A violent earthquake that cracked highways in Alaska set the sky shaking as well as the land, an ESA-backed study has confirmed.
This fact could help improve earthquake detection techniques in areas lacking seismic networks, including the ocean floor. A team from the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris and the California Institute of Technology has successfully used the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite constellation to map disturbances in the ionosphere following last Nov
An international team of researchers has identified the role of a gene which may explain why some people overeat and become obese.
Their research, published today in Public Library of Science Biology, shows that the gene GAD2 has an appetite stimulating role, and that one form of the gene is strongly associated with obese people.
While the researchers recognise that obesity is a result of the interactions of many genes and environmental factors, this is one of the first gene
Stratospheric data supplied by Envisat are the basis for a near-real time global ozone forecasting service now available online.
Up in the stratosphere about 25 km above our heads is the ozone layer. Stratospheric ozone absorbs up to 98% of the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet light – making the difference between a suntan and sunburn, and safeguarding all life on Earth. But chemical activity in the stratosphere ultimately due to the presence of manmade gases such as chlorofluorocarbons (CF
A unique device has been designed by the Moscow scientists – specialists of the Institute of General Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences, supported by funding from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research. The device not only helps to discover in a few seconds the minute quantities of narcotics and explosives in the air, but to identify and even count every single molecule of these dangerous substances. For the first time has the man managed to approach the creation of device more sensitive than th
The treatment of waste has become a problem of international importance. Concretely, the recycling of plastics from waste electrical and electronic equipment is particularly significant due to use in their manufacture of critical components such as specific bromates or heavy metal additives. Thus the need to find ecological solutions for the treatment of these goods.
This European project arose as a result of the need to continue with the work started in 1998 with the COMBIDENT project, fina
Technique could lead to new drugs as well as industrial processes
The diversity of nature may be enormous, but for Michael Hecht it is just a starting point.
Hecht, a Princeton professor of chemistry, has invented a technique for making protein molecules from scratch, a long-sought advance that will allow scientists to design the most basic building blocks of all living things with a variety of shapes and compositions far greater than those available in nature.
The
More than 60 percent of liver transplant patients with advanced liver cancer are still alive after five years, compared to nearly zero survival for those patients who did not undergo transplant, according to a study by Johns Hopkins researchers.
“This is good news for patients with liver cancer. If diagnosed early, transplantation is the treatment of choice for patients with liver cancer and advanced cirrhosis,” says Paul Thuluvath, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins and
Oregon patients are first on West Coast to take part in clinical trial
Two Oregon Health & Science University patients are the first on the West Coast to receive a new stroke prevention treatment that uses a spongy, polymer compound to seal a brain aneurysm.
The patients, Joyce Turner, 68, of Kings Valley and Rob Pardee, 48, of Talent, underwent back-to-back procedures Oct. 23 at OHSU Hospital to repair aneurysms – weakened areas of an artery wall that balloon out and fill w
A trio of scientists including a researcher from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has found that humans may owe the relatively mild climate in which their ancestors evolved to tiny marine organisms with shells and skeletons made out of calcium carbonate.
In a paper titled “Carbonate Deposition, Climate Stability and Neoproterozoic Ice Ages” in the Oct. 31 edition of Science, UC Riverside researchers Andy Ridgwell and Martin Kennedy along with LLNL climate scientist Ken Caldeira, di
Investigators at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), Pfizer Global Research and Development and Stanford University have collaborated in studying a new immunosuppressant drug, CP-690,550, that may avoid some of the common side effects associated with other medications that curb the immune system. The new drug, discovered by Pfizer researchers, may be of major importance for those who are treated with immunosuppressants for organ transplants or autoimmune
Advances in development of lab-on-chip devices, which shrink and potentially simplify laboratory tests like DNA analysis, have largely been tempered by the inherent complexity of the systems they are trying to replace. DNA analysis usually requires a laboratory full of instruments and several days to obtain results.
But now a team of researchers at Arizona State University report that they have made several advances in the area of microfluidic component design, fabrication and integration,
Razor-sharp optics on ground-based telescopes now allows astronomers to peer at events occurring near the very edge of our galaxy’s central black hole, providing new clues about the massive but invisible object at the core of the Milky Way.
In a paper in this week’s issue of Nature, a team led by University of California, Berkeley, physicist Reinhard Genzel, who also directs the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany, reports the detection of p
Just in time for Halloween, a new study of the use of virtual reality to treat spider phobia indicates that touching the fuzzy creepy-crawlers can make the therapy twice as effective.
Researchers at the University of Washington’s Human Interface Technology (HIT) Lab measured aversion and anxiety responses of students, some of whom had a clinical phobia of spiders, before and after undergoing VR therapy. During the therapy, some of the subjects touched a realistic model of a large spide
For at least a million years, owls throughout the West have been snapping up sagebrush voles and reducing them to gray pellets of fur, bones and teeth littering the foot of the roost.
Thanks to pack rats, however, these voles have not been forgotten.
In one Colorado cave, a pack rat collection of teeth and bones has yielded a layered slice of vole history between 600,000 and a million years ago, providing an unprecedented picture of how a species changes and evolves, and how its e
Recent evidence suggests that oxygen levels were suppressed worldwide 175 million to 275 million years ago and fell to precipitously low levels compared with today’s atmosphere, low enough to make breathing the air at sea level feel like respiration at high altitude.
Now, a University of Washington paleontologist theorizes that low oxygen and repeated short but substantial temperature increases because of greenhouse warming sparked two major mass-extinction events, one of which eradicated
Evidence has mounted for nearly 20 years that a great earthquake ripped the seafloor off the Washington coast in 1700, long before there were any written records in the region. Now, a newly authenticated record of a fatal shipwreck in Japan has added an intriguing clue.
Written records collected from villages along a 500-mile stretch of the main Japanese island of Honshu show the coast was hit by a series of waves, collectively called a tsunami, on Jan. 28, 1700. Because no Japanese earthqu
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