Heavens

A new observatory still under construction has given astronomers a major breakthrough in understanding a nearby planetary system that can provide valuable clues about how such systems form and evolve. The scientists used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to discover that planets orbiting the star Fomalhaut must be much smaller than originally thought.

A new scientific instrument, a "time machine" of sorts, built by UCLA astronomers and colleagues, will allow scientists to study the earliest galaxies in the universe, which could never be studied before.

The five-ton instrument, the most advanced and sophisticated of its kind in the world, goes by the name MOSFIRE (Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infra-Red Exploration) and has been installed in the Keck I Telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

The demand for caregivers is growing rapidly as California's population ages, but the majority of state's Medi-Cal caregivers earn poverty or near-poverty wages and have poor access to health care and food, a new study from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research has found.

Writing in Nature, the team of researchers used new techniques which allowed them to look into the atmospheres of distant, dying stars.

The team, lead by Barnaby Norris from the University of Sydney in Australia, includes scientists from the Universities of Manchester, Paris-Diderot, Oxford and Macquarie University, New South Wales. They used the Very Large Telescope in Chile, operated by the European Southern Observatory.

For more than 50 years, pacemakers have set the rhythm for many hearts. The engineering of microelectronic implants has since advanced by leaps and bounds: they have become ever-smaller and more technologically sophisticated. The trend is moving toward miniaturized, intelligent systems that will take over therapeutic and diagnostic functions. For example, in the future implantable sensors will measure glucose levels, blood pressure or the oxygen saturation of tumorous tissue, transmitting patient data via telemetry.

A new online tool from the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health determines the extent of exposure to radio alcohol advertisements among young people ages 12 to 20 in 75 different media markets. This free and user-friendly tool is the first service to provide parents, health departments and other key audiences with access to customizable information on youth exposure to radio alcohol advertising.

In chemical industry, heterogeneous catalysis is of crucial importance to the manufacture of basic or fine chemicals, in catalytic converters of exhaust gas, or for the chemical storage of solar energy. Scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have developed a new infrared spectroscopy method in order to study processes at surfaces of oxides used as catalysts. Their results are published in the renowned Angewandte Chemie journal.

AMES, Iowa -- Scientists have overcome a major hurdle facing quantum computing: how to protect quantum information from degradation by the environment while simultaneously performing computation in a solid-state quantum system. The research was reported in the April 5 issue of Nature.

One day in the fall of 2011, Neil Sheeley, a solar scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., did what he always does – look through the daily images of the sun from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).

Scientists have discovered the initial stages by which gypsum crystals form.

Gypsum is a naturally occurring mineral which is often used in industrial processes and which in nature, if left alone for thousands of years, can grow into huge translucent, towering and eerie, crystals more than 10 metres tall. These are famed for their beauty in places such as the Cave of Crystals in Mexico. Nevertheless, the formation of gypsum has until now been largely unexplored.

For children with dyslexia, the trouble begins even before they start reading and for reasons that don't necessarily reflect other language skills. That's according to a report published online on April 5 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, that for the first time reveals a causal connection between early problems with visual attention and a later diagnosis of dyslexia.

Tropical Storm Daphne has become an extra-tropical storm and is fading fast in the South Pacific Ocean, but not before making its mark on the Fuji Islands. NASA's TRMM satellite compiled rainfall data that revealed flooding rains fell in Fiji.

PHILADELPHIA (April 04, 2012) – Scientists from the Monell Center report that blood glucose levels following starch ingestion are influenced by genetically-determined differences in salivary amylase, an enzyme that breaks down dietary starches. Specifically, higher salivary amylase activity is related to lower blood glucose.

Observations by the two of the European Space Agency's space observatories have provided a multi-wavelength view of the mysterious galaxy Centaurus A. The new images, from the Herschel Space Observatory and the XMM-Newton x-ray satellite, are revealing further hints about its cannibalistic past and energetic processes going on in its core.

Efforts are underway to develop a more environmentally friendly process for dyeing denim with indigo, the storied "king of dyes," used to the tune of 50,000 tons annually to color cotton blue jeans and hundreds of other products. That effort is the topic of an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN). C&EN is the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society.