A new study by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers is the first to pinpoint damage inside the brains of veterans suffering from Gulf War syndrome – a finding that links the illness to chemical exposures and may lead to diagnostic tests and treatments.
Earth
In the first ever "salvo" firing of a THAAD interceptor, the Divert and Attitude Control System (DACS) developed by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne successfully positioned the interceptor to destroy the incoming test ballistic missile. Two Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles were fired during a test on March 17 from the Pacific Missile Range off Kauai, Hawaii.
ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Relying on principles similar to those that cause Jell-O to congeal into that familiar, wiggly treat, University of Michigan researchers are devising a new method of detecting nitric oxide in exhaled breath.
Because elevated concentrations of nitric oxide in breath are a telltale sign of many diseases, including lung cancer and tuberculosis, this development could prove useful in diagnosing illness and monitoring the effects of treatment.
SALT LAKE CITY – Lighting consumes one-fifth of the electricity generated in the United States. Solid-state lighting offers tremendous potential to improve the situation – once major research challenges are overcome.
LAS VEGAS—Explosive population growth in southern Nevada has placed increasing demands on available water resources. In 2007, 80% of the state's residents lived in southern Nevada, where the population approached two million people. The dual concerns of this population boom and a climate that features frequent severe drought conditions has created an urgent demand for officials to investigate alternative water resources to meet resident and visitor demand.
GAINESVILLE, FL—Researchers at the University of Florida have introduced 'Delicious', a new muscadine grape cultivar. 'Delicious' ripens early, produces high yields, and is disease-resistant. The black fruit features exceptional taste and texture with an edible skin, making it well-suited for fresh fruit consumption and the potential for wine production. The name 'Delicious' was selected based on the comments of vineyard visitors who sampled the fruit.
LIVERMORE, Calif. - The most abundant material on Earth exhibits some unusual chemical properties when placed under extreme conditions.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists have shown that water, in hot dense environments, plays an unexpected role in catalyzing complex explosive reactions. A catalyst is a compound that speeds chemical reactions without being consumed. Platinum and enzymes are common catalysts. But water rarely, if ever, acts as a catalyst under ordinary conditions.
Does a twin Earth exist somewhere in our galaxy? Astronomers are getting closer and closer to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit. NASA's Kepler spacecraft just launched to find such worlds. Once the search succeeds, the next questions driving research will be: Is that planet habitable? Does it have an Earth-like atmosphere?
Answering those questions will not be easy.
Berlin, 19 March 2009 – World Water Day on Sunday, 22 March aims to raise public awareness of the increasing scarcity of clean drinking water on our planet. In a densely populated world, droughts and floods are causing more damage than ever before.
Portland, Ore. March 19, 2009. No single decision-support system exists for selecting alternatives for postfire management. That thesis is what a recently released report on management after fire hinges upon. The publication, Effects of Timber Harvest Following Wildfire in Western North America, tells us that the type of forest landscape determines the ways fire and logging may change an area after a wildfire. The authors, however, hope that public land managers will use the publication to evaluate postfire management options.
By combining data from 48 studies of coral reefs from around the Caribbean, researchers have found that fish densities that have been stable for decades have given way to significant declines since 1995. The study appears online on March 19th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.
Two decades after the Exxon Valdez oil spill devastated a vast stretch of the Alaskan coast, governments and industry in the Arctic would be unable to effectively manage a large oil spill, according to a new report by World Wildlife Fund. As the 20th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez spill approaches on March 24, WWF renewed its call for a time-out on new offshore oil development in the Arctic until technologies improve to ensure adequate clean-up of an oil spill. WWF is also calling on the Obama Administration to permanently protect Alaska's fish-rich Bristol Bay from drilling.
Berkeley -- A newly-laid, 32-mile underwater cable finally links the state's only seafloor seismic station with the University of California, Berkeley's seismic network, merging real-time data from west of the San Andreas fault with data from 31 other land stations sprinkled around Northern and Central California.
Researchers today worry about the collapse of West Antarctic ice shelves and loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet, but little is known about the past movements of this ice. Now climatologists from Penn State and the University of Massachusetts have modeled the past 5 million years of the West Antarctic ice sheet and found the ice expanse changes rapidly and is most influenced by ocean temperatures near the continent.
A five-nation scientific team has published new evidence that even a slight rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, one of the gases that drives global warming, affects the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The massive WAIS covers the continent on the Pacific side of the Transantarctic Mountains. Any substantial melting of the ice sheet would cause a rise in global sea levels.