ST. PAUL, Minn. – People who have Alzheimer's disease may be less likely to develop cancer, and people who have cancer may be less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study published in the December 23, 2009, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Heavens
MADISON — For almost 50 years, astronomers have puzzled over the youthful appearance of stars known as blue stragglers.
Blue stragglers are the timeworn Hollywood starlets of the cosmos: They shine brightly, they are older than they appear, and they have, disconcertingly, gained mass at a late stage of life.
Stars in globular clusters [1] are generally extremely old, with ages of 12-13 billion years. However, a small fraction of them appear to be significantly younger than the average population and, because they seem to have been left behind by the stars that followed the normal path of stellar evolution and became red giants, have been dubbed blue stragglers [2]. Blue stragglers appear to regress from "old age" back to a hotter and brighter "youth", gaining a new lease on life in the process.
Members of a Syracuse University research team have shown that an obscure phenomenon called stochastic resonance (SR) can improve the clarity of signals in systems such as radar, sonar and even radiography, used in medical clinics to detect signs of breast cancer. It does this by adding carefully selected noise to the system.
Two brown dwarf-sized objects orbiting a giant old star show that planets may assemble around stars more quickly and efficiently than anyone thought possible, according to an international team of astronomers.
"We have found two brown dwarf-sized masses around an ordinary star, which is very rare," said Alex Wolszczan, Evan Pugh professor of astronomy and astrophysics, Penn State and lead scientist on the project.
Doha, December 16, 2009 – A first-of-its-kind consensus statement by 50 medical experts from around the world has pronounced surgery to be a legitimate and effective treatment for type 2 diabetes, bringing the procedure a significant step closer to wider use and acceptance.
Exposing patients with chronic sinus disease to allergens and then obtaining repeated images by X-ray or ultrasound reveals that nasal allergies may be involved in some cases of chronic sinus disease, according to a report in the December issue of Archives of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
MAYWOOD, Ill. -- The tuberculosis bacterium is an insidious germ that can lie dormant for many years, then suddenly emerge and cause potentially fatal disease.
Earlier this year, researchers in Sweden proposed a provocative explanation: TB bacteria have the ability to turn into dormant, armor-plated spores. If true, the findings would provide promising new avenues of research in the worldwide fight against TB.
PASADENA, Calif.— Saturn's largest moon, Titan, looks to be the only place in the solar system—aside from our home planet, Earth—with copious quantities of liquid (largely, liquid methane and ethane) sitting on its surface. According to planetary astronomer Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Earth and Titan share yet another feature, which is inextricably linked with that surface liquid: common fog.
In the new blockbuster Avatar, humans visit the habitable - and inhabited - alien moon called Pandora. Life-bearing moons like Pandora or the Star Wars forest moon of Endor are a staple of science fiction. With NASA's Kepler mission showing the potential to detect Earth-sized objects, habitable moons may soon become science fact. If we find them nearby, a new paper by Smithsonian astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger shows that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be able to study their atmospheres and detect key gases like carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water vapor.
A network of cameras deployed around the Arctic in support of NASA's THEMIS mission has made a startling discovery about the Northern Lights. Sometimes, vast curtains of aurora borealis collide, producing spectacular outbursts of light. Movies of the phenomenon were unveiled at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union today in San Francisco.
Although the center of Tropical Cyclone Laurence has been over land for two days, it's still holding together and bringing heavy rains and gusty winds to the northern coastal areas of West Australia and will do so into the weekend. Warnings and watches are still in effect in some areas as Laurence will continue moving west before re-entering the Southern Indian Ocean.
At a very early age, children learn how to classify objects according to their shape. Now, new research suggests studying the shape of the aftermath of supernovas may allow astronomers to do the same.
A new study of images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory on supernova remnants - the debris from exploded stars - shows that the symmetry of the remnants, or lack thereof, reveals how the star exploded. This is an important discovery because it shows that the remnants retain information about how the star exploded even though hundreds or thousands of years have passed.
New research by the University of Adelaide could help explain why some people are more prone to Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis and other autoimmune diseases.
A critical imbalance of the regulatory cells required to control the immune system has been revealed among people suffering inflammatory bowel disease.
Laurence is still a tropical cyclone even though the storm has made landfall in northern West Australia and is moving over land. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite noticed some powerful and high thunderstorms in Laurence before he made landfall, and the storm is still maintaining intensity for now, but that will wane as the storm continues to interact with the friction caused by traveling over land.