ScienceDaily: Top News

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• Plants previously thought to be 'stable' found to be responding to climate change
• Prototype device translates sign language
• Alcohol may trigger serious palpitations in heart patients
• Venus: Planetary portrait of inner beauty
• Saturn's geyser moon Enceladus provides a new kind of plasma laboratory
• Sierra Nevada 200-year megadroughts confirmed
• New compound could become 'cool blue' for energy efficiency in buildings
• Some butterfly species particularly vulnerable to climate change
• Unique approach to materials allows temperature-stable circuits
• Quantum computers will be able to simulate particle collisions
• Plate tectonics cannot explain dynamics of Earth and crust formation more than three billion years ago
• Astronomers discover faintest distant galaxy
• New method for picking the 'right' egg in IVF
• Why is it so difficult to trace the origins of food poisoning outbreaks?
• All proteins that bind to RNA, including 300 new ones, catalogued
• 'Jack Spratt' diabetes gene identified
• Nunavik sled dogs need first aid and care too
• Neuroscientists reach major milestone in whole-brain circuit mapping project
• Silkmoth inspires novel explosive detector
• Non-invasive brain stimulation shown to impact walking patterns
• Nanotechnology breakthrough could dramatically improve medical tests
• First success of targeted therapyin most common genetic subtype of non-small cell lung cancer

Plants previously thought to be 'stable' found to be responding to climate change Posted: 01 Jun 2012 10:59 AM PDT Many wild plant species thought to be "stable" in the face of climate change are actually responding to global warming, say researchers.

Prototype device translates sign language Posted: 01 Jun 2012 10:59 AM PDT The hearing impaired may soon have an easier time communicating with those who do not understand sign language due to a new device. During the past semester, students in engineering technology and industrial design programs teamed up to develop the concept and prototype for MyVoice, a device that reads sign language and translates its motions into audible words.

Alcohol may trigger serious palpitations in heart patients Posted: 01 Jun 2012 10:56 AM PDT The term "holiday heart syndrome" was coined in a 1978 study to describe patients with atrial fibrillation who experienced a common and potentially dangerous form of heart palpitation after excessive drinking, which can be common during the winter holiday season. The symptoms usually went away when the revelers stopped drinking. Now new research builds on that finding, establishing a stronger causal link between alcohol consumption and serious palpitations in patients with atrial fibrillation, the most common form of arrhythmia.

Venus: Planetary portrait of inner beauty Posted: 01 Jun 2012 09:30 AM PDT A Venus transit across the face of the sun is a relatively rare event -- occurring in pairs with more than a century separating each pair. There have been all of 53 transits of Venus across the sun between 2000 B.C. and the last one in 2004. On Wednesday, June 6 (Tuesday, June 5 from the Western Hemisphere), Earth gets another shot at it -- and the last for a good long while. But beyond this uniquely celestial oddity, why has Venus been an object worthy of ogling for hundreds of centuries?

Saturn's geyser moon Enceladus provides a new kind of plasma laboratory Posted: 01 Jun 2012 09:21 AM PDT Recent findings from NASA's Cassini mission reveal that Saturn's geyser moon Enceladus provides a special laboratory for watching unusual behavior of plasma, or hot ionized gas. In these recent findings, some Cassini scientists think they have observed "dusty plasma," a condition theorized but not previously observed on site, near Enceladus. Data from Cassini's fields and particles instruments also show that the usual "heavy" and "light" species of charged particles in normal plasma are actually reversed near the plume spraying from the moon's south polar region.

Sierra Nevada 200-year megadroughts confirmed Posted: 01 Jun 2012 09:06 AM PDT The culmination of a comprehensive high-tech assessment of Fallen Leaf Lake -- a small moraine-bound lake at the south end of the Lake Tahoe Basin -- shows that stands of pre-Medieval trees in the lake suggest the region experienced severe drought at least every 650 to 1,150 years during the mid- and late-Holocene period.

New compound could become 'cool blue' for energy efficiency in buildings Posted: 01 Jun 2012 09:06 AM PDT A new type of durable, environmentally-benign blue pigment has also been found to have unusual characteristics in reflecting heat -- it's a "cool blue" compound that could become important in new approaches to saving energy in buildings.

Some butterfly species particularly vulnerable to climate change Posted: 01 Jun 2012 09:06 AM PDT A recent study of the impact of climate change on butterflies suggests that some species might adapt much better than others, with implications for the pollination and herbivory associated with these and other insect species.

Unique approach to materials allows temperature-stable circuits Posted: 01 Jun 2012 09:06 AM PDT Scientists have developed a unique materials approach to multilayered, ceramic-based, 3-D microelectronics circuits, such as those used in cell phones. The approach compensates for how changes due to temperature fluctuations affect something called the temperature coefficient of resonant frequency, a critical property of materials used in radio and microwave frequency applications.

