Heavens

This week PLoS Medicine publishes the second in a four-part series of policy papers examining the ways in which global health institutions and arrangements are changing and evolving.

In this second paper, Julio Frenk, Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, discusses the crucial role of national health systems in making progress in global health.

(CHICAGO) – For adults and children diagnosed with celiac disease, the only treatment is a gluten-free diet, which can be very challenging. Gastroenterologists at Rush University Medical Center are conducting a new study to see if mind/body techniques could help patients with celiac disease adhere to the very strict diet.

The weekend wasn't very helpful to Edzani, once a powerful Cyclone, now weakened to a tropical storm in the Southern Indian Ocean. That's because of cooler waters and increased wind shear.

To the gardening world it may have always been considered a fact, but science has never proved the widely held belief that watering your garden in the midday sun can lead to burnt plants. Now a study into sunlit water droplets, published in New Phytologist, provides an answer that not only reverberates across gardens and allotments, but may have implications for forest fires and human sunburn.

Physicists may see data as soon as late summer from the prototype for a $278 million science experiment in northern Minnesota that is being designed to find clues to some fundamental mysteries of the universe.

But it could take years before the nation's largest "neutrino" detector answers the profound questions that matter to scientists.

Studies of two supernova remnants using the Japan-U.S. Suzaku observatory have revealed never-before-seen embers of the high-temperature fireballs that immediately followed the explosions. Even after thousands of years, gas within these stellar wrecks retain the imprint of temperatures 10,000 times hotter than the sun's surface.

"This is the first evidence of a new type of supernova remnant -- one that was heated right after the explosion," said Hiroya Yamaguchi at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Japan.

The latest satellite imagery from NASA's Aqua and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellites have provided forecasters with signs in clouds and rainfall that Edzani is strengthening in the Southern Indian Ocean. Edzani has become a tropical cyclone as a result of low wind shear and warm ocean temperatures.

In ancient mythological times reflective surfaces like shiny metals and mirrors were thought to be magical and credited with the ability to look into the future. NASA is using mirrors to do just the opposite – look into the past.

For the last 20 years, the best models of planet formation—or how planets grow from dust in a gas disk—have contradicted the very existence of Earth. These models assumed locally constant temperatures within a disk, and the planets plunge into the Sun. Now, new simulations from researchers at the American Museum of Natural History and the University of Cambridge show that variations in temperature can lead to regions of outward and inward migration that safely trap planets on orbits.

Mobile technologies, including the global system for mobile communication (GSM) and the ZigBee short-range wireless data connection technology could be used to monitor and detect bushfires, according to two research papers to be published in the International Journal of Computer Aided Engineering and Technology.

Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center researchers say preliminary studies show that a vaccine made with leukemia cells may be able to reduce or eliminate the last remaining cancer cells in some chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) patients taking the drug Imatinib mesylate (Gleevec).

The discovery of fossil footprints from early backboned land animals in Poland leads to the sensational conclusion that our ancestors left the water at least 18 million years earlier than previously thought. The results of the Polish-Swedish collaboration are published online this week in Nature.

- These results force us to reconsider our whole picture of the transition from fish to land animals, says Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University, one of the two leaders of the study.

GREENBELT, Md. -- The most earthlike planet yet found around another star may be the rocky remains of a Saturn-sized gas giant, according to research presented today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington.

A University of British Columbia astronomer has produced the most detailed images of deep space from 12 billion years ago, using data from the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory.

Recently presented at the first International Herschel Science Meeting in Madrid, Spain, the images by UBC post-doctoral fellow Gaelen Marsden reveal tens of thousands of newly-discovered galaxies at the early stages of formation – just one billion years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was a thriving nursery of newly-formed stars.

When scientists confirmed in October that they had detected the first rocky planet outside our solar system, it advanced the longtime quest to find an Earth-like planet hospitable to life.

Rocky planets – Earth, Mercury, Venus and Mars – make up half the planets in our solar system. Rocky planets are considered better environments to support life than planets that are mainly gaseous, like the other half of the planets in our system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.