Giant Squid and Whale Sharks Aren't As Big As People Think
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How Greenland Got Its Glaciers
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Plants versus ants: voracious vegetation is victorious
By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A tricky insect-eating plant from Borneo is living proof that one need not have a brain to outsmart the opposition. Scientists say the tropical carnivorous plant regularly exploits natural weather fluctuations to adjust the slipperiness of its pitfall traps in order to capture and dine on batches of ants at a time rather than individual ants. The research involved an Asian species of pitcher plant, so named because its leaves form cup-shaped insect traps that look like a pitcher. ... Read More »
Fling or ring? Men's mating preferences not hard wired: study
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Florida's Cape Canaveral may be world's busiest spaceport in 2015
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Crew evacuates U.S. section of space station after leak: agencies
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What Can We Do If an Asteroid Threatens Earth? Europe Starts Planning
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Saturn's Position in the Solar System Pinpointed Within 2 Miles
Astronomers have pinned down the position of Saturn and its many moons with unprecedented precision, a breakthrough that should aid spacecraft navigation and basic physics research down the road. The researchers used the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) — a system of radio dishes set up in Hawaii, the continental United States and the Virgin Islands — to track the signals coming from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004. After combining this information with data from NASA's spacecraft-tracking Deep Space Network system, the study team was able to pinpoint the Saturn system's center of mass, or barycenter, within about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers). The measurement represents a 50-fold improvement over the best estimates provided by ground-based telescopes, NASA officials said. Read More »
Scientists Observe Solar System Planets Like Alien Worlds
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Steam Machine Turns Poop into Clean Drinking Water
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Dogs Arrived Late to the Americas
Dogs may have arrived in the Americas only about 10,000 years ago, thousands of years after humans first did, researchers say. This date "is about the same time as the oldest dog burial found in the Americas," study co-author Ripan Malhi, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in a statement. The new finding suggests that dogs came to the Americas with a second wave of human migration, thousands of years after people first traveled to the Americas from Asia. "Dogs are one of the earliest organisms to have migrated with humans to every continent, and I think that says a lot about the relationship dogs have had with humans," lead study author Kelsey Witt, a biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in a statement. Read More »
Ammonia Leak Scare on Space Station Prompts Astronaut Evacuation from US Side
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Liberia's Ebola Epidemic Could End by Summer, Study Predicts
The Ebola outbreak in Liberia could be largely brought to an end by June — if the country stays on track with getting a high percentage of the people who are ill to hospitals, a new study predicts. Researchers found that if 85 percent of people with Ebola in Liberia are hospitalized, transmission of the disease could be nearly stopped between March and June of this year. However, if Liberia's hospitalization rate remains where it was last summer, at around 70 percent, then transmission of the disease would "most certainly continue into the second half of 2015," the researchers said. The actual hospitalization rate in Liberia right now is not known, but it is likely close to 85 percent, said study researcher John Drake, an associate professor at the University of Georgia. Read More »
Bladder Drug May Help Body Burn More Calories
A drug used to treat people with overactive bladder can also boost the calorie-burning capacity of the body's brown fat, new findings show. Unlike its cousin "white fat," which stores calories, brown fat actually burns calories, helping babies and hibernating mammals to stay warm. Now, investigators hope that cranking up the metabolic activity of brown fat could help people lose weight, as well as bring other metabolic benefits. "I would say the results are promising, but there's a lot that we still have to figure out," said Dr. Aaron Cypess, head of the Diabetes, Endocrinology, and Obesity Branch at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Read More »
Space Station Ammonia Leak Scare Likely a False Alarm, NASA Says
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Scientists find key gene mutations behind inherited heart disease
By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have identified the crucial genetic mutations that cause a common heart condition called dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), paving the way for more accurate diagnosis and screening of high-risk patients. In a study of more than 5,000 people, researchers sequenced the gene encoding the muscle protein "titin", known to be linked to this leading cause of inherited heart failure, to try to find which variations in it caused problems. ... Read More » | ||
Monday, January 19, 2015
Scientists find key gene mutations behind inherited heart disease
Amygdala–prefrontal interactions in (mal)adaptive learning
Amygdala–prefrontal interactions in (mal)adaptive learning
Navigation through daily life depends on a blueprint of familiar stimulus–outcome associations and the ability to update them as circumstances change. The update is particularly important for tracking shifting sources of danger. Too little self-protection in the face of new threat risks bodily harm, whereas indiscriminate fear is physically and psychologically debilitating, as evidenced in anxiety disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). In neurobiology, the most popular model of associative learning, first formalized by Pavlov during the early 20th century [1], continues to be a versatile tool for studying how the nervous system learns about the changing world in general and emotional learning in particular [2]. Read More » | ||||
