Heavens

For Margot Parkes, Canada Research Chair in Health, Ecosystems and Society at the University of Northern British Columbia, watersheds are living systems that are essential for healthy communities.

"My research focuses on the relationships between ecosystems and health," says Parkes, who presents her work at the THINK CANADA Press Breakfast panel discussion today at AAAS. Originally trained as a medical doctor, Parkes says it is important to take a holistic view of the issue.

Using the super-sharp radio "vision" of astronomy's most precise telescope, scientists have extended a directly-measured "yardstick" three times farther into the cosmos than ever before, an achievement with important implications for numerous areas of astrophysics, including determining the nature of Dark Energy, which constitutes 70 percent of the Universe. The continent-wide Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) also is redrawing the map of our home Galaxy and is poised to yield tantalizing new information about extrasolar planets, among many other cutting-edge research projects.

Planets form in disks of dust and gas that surround young stars. A look at the birth places means a journey into the past of the earth and its siblings. Now, astronomers have been able to obtain detailed images of the protoplanetary disks of two stars using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii. This is the first time that disk structures comparable in size to our own solar system have been resolved this clearly, revealing features such as rings and gaps that are associated with the formation of giant planets.

A powerful solar flare has ushered in the largest space weather storm in atleast four years and has already disrupted some ground communications on Earth, said University of Colorado Boulder Professor Daniel Baker, an internationally known space weather expert.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Last July, President Obama adopted the recommendations of a White House task force charged with devising a policy to better manage the nation's oceans, coastlines and the Great Lakes. The National Ocean Council is now charged with developing a plan to put the ideas into practice. Two scientists at Brown University will speak about the ecological and social facets of marine management this month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.

Close to the globe, Earth's magnetic field wraps around the planet like a gigantic spherical web, curving in to touch Earth at the poles. But this isn't true as you get further from the planet. As you move to the high altitudes where satellites fly, nothing about that field is so simple. Instead, the large region enclosed by Earth's magnetic field, known as the magnetosphere, looks like a long, sideways jellyfish with its round bulb facing the sun and a long tail extending away from the sun.

Infrared satellite data from NASA's Aqua satellite reveal that Tropical Storm Dianne is getting organized off the coast of Western Australia today.

Star formation is one of the most important processes in shaping the Universe; it plays a pivotal role in the evolution of galaxies and it is also in the earliest stages of star formation that planetary systems first appear.

DETROIT – Biopsies using ultrasound fusion imaging for detecting bone and soft tissue cancers are safe, effective and just as accurate as conventional biopsy methods, according to a Henry Ford Hospital study.

Researchers found that the ultrasound fusion imaging technique guides a needle biopsy with precise accuracy and ease, while making the biopsy experience more convenient for patients.

DETROIT – While the choices of knee implants are plentiful, the success of total knee replacement surgery still is dependent on the surgeon's skill, Henry Ford Hospital researchers say.

Researchers found that utilizing a series of common but nuanced surgical techniques is far more important to customizing the fit of a patient's implant than the implant's design.

The findings will be displayed at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons Feb. 15-18 in San Diego.

ESA's Herschel space observatory has discovered a population of dust-enshrouded galaxies that do not need as much dark matter as previously thought to collect gas and burst into star formation.

The galaxies are far away and each boasts some 300 billion times the mass of the Sun. The size challenges current theory that predicts a galaxy has to be more than ten times larger, 5000 billion solar masses, to be able form large numbers of stars.

The new result is published today in a paper by Alexandre Amblard, University of California, Irvine, and colleagues.

TORONTO, Ont., February 16, 2011 — One in five homeless people with tuberculosis die within a year of their diagnosis, according to a study led by St. Michael's Hospital's Dr. Kamran Khan. And that number remains unchanged over the last decade despite recommendations calling for greater improvements in prevention and control of tuberculosis in homeless shelters.

Pioneering Spanish provinces in terms of early prevention of breast cancer, such as Navarre and the Basque Country, record lower death rates, although the trend is towards the figures levelling out all over Spain. These are the results of a study carried out by Spanish researchers, which analyses the number of women who died between 1975 and 2005.

Singapore - Nantes (France) – February 15, 2011 (SGT) - The Singapore Immunology Network (SIgN), an institute of the Agency of Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), and VIVALIS (NYSE Euronext: VLS), a French biopharmaceutical company, announced today the discovery of two new fully human monoclonal antibodies which could battle Chikungunya, a disease that currently has no available vaccine or specific treatment. The international team of scientists, coordinated by Dr Lucile Warter of SIgN, has published their groundbreaking discovery in the Journal of Immunology.