Quantum computers will be able to simulate particle collisions Posted: 01 Jun 2012 09:06 AM PDT Quantum computers are still years away, but a trio of theoretical physicists can already make the claim "there's an app for that." The theorists have developed a mathematical algorithm that will be used by a future quantum computer to study the inner workings of the universe in ways that are far beyond the reach of even the most powerful conventional supercomputers.

Plate tectonics cannot explain dynamics of Earth and crust formation more than three billion years ago Posted: 01 Jun 2012 09:06 AM PDT The current theory of continental drift provides a good model for understanding terrestrial processes through history. However, while plate tectonics is able to successfully shed light on processes up to three billion years ago, the theory isn't sufficient in explaining the dynamics of Earth and crust formation before that point and through to the earliest formation of planet, some 4.6 billion years ago.

Astronomers discover faintest distant galaxy Posted: 01 Jun 2012 09:06 AM PDT Astronomers have found an exceptionally distant galaxy, ranked among the top 10 most distant objects currently known in space. Light from the recently detected galaxy left the object about 800 million years after the beginning of the universe, when the universe was in its infancy. The team of astronomers identified the remote galaxy after scanning a moon-sized patch of sky with an instrument on the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

New method for picking the 'right' egg in IVF Posted: 01 Jun 2012 07:38 AM PDT Medical researchers have identified the chromosomal make-up of a human egg. This discovery may soon allow them to avoid using abnormal -- or aneuploid -- eggs during infertility treatments, and instead to pick eggs that are healthy enough for a successful in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle.

Why is it so difficult to trace the origins of food poisoning outbreaks? Posted: 01 Jun 2012 07:38 AM PDT As illustrated by the 2011 E. coli outbreak in Germany, any delay in identifying the source of food poisoning outbreaks can cost lives and cause considerable political and economical damage. Scientists have now shown that difficulties in finding the sources of contamination behind food poisoning cases are inevitable due to the increasing complexity of a global food traffic network where food products are constantly crossing country borders, generating a worldwide network.

All proteins that bind to RNA, including 300 new ones, catalogued Posted: 01 Jun 2012 07:38 AM PDT Scientists have cataloged all proteins that bind to RNA, finding 300 previously unknown to do so. The study could help to explain the role of genes that have been linked to diseases like diabetes and glaucoma.

'Jack Spratt' diabetes gene identified Posted: 01 Jun 2012 07:38 AM PDT It has long been hypothesized that Type 2 diabetes in lean people is more "genetically driven." A new study has for the first time demonstrated that lean Type 2 diabetes patients have a larger genetic disposition to the disease than their obese counterparts. The study has also identified a new genetic factor associated only with lean diabetes sufferers.

Nunavik sled dogs need first aid and care too Posted: 01 Jun 2012 07:35 AM PDT In Nunavik, there are many dogs – sled dogs, pets, and strays – but no veterinarian, so a veterinary student is designing and delivering a first aid guide for dogs in northern Quebec.

Neuroscientists reach major milestone in whole-brain circuit mapping project Posted: 01 Jun 2012 06:37 AM PDT Neuroscientists have just reached an important milestone, publicly releasing the first installment out of 500 terabytes of data so far collected in their pathbreaking project to construct the first whole-brain wiring diagram of a vertebrate brain, that of the mouse.

Silkmoth inspires novel explosive detector Posted: 01 Jun 2012 06:34 AM PDT Imitating the antennas of the silkmoth, Bombyx mori, researchers have designed a system for detecting explosives with unparalleled performance. Made up of a silicon microcantilever bearing nearly 500,000 aligned titanium dioxide nanotubes, this device is capable of detecting concentrations of trinitrotoluene (TNT) of around 800 ppq (1) (i.e. 800 molecules of explosive per 10^15 molecules of air), thereby improving one thousand-fold the detection limit attainable until now. This innovative concept could also be used to detect drugs, toxic agents and traces of organic pollutants.

Non-invasive brain stimulation shown to impact walking patterns Posted: 01 Jun 2012 06:31 AM PDT Kennedy Krieger researchers believe tool has potential to help patients relearn to walk after brain injury.

Nanotechnology breakthrough could dramatically improve medical tests Posted: 31 May 2012 01:57 PM PDT A laboratory test used to detect disease and perform biological research could be made more than 3 million times more sensitive, according to researchers who combined standard biological tools with a breakthrough in nanotechnology.

First success of targeted therapyin most common genetic subtype of non-small cell lung cancer Posted: 31 May 2012 10:54 AM PDT A novel compound has become the first targeted therapy to benefit patients with the most common genetic subtype of lung cancer.

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