Earth Sciences

Scientists from the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia have helped unveil the birthplaces of ancient stars using a two-tonne telescope carried by a balloon the size of a 33-storey building. After two years spent analyzing data from the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope (BLAST) project, an international group of astronomers and astrophysicists from Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. reveals today in the journal Nature that half of the starlight of the Universe comes from young, star-forming galaxies several billion light years away. "While those…

PHILADELPHIA, PA -- Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered that parasites hijack host-cell proteins to ensure their survival and proliferation, suggesting new ways to control the diseases they cause. The study, appearing this week online in Science, was led by Doron Greenbaum, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pharmacology in the Penn School of Medicine. "Researchers can now develop ways to kill parasites by placing roadblocks in the path they use to destroy their victims," says Greenbaum. The team discovered that malaria parasites depend upon an enzyme stolen from the host…

A small, dense object only twelve miles in diameter is responsible for this beautiful X-ray nebula that spans 150 light years. At the center of this image made by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is a very young and powerful pulsar, known as PSR B1509-58, or B1509 for short. The pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star which is spewing energy out into the space around it to create complex and intriguing structures, including one that resembles a large cosmic hand. In this image, the lowest energy X-rays that Chandra detects are red, the medium range is green, and the most energetic ones…

INDIANAPOLIS – When the need for speed is critical, how can a public health department communicate with doctors and hospitals, sending alerts to help prevent or stop a public health crisis? How can thousands of health-care providers be notified about disease outbreaks, illness from food borne contaminants or even a possible pandemic? Researchers from the Regenstrief Institute, Inc. in collaboration with the Marion County Health Department (Indianapolis, Ind), have developed and tested a technology that allows public health officials to abandon a traditional, inefficient paper approach to…

New Haven, Conn. — Some of the brightest colors in nature are created by tiny nanostructures with a structure similar to beer foam or a sponge, according to Yale University researchers. Most colors in nature—from the color of our skin to the green of trees—are produced by pigments. But the bright blue feathers found in many birds, such as Bluebirds and Blue Jays, are instead produced by nanostructures. Under an electron microscope, these structures look like sponges with air bubbles. Now an interdisciplinary team of Yale engineers, physicists and evolutionary biologists has taken a step…

LAWRENCE, Kansas — Natalie Ciaccio, a fourth-year graduate student researcher in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Kansas, is investigating what might be an ideal target for anti-cancer drug therapy, and she is focusing her work on brain tumors specifically. The National Cancer Institute estimates that in 2008, there were 21,810 diagnoses of brain tumors and other nervous system disorders in the United States. These cancers led to approximately 13,070 deaths. What's worse, in 2007 brain tumors were the leading cause of solid tumor death in children, constituting…

Seventeen people are still dying from lung cancer each week in Northern Ireland despite a small improvement in survival rates for the disease. The figures are revealed by a report launched today by the Northern Ireland Cancer Registry (NICR) at Queen's University Belfast. The NICR is holding a joint launch today with Macmillan Cancer Support which has released its own report on the experience of patients living with lung cancer and their carers in Northern Ireland, highlighting that services are not meeting their needs. The Queen's report, entitled Monitoring care of patients with lung cancer…

Integral has captured one of the brightest gamma-ray bursts ever seen. A meticulous analysis of the data has allowed astronomers to investigate the initial phases of this giant stellar explosion, which led to the ejection of matter at velocities close to the speed of light. In particular, the astronomers believe that the explosion lifted a piece of the central engine's magnetic field into space. On 19 December 2004, the blast from an exploding star arrived at Earth. ESA's Integral satellite, an orbiting gamma-ray observatory, recorded the entire event, providing information for what may prove…

As we look at the world around us, images flicker into our brains like so many disparate pixels on a computer screen that change every time our eyes move, which is several times a second. Yet we don't perceive the world as a constantly flashing computer display. Why not? Neuroscientists at The Johns Hopkins University think that part of the answer lies in a special region of the brain's visual cortex which is in charge of distinguishing between background and foreground images. Writing in a recent issue of the journal Neuron, the team demonstrates that nerve cells in this region (called V2)…

In 2008, residents of Hispaniola experienced one of their worst hurricane seasons in recent memory. Hispaniola, the Caribbean island containing Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is located directly within the hurricane belt, and was pummeled by five tropical cyclones last year: Fay, Gustav, Hanna, Ike, and low over the Dominican Republic on Sept. 24 what would become Kyle after moving north. More than 800 people were reported dead or missing from these storms. Haiti occupies the western third of Hispaniola, while the Dominican Republic covers the eastern two-thirds. Hispaniola is the second-…