Scientists find key gene mutations behind inherited heart disease : Roller-Coaster Flight: How Geese Save Energy While Migrating
Scientists find key gene mutations behind inherited heart disease
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Genome wiz Venter partners with Roche in DNA sequencing deal
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Scientists tease out genes that signal risk of heart failure
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists are teasing out gene mutations that can make heart muscle turn flabby, part of a push to better screen people at risk of heart failure. Read More »
Fresh Crater on Mars Spied by NASA Spacecraft (Photo)
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Sun Fires Off First Strong Solar Flare of 2015 (Video)
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Space Station Astronauts Return to US Side After Leak False Alarm
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U.S. Air Force secretary upbeat on SpaceX certification
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U.S. Air Force secretary upbeat on SpaceX certification
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Big Asteroid to Zoom by Earth on Jan. 26
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NASA to Preview Yearlong Space Station Mission Today: Watch It Live
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Why Do Zebras Have Stripes? It's Not for Camouflage
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Jeepers! New Look at 'Creeping' San Andreas Fault
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Treasured 16th-Century 'Lenox Globe' Gets a Digital Makeover
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Ancient Scorpion Had Feet, May Have Walked Out of Ocean
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Music Festival Linked to Party Drugs in Waterways
Drugs may pass out of a person's body in their urine or feces, and although the wastewater passes through treatment facilities, the process does not break down all chemicals, so some find their way into the local soil and water. "The most interesting finding was the extraordinary increase," in the party drug MDMA (which is found in both ecstasy and Molly), the researchers wrote in their report on the drug levels in waterways in Taiwan before, during and after an event called the Spring Scream festival. The new findings add to the wider issue of what scientists call "emerging contaminants," which are the chemicals in medications and personal-care products that end up in the natural environment. Studies have found that even low doses of some of these chemicals, such as antianxiety drugs and the hormones from birth control pills, can affect the fish living in those contaminated waters. Read More »
Your Blood Type May Put You at Risk for Heart Disease
People whose blood type is A, B or AB have an increased risk of heart disease and shorter life spans than people who have type O blood, according to a new study. But that doesn't mean people with blood types other than O should be overly concerned, because heart disease risk and life span are influenced by multiple factors, including exercise and overall health, experts said. They found that people with non-O blood types were 9 percent more likely to die during the study for any health-related reason, and 15 percent more likely to die from cardiovascular disease, compared with people with blood type O. "It was very interesting to me to find out that people with certain blood groups — non-O blood groups — have a higher risk of dying of certain diseases," said the study's lead investigator, Dr. Arash Etemadi, an epidemiologist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Read More »
Stressed Out? Social Media May Help Women Cope
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Deadly MERS Virus Spreads from Camels to People Only Rarely
Many camels in Saudi Arabia have been infected with the virus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), but the virus rarely spreads from the animals to people, a new study says. The MERS virus first appeared in 2012 and causes a respiratory illness that has killed 30 percent of the people infected with it, but it's not well understood. In the new study, researchers tested blood from 45 people who were exposed to camels in Saudi Arabia, including 12 people who had direct contact with a herd of dromedary (one hump) camels while some of the animals were infected with MERS. None of the people in the study had antibodies against MERS in their blood, meaning they likely had not been infected with MERS in the past. Read More »
'Stranger Danger' Makes People Less Empathetic
But giving people a drug that blocks the body's stress response can restore that sense of empathy, scientists said. "In some sense, we've figured out what to do about increasing empathy as a practical matter," said Jeffrey Mogil, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal. Decreasing stress by doing a shared activity could be a simple way to increase empathy between people who don't know each other, the findings suggest. Past studies had found that mice seemed to feel the pain of familiar mice but were less responsive to foreign mice. Read More »
Sea Turtles Use Earth's Magnetic Field to Find Home
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Flu Shot This Year Provides Weak Protection
This year's flu vaccine is not very effective at preventing the flu, particularly among adults, according to new estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a study of more than 2,000 people in the United States, including both children and adults, researchers found that those who got this year's flu shot were just 23 percent less likely to go to the doctor for flu symptoms than people who didn't get a shot. This level of protection is quite a bit lower than the level of protection seen in some previous seasons — for example, during the 2012 to 2013 flu season, getting a flu shot reduced people's risk of needing a doctor's visit for flu by 56 percent. The findings confirm what health officials have suspected for weeks — that this year's flu shot offers limited protection against the disease — and underscores the need to give patients who may have the flu early treatment with antiviral drugs, if they are at high risk for complications from the disease, the CDC said. Read More »
Roller-Coaster Flight: How Geese Save Energy While Migrating
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