EurekAlert!

Syndicate content EurekAlert! - Breaking News
The premier online source for science news since 1996. A service of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
URL: http://www.eurekalert.org
Updated: 8 min 21 sec ago

AGA presents cutting-edge research during DDW®

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
Clinicians, researchers and scientists from around the world will gather for Digestive Disease Week 2012, the largest and most prestigious gastroenterology meeting, from May 19-22, 2012, at the San Diego Convention Center. DDW, the annual meeting of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute, is jointly sponsored by the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, the AGA, the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy and the Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract.
Categories: Science

Acid in the brain

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
University of Iowa researchers have developed an MRI-based method to detect and monitor pH changes in living brains. The new technique provides the best evidence so far that pH changes do occur with normal function in the intact human brain. The team hopes to use the method to investigate the role of pH changes in psychiatric disease, including anxiety and depression.
Categories: Science

Pollution teams with thunderclouds to warm atmosphere

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
Pollution is warming the atmosphere through summer thunderstorm clouds, according to a computational study published May 10 in Geophysical Research Letters. How much the warming effect of these clouds offsets the cooling that other clouds provide is not yet clear. To find out, researchers need to incorporate this new-found warming into global climate models.
Categories: Science

May GSA Bulletin postings take global geology tour

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
GSA Bulletin papers posted online 3-18 May 2012 cover a variety of locations: the Coast Range basalt province, southwest Washington State, USA; the Faroe Islands of the northeast Atlantic margin; Wairarapa fault, North Island, New Zealand; the eastern Mediterranean Sea offshore of southern Crete; the southern central Andes of Argentina; the Adriatic Carbonate Platform of southwest Slovenia; the Atacama Desert, Chile; Questa caldera, northern New Mexico, USA; the Norwegian Caledonides; and Lake Tahoe, USA.
Categories: Science

Hitting snooze on the molecular clock: Rabies evolves slower in hibernating bats

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
The rate at which the rabies virus evolves in bats may depend heavily upon the ecological traits of its hosts, according to research from the University of Georgia, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium published May 17 in the journal PLoS Pathogens. Rabies viruses in tropical and sub-tropical bat species evolved nearly four times faster than viral variants in bats in temperate regions.
Categories: Science

Stanford scientists document fragile land-sea ecological chain

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
Intricate, often invisible chains of life are threatened with extinction around the world. A new study quantifies one of the longest such chains ever documented.
Categories: Science

University of Nevada, Reno, scientists design indoor navigation system for blind

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
University of Nevada, Reno, computer science engineering team Kostas Bekris and Eelke Folmer presented their indoor navigation system for people with visual impairments at two national conferences in the past two weeks. The researchers explained how a combination of human-computer interaction and motion-planning research was used to build a low-cost accessible navigation system, called Navatar, which can run on a standard smartphone.
Categories: Science

A nurse practitioner-driven palliative care intervention improves cancer patients' quality of life

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
Recent studies have shown that palliative care interventions aimed at addressing patients' emotional, spiritual and social needs have a significant impact on cancer patients' quality of life and may even improve cancer patients' overall survival.
Categories: Science

CQ Researcher examines distracted driving

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
More than 5,000 people die each year in vehicle crashes caused by distracted driving, many who were texting and talking on cellphones behind the wheel, according to the May 4 issue of CQ Researcher (published by CQ Press, an imprint of SAGE). Teen drivers appear to be especially susceptible to distraction.
Categories: Science

A cell's first steps: Building a model to explain how cells grow

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
A collaboration between Lehigh University physicists and University of Miami biologists addresses an important fundamental question in basic cell biology: how do living cells figure out when and where to grow?
Categories: Science

Comprehensive report documents impact of urologic diseases on American public

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
Urologic conditions like urinary tract infections, kidney stones, and prostate cancer are a major economic burden on Americans, resulting in health care costs of close to $40 billion annually, according to a newly released national report that charts the demographic and economic impact of urologic diseases in the US.
Categories: Science

Engineers use droplet microfluidics to create glucose-sensing microbeads

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
Tiny beads may act as minimally invasive glucose sensors for a variety of applications in cell culture systems and tissue engineering.
Categories: Science

Quantum computing: The light at the end of the tunnel may be a single photon

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
Semiconductors are the foundation of modern computer technology. Now a photon's literal quantum leap may point the way to a semiconductor-based quantum computer.
Categories: Science

Return of the vacuum tube

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
Retro technology makes a comeback in a nanoscale transistor that is lightweight, low cost, and long lasting.
Categories: Science

Finding fingerprints in sea level rise

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
As described in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, graduate students Eric Morrow and Carling Hay demonstrate the use of a statistical tool called a Kalman smoother to identify "sea level fingerprints" -- tell-tale variations in sea level rise -- in a synthetic data set. Using those fingerprints, scientists can determine where glacial melting is occurring.
Categories: Science

A North American first at the Montreal Heart Institute

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
The surgical team at the Montreal Heart Institute achieved a North American surgical milestone on May 1st with a sutureless aortic valve replacement through a thoracic incision just 5 centimeters long. The two patients in their seventies who underwent this innovative procedure, which was performed by cardiac surgeons Denis Bouchard and Michel Carrier, were doing well only one week after their operations.
Categories: Science

UGA study finds that education plays mitigating role in escaping roots of adversity

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
Decades of research show people born into poverty are likely to continue to live that way as adults. But one University of Georgia researcher has found a way out -- education.
Categories: Science

Production of chemicals without petroleum

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
In a paper published online in Nature Chemical Biology on May 17, professor Sang Yup Lee and his colleagues at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea, present new general strategies of systems metabolic engineering for developing microorganisms for the production of natural and non-natural chemicals from renewable biomass.
Categories: Science

Using graphene, scientists develop a less toxic way to rust-proof steel

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
University at Buffalo researchers are making significant progress on rust-proofing steel using a graphene-based composite that could serve as a nontoxic alternative to coatings that contain hexavalent chromium, a probable carcinogen.
Categories: Science

Facebook and smartphones: New tools for psychological science research -- news brief

Fri, 18/05/2012 - 05:00
Whether you're an iPerson who can't live without a Mac, a Facebook addict, or a gamer, you know that social media and technology say things about your personality and thought processes. And psychological scientists know it too -- they've started researching how new media and devices both reveal and change our mental states.
Categories: Science