Lunar Eclipse to Provide Blood Red Moon Oct. 27

On Wednesday night, Oct. 27th, North Americans can see a total eclipse of the moon. According to folklore, October’s full moon is called the ”Hunter’s Moon” or sometimes the ”Blood Moon.” It gets its name from hunters who tracked and killed their prey by autumn moonlight, stockpiling food for the winter ahead. You can picture them: silent figures padding through the forest, the moon overhead, pale as a corpse, its cold light betraying the creatures of the wood. The Blood Moon rises this year on Wednesday, Oct. 27th. At first it will seem pale and cold, as usual. And then … blood red.

Parkinson’s: Bilateral Benefits with Brain Stim

For many patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease, deep brain stimulation can mean the difference between having difficulty walking and being able to run. Since its approval by the Food and Drug Administration in 1997, the treatment has been used by 20,000 patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease or other movement disorders to help control their symptoms. Now, researchers have discovered that surgically implanting electrical stimulators on just one side of a patient’s brain could help alleviate symptoms on both sides of the body, potentially cutting the surgery risk for some patients. The results are published in the October issue of the journal Motor Control.

Ancient sea spider fossils discovered in volcanic ash

Volcanic ash that encased and preserved sea life in the Silurian age 425 million years ago near Herefordshire, UK has yielded fossils of an ancient sea spider, or pycnogonid, one of the most unusual types of arthropod in the seas today. Sea spiders are soft-bodied arthropods, found widely in modern oceans. For two-centuries there has been a controversy about the relationship of sea spiders to land spiders, scorpions, ticks and mites because of their unique body form. Sea spiders have a long proboscis and unusual limb structures used in mating and carrying brooding embryos.

‘Brain’ in a dish acts as autopilot, living computer

A Florida scientist has grown a living ”brain” that can fly a simulated plane, giving scientists a novel way to observe how brain cells function as a network. The ”brain” — a collection of 25,000 living neurons, or nerve cells, taken from a rat’s brain and cultured inside a glass dish — gives scientists a unique real-time window into the brain at the cellular level. By watching the brain cells interact, scientists hope to understand what causes neural disorders such as epilepsy and to determine noninvasive ways to intervene. As living computers, they may someday be used to fly small unmanned airplanes or handle tasks that are dangerous for humans, such as search-and-rescue missions or bomb damage assessments.

Honey could be healthy alternative to high-fructose corn syrup

Soda, Halloween candy and other food products that contain high-fructose corn syrup and other sweeteners could one day get a fresh makeover using honey, one of the most ancient sweeteners, researchers say. Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign say that honey may be a healthier alternative than corn syrup due to its higher level of antioxidants, compounds which are believed to fight cancer, heart disease and other diseases.

Academics find that finger of destiny points their way

Male scientists are good at research because they have the hormone levels of women and long index fingers, a new study says. A survey of academics at the University of Bath has found that male scientists typically have a level of the hormone estrogen as high as their testosterone level. These hormone levels are more usual in women than men, who normally have higher levels of testosterone. The study draws on research that suggests that these unusual hormone levels in many male scientists cause the right side of their brains, which governs spatial and analytic skills, to develop strongly.

System eliminates perchlorate, helps scientists trace source

An award-winning system developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to clean up perchlorate pollution is now also helping scientists determine whether the contamination is natural or man-made. This latter application could be instrumental in tracking environmental perchlorate, finding its source and resolving resulting liability issues, said ORNL scientist Baohua Gu, who headed development of the treatment system. Perchlorate, or ClO4-, disrupts the thyroid gland that regulates metabolism in adults and physical development in children and is increasingly being found in soil and water. It is used to make solid rocket propellant and explosives but also occurs naturally, as in nitrate soils from Chile used to make fertilizers, making the source sometimes difficult to trace.

U.S. farmers draining world’s fresh water supply

In a world plagued by shortages of water, three facts stand out in an analysis by Cornell University ecologists: Less than 1 percent of water on the planet is fresh water; agriculture in the United States consumes 80 percent of the available fresh water each year; and 60 percent of U.S. water intended for crop irrigation never reaches the crops. Their report names farmers as ”the prime target for incentives to conserve water.” The report is particularly critical of irrigation practices in the United States, where subsidized ”cheap water” offers scant incentive for conservation.

Large-Scale Forces Shape Local Ocean Life, Global Study Shows

In a groundbreaking, globetrotting study of sea life in shallow waters, a research team led by a Brown University marine ecologist has found that the richness of species diversity in a small patch of ocean is powerfully shaped by far-away forces. Jon Witman, associate professor of biology at Brown, said this finding was a surprise. At the start of the project, Witman expected to find that forces specific to a small area of ocean — predation, species competition and disturbances such as hurricanes or landslides — would play a central role in limiting the number of species found there. But Witman and his team found that species diversity in local areas, no bigger than a half-mile square, was directly proportional to species diversity in that region, which can span thousands of square miles.

Genetic data crunching achieves milestone

The revolution was not televised. In the fall of 1999, the Stanford Microarray Database booted up, and a level of computing power was suddenly available to the field of molecular biology that only a few years earlier was inconceivable. On Oct. 19, the database recorded its 50,000th experiment, marking its place at the forefront of an information processing revolution that has yielded groundbreaking insights into the relationships between genes and illness, as well as fundamental biological discoveries.

Physically fit children appear to do better in classroom

The health benefits of exercise — across the lifespan — have been well documented. More recently, scientists have begun to demonstrate that exercise also may improve cognitive functioning in older adults. But what about children? Are physically fit kids better suited to compete not only on the ball field, but in the classroom as well? University of Illinois researchers have been exploring these and other related questions in a series of studies during the past two years, and preliminary results indicate a correlation.

Study links warm offices to fewer typing errors and higher productivity

Warm workers work better, an ergonomics study at Cornell University finds. Chilly workers not only make more errors but cooler temperatures could increase a worker’s hourly labor cost by 10 percent, estimates Alan Hedge, professor of design and environmental analysis and director of Cornell’s Human Factors and Ergonomics Laboratory. When the office temperature in a month-long study increased from 68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit, typing errors fell by 44 percent and typing output jumped 150 percent. Hedge’s study was exploring the link between changes in the physical environment and work performance.

Bacteria-Killing vs. Bacteria-Inhibiting Drugs in Treating Infections

When treating an infection, physicians may face a choice between using a bactericidal (bacteria-killing) drug, a bacteriostatic (bacteria-inhibiting) drug or a combination of the two. The solution is not always obvious, particularly since a drug that is bactericidal for one strain of bacteria may only inhibit the growth of another strain. Although it might seem logical that bactericidal drugs would be preferable to bacteriostatic drugs, the type of infection is important in determining which kind of drug to use.

Neurosurgeons identify growth of new adult brain cells

It had long been thought that once the human brain is fully matured, no new brain cells develop. Now a team of researchers and scientists has found evidence of cell generation in the brains of adults with epilepsy and say it could lead to ground-breaking treatment for the disease. Researchers studied patients with medically intractable epilepsy who underwent epilepsy surgery to see if new cells were developing post-operatively. They found such cell generation and believe that may be the cause of the recurring seizures that are typical of epilepsy.