, a magnitude 8.1 in 1946, resulted in a tsunami that killed a reported 1,600 people.
With nearly twenty mill
Hubble astronomers have uncovered, for the first time, a population of infant stars in the Milky Way satellite galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC, visible to the naked eye in the southern constellation Tucana), located 210,000 light-years away.
The exquisite sharpness of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has plucked out an underlying population of infant stars embedded in the nebula NGC 346 that are still forming from gravitationally collapsing gas clouds. They have not
Little is known about the specific role of histones – the protein ’spool’ around which the famous DNA double helix is folded.
Now, researchers at the University of Virginia Health System have unraveled one mystery about what histones accomplish in the complex chemical cascade that determines the function of a cell in the body. Their findings are published in the Jan. 12, 2005 online edition of the journal Nature.
Scientists at U.Va’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular
Ventricular assist devices (VADs), blood pumps used in heart failure situations, now have the potential for use in additional patient groups. Scientists and clinicians gathered at the 11th Congress of the International Society of Rotary Blood Pumps in Germany last year to discuss past lessons learned and future directions for this technology.
Increasing experience, better understanding, and advances in VADs now suggest that its smaller size offers an advantage in permitting its us
Software behind the technology already finding its way into photo editing
Researchers are developing new technologies that may give robots the visual-sensing edge they need to monitor dimly lit airports, pilot vehicles in extreme weather and direct unmanned combat vehicles.
The researchers intend to create an imaging chip that defeats the harmful effects of arbitrary illumination, allowing robotic vision to leave the controlled lighting of a laboratory and enter the erra
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a novel carbon-nanotube-based material that chokes vibration and may have applications for both large and small devices.
In the January 9, 2004, advance online edition of Nature Materials, the researchers describe the new material and demonstrate its usefulness as a filler to enhance traditional vibration-reduction materials.
Conducted by Nikhil Koratkar and colleagues at Rensselaer, the research arose fro
Huge gas disk may be similar to stuff of early universe
An astronomer studying small irregular galaxies has discovered a remarkable feature in one of them that may provide key clues to understanding how galaxies form and the relationship between the gas and the stars within galaxies.
Liese van Zee of Indiana University Bloomington, using the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico, found that a small galaxy 16 million light-yea
The January issue of GEOLOGY covers a wide variety of potentially newsworthy subjects. Topics include: new insights into conditions during the Neoproterozoic and Cryogenian; evidence challenging a widely used method for dating rocks; mathematical descriptions of sand ripples that may aid understanding of water flow on planetary surfaces; and evidence questioning whether Akilia Island’s metamorphic rocks really contain Earth’s earliest signs of life. GSA TODAY’s science article focuses
Statement from the Naturally Nutrient Rich Coalition
The United States Departments of Agriculture (USDA) and Health and Human Services (HHS) today released the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans – science-based dietary guidance that is updated every five years by the government.
The 2005 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee indicated most Americans consume too many foods that are high in calories but low in nutrients. To address this concern, the new Guidelines reinfor
Improving how decision-makers respond in the minutes and hours that follow the first reports of a natural disaster like the recent tsunami or a manmade incident, such as a chemical accident or a terrorist attack, is the focus of a research project at the University at Buffalo’s Center for Multisource Information Fusion.
“Responders immediately begin knitting together a picture that makes sense of what is happening based on the flow of reports they receive from the field,” said
Gene transfer technique immunizes mice within 12 hours
Using gene transfer technology, investigators were able to immunize mice against anthrax in just 12 hours, according to new research featured in the February 2005 issue of Molecular Therapy, the peer-reviewed scientific journal of the American Society of Gene Therapy (ASGT).
In any bioterror attack, vaccines that provide a rapid, effective defense against the pathogen will be key to saving lives. Research underway at
Along with aiding efforts to study addicted smokers, a new drug that attaches only to areas of the brain that have been implicated in nicotine addiction may help studies of people battling other disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia.
Developed by UC Irvine Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center scientists, the new drug – Nifrolidine – is a selective binding agent that identifies specific areas of the brain responsible for decision-making, learning and
Observations eventually expected lead to increased understanding of interstellar dust and gas
Using NASA’s orbiting Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, a team of astronomers from The Johns Hopkins University and elsewhere has taken an unprecedented peek beneath the “skirts” of the tunic-clad Orion the Hunter and come away with observations that may lead to enhanced knowledge of how interstellar dust absorbs and scatters ultraviolet starlight. “Understanding interstellar dust i
A Mount Sinai School of Medicine led study is the first to suggest that Alzheimer’s disease may be slowed and possibly prevented through dietary changes
Researchers found that a low carbohydrate diet that reduced total caloric intake by 30% prevented the development of a fundamental feature of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in mice genetically engineered to develop the disease. The diet eliminated amyloid plaque development, which is the underlying pathology in AD. The study, p
The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) announced that it will conduct an urgent study of the large-scale earthquake which occurred off the coast of Sumatra in Indonesia on December 26, 2004. The study will be the first to observe the actual epicenter of the earthquake that devastated coastal regions in Asian countries along the Indian Ocean coastline.
JAMSTEC is a partner in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, an international marine research program that
Professor Glennys R. Farrar, a physicist at New York University, today announced that, for the first time, a source of ultra-high energy cosmic rays has been isolated and studied, a major breakthrough in the field. Ultra-high energy cosmic rays–which rarely hit the earth–are believed to be the result of extremely powerful cosmic phenomena, such as the creation or accretion of massive black holes. In addition to elucidating the origin of these remarkable particles and the systems that crea
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