AURORA, Colo. (April 20, 2016) - In a discovery with implications for long-term spaceflight and future missions to Mars, a researcher at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus has found that mice flown aboard the space shuttle Atlantis returned to Earth with early signs of liver disease.
Heavens
Medical interventions that work well when tested in mouse models can fail when they advance to safety and efficacy testing in humans. One reason for this, scientists propose, may be the differences between immune system development of laboratory mice and humans. Laboratory mice are raised in pathogen-free environments lacking microbial diversity that may contribute to these differences, concludes a new study funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.
As Tropical Cyclone 20P formed in the Southern Pacific Ocean NASA's Aqua satellite analyzed storm cloud top temperatures while the RapidScat instrument looked at surface winds. The National Weather Service in Pago Pago expects the tropical storm to affect American Samoa by the weekend.
Cows in Brazil might start bellowing "leguuume" rather than "moo." That's because Jose Dubeux Jr. wants to plant more legume trees in cow pastures.
Dubeux is an assistant professor of Agronomy at North Florida Research & Education Center. Growing up, Dubeux spent a lot of time on his grandparents' farm in Brazil. There he developed a passion for livestock operations and the grasslands on which the livestock graze. That passion drew him to questions about silvopastoral systems. Silvopastoral systems combine crops and animals in the same location in a way that benefits both.
When Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, it spewed dust and sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere with a force more powerful than any eruption since. As the aerosols and particulates circulated around the globe, they cooled the planet, disrupting agriculture and leading to what became known as the "year without a summer."
Scientists can read old descriptions of eruptions like Tambora and analyze ash deposits captured in polar ice, but consistently estimating the climate impact of past eruptions has been difficult. A new technique may change that.
Tropical Cyclone Fantala continued to spin northeast of Madagascar when NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the Southern Indian Ocean on April 20.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard Aqua captured a visible image of the Category 2 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Scale on April 20 at 10:10 UTC (6:10 a.m. EDT). The storm had decreased from its Category 5 status on April 18. The MODIS image continued to show good circulation with a wide, clear eye, surrounded by powerful thunderstorms.
Solar flares are intense bursts of light from the sun. They are created when complicated magnetic fields suddenly and explosively rearrange themselves, converting magnetic energy into light through a process called magnetic reconnection - at least, that's the theory, because the signatures of this process are hard to detect. But during a December 2013 solar flare, three solar observatories captured the most comprehensive observations of an electromagnetic phenomenon called a current sheet, strengthening the evidence that this understanding of solar flares is correct.
Scientists at NJIT's Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) have captured unprecedented images of a recent solar flare, including bright flare ribbons seen crossing a sunspot followed by "coronal rain," plasma that condenses in the cooling phase shortly after the flare, showering the visible surface of the Sun where it lands in brilliant explosions.
Three NASA satellites provided data on powerful Tropical Cyclone Fantala as it lingered north of Madagascar in the Southern Indian Ocean. NASA-NOAA's Soumi NPP satellite provided a night-time and infrared view, NASA's Aqua satellite provided a look at cloud top temperatures and extent, and NASA-JAXA's Global Precipitation Measurement or GPM core satellite measured the storm's intense rainfall.
WASHINGTON, DC, April 19, 2016 -- The number of children in foster care across the country is driven not solely by child abuse and neglect, but by states' varying politics and approaches to social problems, a new University of Washington (UW) study finds.
States with more punitive criminal justice systems tend to remove children from their homes far more frequently than those with generous welfare programs -- meaning that two states with similar rates of child abuse and neglect could have very different rates of foster care entry.
New research has measured the 'wealth effect' of upgrading the infrastructure in poorer sections of cities. Revamps, such as surfacing roads and joining them to the city grid, dramatically push up prices of the adjoining land and properties, says the study to be published in the journal, The Review of Economics and Statistics. Researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Toronto measured how households who owned property in the upgraded roads were also allowed to spend more on credit so they could buy items for the home or cars that made them better off.
In many plumbing and pipework systems in general, there are junctions and connections to move liquids such as water in different directions, but have you ever thought about what happens to the water in those fluid intersections? A team of researchers from Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) and collaborators found an unexpected spiral vortex phenomenon that occurs in the intersections of cross-shaped devices when liquid flows through the channels in a particular way. The team has published their results in Physical Review E.
On Sept. 14, waves of energy traveling for more than a billion years gently rattled space-time in the vicinity of Earth. The disturbance, produced by a pair of merging black holes, was captured by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facilities in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. This event marked the first-ever detection of gravitational waves and opens a new scientific window on how the universe works.
HANOVER, N.H. - Dartmouth College and Griffith University researchers have devised a new way to "sense" and control external noise in quantum computing.
Quantum computing may revolutionize information processing by providing a means to solve problems too complex for traditional computers, with applications in code breaking, materials science and physics, but figuring out how to engineer such a machine remains elusive.
Private v. public, virtual v. real have converged in a world saturated by information technology. It seems impossible to divide the public from the personal. But when and where do we choose to share information about ourselves? How do we perceive public space and virtual space? And how do these perceptions influence our practices of seeing and being seen?