From computer simulations that produce El Nino-like climate cycles to molten rock making big earthquakes bigger, the American Geophysical Union’s April highlights contain a bunch of cool new papers. Try the “Day After Tomorrow”-like “Ocean cycling depends on small salinity differences,” or have a go with “Antarctic glaciers shrinking due to ice shelf collapse.” Who knew geosciences could be so fun?
Biomedical engineers have built a device to quickly detect mild traumatic brain injury in the heat of sports competition, on the battlefield, in the emergency room, and in other situations where time is of the essence.
Sixty-nine days before it gets up-close-and-personal with a comet, NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft successfully photographed its quarry, comet Tempel 1, from a distance of 64 million kilometers (39.7 million miles). The image, the first of many comet portraits it will take over the next 10 weeks, will aid Deep Impact’s navigators, engineers and scientists as they plot their final trajectory toward an Independence Day encounter.
It takes conventional rockets about six months just to get to Mars. Total roundtrip times can be as long as three years, because an extended stay on the Red Planet is required while the Earth and Mars progress in their orbits enough to be closely aligned again for the return trip. However, future astronauts may race to Mars up to six times faster by riding a beam of electrified and magnetized gas (plasma). A roundtrip Mars mission could be completed in about 90 days using the Magnetized Beam Plasma Propulsion (Magbeam) system proposed by Dr. Robert Winglee of the University of Washington.
A nuclear weapon that is exploded underground can destroy a deeply buried bunker efficiently and requires significantly less power to do so than a nuclear weapon detonated on the surface would, says a new report from the National Academies’ National Research Council. However, such “earth-penetrating” nuclear weapons cannot go deep enough to avoid massive casualties at ground level, and they could still kill up to a million people or more if used in heavily populated areas, said the committee that wrote the report.
When it comes to her health, Janice Winfield of Portland, Ore., does her research. That’s why the stay-at-home mom, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in July 2000, was willing to turn to popular, over-the-counter herbal supplements like ginkgo biloba to deal with memory problems, fatigue and occasional muscle pain.
Black cohosh, an herb widely used by breast cancer patients to alleviate hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms, may alter the way that cells respond to drugs commonly used to treat breast cancer, according to a new study.
Many primary care responsibilities can be safely transferred from doctors to appropriately trained nurses, says a new review of evidence. Yet there is little proof that such a shift reduces physician workload or health-care costs.
A contest is challenging NASA web visitors to guess which day and at what time the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft will find its 1,000th comet. Already the most prolific comet hunter in history, SOHO has found 945 comets as of April 25 and is on track to find its 1,000th sometime this summer. Over 9,000 people have entered the contest since it opened in January and the 960th comet, expected sometime in May, will officially end registration.
Children facing surgery can be made more comfortable with little risk by allowing them to have certain liquids up to two hours before the operation, a new review of recent studies has found. Like adults, children are often required to go without food or drink up to a half-day before surgery to prevent their stomach contents from being regurgitated or sucked into the lungs under general anesthesia.
Moderate alcohol consumption over a relatively long period of time can enhance the formation of new nerve cells in the adult brain. The new cells could prove important in the development of alcohol dependency and other long-term effects of alcohol on the brain. The findings are published by Karolinska Institutet.
Physical activity appears to inhibit Alzheimer’s-like brain changes in mice, slowing the development of a key feature of the disease, according to a new study. The research demonstrated that long-term physical activity enhanced the learning ability of mice and decreased the level of plaque-forming beta-amyloid protein fragments–a hallmark characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease (AD)–in their brains.
Breastfeeding causes nearly 40 percent of all pediatric HIV infections, yet also prevents millions of child deaths every year by protecting infants from diarrhea and other infections. Finding ways to make breastfeeding safer for infants of HIV-infected mothers has been an urgent research priority. A new study has found that exclusive breastfeeding substantially reduces the transmission of HIV from mother to infant and infant death, compared with partial breastfeeding.
Researchers chiseling away at the problem of antibiotic resistance now have a detailed explanation of how the drugs’ main cellular target in bacteria evolves to become resistant to some of these medications. The findings are already leading to new experimental antibiotics that are being engineered to circumvent resistance, which is a major worldwide health problem.
A first-of-its-kind multi-center trial has shown that cooling the body can have positive affects on children who suffered traumatic brain injury. Researchers determined that induced moderate hypothermia initiated after severe traumatic brain injury is a safe therapeutic intervention for children.
If you wanted a random number, historically you could do worse than to pick a sequence from the string of digits in pi. But Purdue University scientists now say other sources might be better. Physicists including Purdue’s Ephraim Fischbach have completed a study comparing the “randomness” in pi to that produced by 30 software random number generators and one chaos-generating physical machine. After conducting several tests, they have found that while sequences of digits from pi are indeed an acceptable source of randomness – often an important factor in data encryption and in solving certain physics problems – pi’s digit string does not always produce randomness as effectively as manufactured generators do.
The “dead zone” area of the Gulf of Mexico — a region that annually suffers from low oxygen which can result in huge marine life losses – has appeared much earlier this year, meaning it could be potentially larger in 2005 and affect marine life more adversely than normal, researchers are reporting.
Direct-to-consumer (DTC) prescription drug advertising — a $3.2 billion industry in the United States — not only sways patients to ask for certain medications, but profoundly influences the way doctors make initial treatment decisions, according to an April 27 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
