New York
On Friday, the Olympic flame in Athens was lit after a global torch relay covering 27 countries and traveling a distance of about 48,000 miles total. Particles from the Sun had to travel a little further - 93 million miles - to light up the skies in states like Iowa, Michigan, California, and New York. The bright auroras were the result of elevated activity on the Sun and some unusually large sunspots rotating toward Earth. The coronal mass ejection blast that triggered the aurora took place around 10:45 am ET on July 25, traveling at roughly 1300 km per second.
A study by a scientist from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society has revealed how Africa's giant mahoganies, the ancient trees driving the tropical logging industry, require specialized, poorly understood soil conditions -- results that could have huge implications on how Africa's tropical forests are managed. The study, appearing in the latest issue of the journal Ecology, looked at four mahogany species in Dznagha-Sangha Dense Forest Reserve, a 1,700 square-mile region in Central African Republic. The authors found that that three of the four species required specialized soils -- those with a particular combination of plant nutrients - and were restricted to these sites within the forest.
As part of its building and fire safety investigation of the World Trade Center disaster, the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology today released an interim analysis of the location of the 2,749 victims that classifies the decedents as being at/above or below the floors of impact. The evacuation patterns suggest more people than previously thought died below the floors of impact.
Can doping athletes be stopped? With the Athens Olympics about to open, scientists are increasingly concerned that sophisticated techniques for evading drug tests will make it difficult for testers to catch athletes using steroids and other drugs, especially at future athletic competitions when genetic-based enhancements are expected to be prevalent.
A study by researchers at the New York Hospital Medical Center of Queens finds that nearly half of neckties worn by medical personnel harbor bacteria that can cause disease. They report their findings today at the 104th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. ''Studies such as this remind us about what we may bring to our patients' bedside. By increasing our awareness and making simple behavioral changes we may be able to provide a better quality of healthcare,'' says Steven Nurkin, one of the researchers on the study.
Medical schools received 45 percent of all federal research and development funds provided to U.S. colleges and universities in the 2002 fiscal year, according to a RAND Corporation study that gives the most complete profile ever of how such funds are distributed. The nation's 126 medical schools received $9.6 billion of the $21.4 billion in federal research and development funds awarded in FY 2002 to the nearly 800 separate campuses of U.S. colleges and universities that received some federal research and development funding. There are more than 1,825 separate campuses of four-year accredited and professional degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States.
For decades people have nipped a wrinkle here, reduced a nose size there or paid for help boosting test scores. With this history of paying to improve our bodies and minds, why not extend that liberty to memory-improving drugs or brain-enhancing implants? These and other questions being raised by modern neuroscience were the topic of a meeting of neuroscientists, ethicists and psychologists funded by the National Science Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences. The group's goals were to outline both the ethical issues raised by modern neuroscience and the steps scientists should take, if any.
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have helped develop a new technology that converts material dredged from the bottoms of harbors and waterways into a substance that can be made into construction-grade cement. The technology, called Cement-Lock, was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the State of New Jersey, and other government and public groups. "This technology will greatly help to increase the health of many U.S. harbors and waterways, such as the Port of New York and New Jersey," said Keith Jones, an environmental scientist at Brookhaven who took part in Cement-Lock's development. "These waterways are contaminated by metals and pollutants from many human activities, such as sewer overflow systems and discharges from industrial operations."
How do you keep a black bear from taking out the backyard bird feeder or going through your garbage? Play the sound of a helicopter, or flash a strobe light, say scientists from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and other organizations, who tested several non-lethal techniques to minimize conflicts between humans and large carnivores.
Despite widespread attention to diet, calorie intake may not be a major factor in causing death by heart disease, according to a 17-year study of almost 9,800 Americans. Instead, losing excess weight -- or not becoming overweight to begin with -- and exercising may do more to ward off death from heart disease, say Jing Fang, M.D., and colleagues from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York.
Every 45 seconds, someone in America experiences a stroke. This week, researchers announced that compounds in cranberry may potentially offer a way to reduce stroke damage. A preliminary rat cell tissue study ? led by principal investigator Dr. Catherine Neto at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, who presented the findings at the American Chemical Society meeting in New York ? suggests that cranberry may protect against the brain cell damage that occurs during a stroke. According to the study, cranberry may reduce the stroke's severity via an antioxidant mechanism during the early stages of stroke, when the most damage occurs.
A team of researchers, led by Serge Przedborski, at Columbia University in New York, have demonstrated that infusion of D-beta-hydroxybutyrate (D-beta-HB) to mice suffering from Parkinson disease restored impaired brain function and protected against neurodegeneration and motor skill abnormalities. D-beta-HB, already utilized in the treatment of epilepsy, may represent a cheap and easy way to treat Parkinson disease. Parkinson disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder after Alzheimer disease. Sufferers experience motor skill abnormalities including tremor, muscle stiffness, and unstable voluntary movements and posture. The main pathological feature of the Parkinson brain is the loss of dopaminergic neurons.
A gene that belongs to a family of genes implicated in heart disease has been found to be essential for male fertility but has no impact on female fertility, researchers at U of T, along with colleagues in New York and Japan, have discovered.
More than 900 scientific and nonscientific documents of one of the most influential intellects in the modern era, Albert Einstein, will soon be available online for the first time. The Einstein Archives Online website, at http://www.alberteinstein.info, will also be accompanied by an extensive database of archival information. It will be launched on May 19 during a daylong symposium on his life and work, to be held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Lesson one: don't steal a bear's dinner. Last week, a wolverine - a ferocious member of the weasel family able to kill a caribou - learned this the hard way, according to a team of researchers from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Scientists Kristine and Bob Inman, while tracking the wolverine as part of a WCS study of these rare carnivores, discovered that the animal's radio collar began emitting a "mortality signal," indicating it hadn't moved in several hours. They later found the wolverine's carcass, showing clear evidence that it had been killed by a bear. Nearby, they discovered the carcass of an elk, along with additional evidence that the wolverine had attempted to drag it away from the bear, thus instigating the fatal encounter.
