Heavens

Bottom Line: Children and young adults who start antidepressant therapy at high doses, rather than the "modal" [average or typical] prescribed doses, appear to be at greater risk for suicidal behavior during the first 90 days of treatment.

Author: Matthew Miller, M.D., Sc.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, and colleagues.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The idea of a smart home sounds promising enough. Who doesn't want a house full of automated gadgets — from light switches to appliances to heating systems — that know exactly when to turn on, turn off, heat up or power down?

But in order for all those devices to do what they're supposed to do, they'll need to be programed — a task the average homeowner might not have the interest or the tech-savvy to perform. And nobody wants to call tech support just to turn on a light.

Success really does breed success – up to a point - found researchers from UCL and Stony Brook University, following a series of unique on-line experiments.

According to the Voice of Russia, "As of Saturday morning, in Russia continue 103 wildfires at 27,412 hectares, including big 26 wildfires in the Far East and in Siberia. On Friday, 147 new fires began at 12,509 hectares, and 150 were extinguished at 5,437 hectares. Emergency situation has been introduced in the regions with most complicated situations - in the Amur region, in the Maritime and Baikal territories. This was according to the EMERCOM's (Emergency Control Ministry) spokesperson Alexander Drobyshevsky.

HAMILTON, ON, April. 28, 2014 — Providing safe, stable and affordable housing first is the best way to help homeless in Hamilton, Ont., according to new research.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A marathon summer of field work by Mark Bertness, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and a squadron of students may finally help settle the heated debate about what's killing the coastal saltmarshes of southern New England and Long Island. The group's work has yielded two new papers that offer clear evidence of the cause.

A "brown dwarf" star that appears to be the coldest of its kind -- as frosty as Earth's North Pole -- has been discovered by a Penn State University astronomer using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Spitzer Space Telescopes. Images from the space telescopes also pinpointed the object's distance at 7.2 light-years away, making it the fourth closest system to our Sun.

April is in the middle of the dry season, which runs from January through May in this region, and naturally coincides with fire season. Farmers often use fire to return nutrients to the soil and to clear the ground of unwanted plants. Fire helps enhance crops and grasses for pasture. Some of the fires in this image may be wildfires, with natural (lightning) or accidental (human) sources.

The southern hemisphere of Mars is home to a crater that contains very well-preserved gullies and debris flow deposits. The geomorphological attributes of these landforms provide evidence that they were formed by the action of liquid water in geologically recent time.

Evidence of liquid water

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have applied a new image processing technique to obtain near-infrared scattered light photos of five disks observed around young stars in the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes database. These disks are telltale evidence for newly formed planets.

This release is available in Japanese.

An exceptionally bright supernova reported in 2013 is so luminous, a new study reports, because a lens in the sky amplified its light. The discovery of the lens settles an important controversy in the field of astronomy.

In 2010, a team of scientists observed a supernova, PS1-10afx, shining brighter than any other in its class.

"PS1-10afx is like nothing we have seen before," said senior author Robert Quimby of the University of Tokyo's Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe.

MADISON – When chemist Tehshik Yoon looks out his office window, he sees a source of energy to drive chemical reactions. Plants "learned" to synthesize chemicals with sunlight eons ago; Yoon came to the field a bit more recently.

But this week, in the journal Science, he and three collaborators detail a way to use sunlight and two catalysts to create molecules that are difficult to make with conventional techniques.

This press release is available in Japanese.

Kashiwa Japan - A team of researchers led by Robert Quimby at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) has announced the discovery of a galaxy that magnified a background, Type Ia supernova thirtyfold through gravitational lensing. This is the first example of strong gravitational lensing of a supernova confirms the team's previous explanation for the unusual properties of this supernova.

A new analysis of NASA satellite data shows Africa's Congo rainforest, the second-largest tropical rainforest in the world, has undergone a large-scale decline in greenness over the past decade.

PHILADELPHIA – One of the first studies to look at a relationship between death and the two types of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), or problems with memory and thinking abilities, suggests that people who have thinking problems but their memory is still intact might have a higher death rate in a period of six years compared to those who have no thinking or memory problems. The research was released today and will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 66th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, April 26 to May 3, 2014.