Colorado
The lack of a certain peptide in the skin of people with atopic dermatitis--the most common form of eczema--may explain why they are at high risk of adverse reactions to the smallpox vaccine, report scientists in the February Journal of Immunology. The finding may lead to new treatments to allow those with the skin condition to be vaccinated against smallpox without breaking out in a potentially deadly rash.
It's looking and feeling a lot less like Christmas in many parts of the country as higher temperatures and fewer snowfalls are becoming the norm from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve.
Looking at states that typically get snow, 197 of 260 weather stations have reported fewer days with snowfall since 1948, according to statistics provided by Dale Kaiser, a meteorologist in the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The survey looked at the 30-day period from Nov. 25 to Dec. 24 from 1948 to 2001.
Colorado State University research points to the use of sheep - instead of laboratory rats - to more accurately study the effects of menopause after several research projects verify that under induced menopause the animal experiences similar symptoms and conditions as do women. Older ewes - female sheep - experience hot flashes, eye trouble, bone density loss and other symptoms of menopause when their ovaries are removed, which means that research that would benefit menopausal and post-menopausal women, such as research about estrogen replacement therapy, osteoporosis treatments, and prevention of arthritis and sight-inhibiting changes can be conducted on ewes.
Despite greatly increasing food production for humans, the growing use of nitrogen as a nutrient is affecting people's health far beyond just the benefits of growing more crops, according to a new University of Colorado at Boulder-led study. Study leader Alan Townsend of CU-Boulder's Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research said changes in the global nitrogen cycle, while beneficial in increasing crop growth, appear to pose a growing health risk. Roughly half of the inorganic nitrogen ever used on the planet has occurred in the past 15 years.
A study published in the April 3 issue of Nature solves a longstanding mystery about elephant speeds by clocking the animals at 15 miles per hour. That's faster than reliable observations of 10 mph top speeds but slower than speculations of 25 mph. But do fast-moving elephants really "run"? Even at fast speeds, it might seem to the casual observer that elephants don't run. Their footfall pattern remains the same as that in walking, and never do all four feet leave the ground at the same time - a hallmark of running. But biomechanists are finding that an elephant's center of mass appears to bounce at high speeds. If that turns out to be true, an elephant's gait meets the biomechanical definition of running.
Researchers have conducted the most sensitive search to date for gravitational-strength forces between masses separated by only twice the diameter of a human hair, but they have observed no new forces. The results rule out a substantial portion of parameter space for new forces with a range between one-tenth and one-hundredth of a millimeter, where theoretical physicists using string theory have proposed that "moduli forces" might be detected, according to the researchers.
Many cultures have relied on driftwood as a resource, for building homes and fires, especially where other wood resources are scarce. But archaeologists have not investigated the possible extent of driftwood use by ancient cultures of the southwestern United States, until now. In a recent article in the journal Kiva, researchers report on the use of driftwood at Homol'ovi, a cluster of 14th-century Hopi villages along the Little Colorado River, near present-day Winslow, Arizona. Their findings not only document the first known reliance on driftwood by peoples of the Southwest, but point to many other implications for the archaeological record of the villages.
Eating 100 fewer calories a day?roughly three bites of a fast-food hamburger?could prevent the 1.8 to 2.0 pounds that the average person gains per year, according to new estimates by James Hill and colleagues. Their article appears in the 7 February issue of the journal Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
A team of astronomers is using one of the most advanced ground-based telescopes in the world to "zoom-in" on protostars in the Orion Nebula, revealing in unprecedented detail a variety of phenomena associated with star and planet formation in the presence of extremely massive, luminous stars. These phenomena include high-velocity jets of gas launched from the protostars themselves; evaporation flows driven by the intense radiation of nearby massive stars; and colliding winds that form thin, filamentary sheets of gas.
Rocks deposited by glaciers on mountain ranges in West Antarctica have given scientists the most direct evidence yet that parts of the ice sheet are on a long-term, natural trajectory of melting. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been melting and contributing water continuously to the ocean for the last 10,000 years and is likely to keep doing so, says John Stone, University of Washington associate professor of Earth and space sciences. Measuring and understanding changes in the Earth?s ice sheets over the past few decades, and predicting their future behavior are major challenges of modern glaciology. But it is important to view these changes in the context of what?s been happening naturally over centuries and millennia. This work establishes a background pattern of steady decline in the West Antarctic ice sheet.
Combining concepts from electromagnetic radiation research and fiber optics, researchers have created an extreme-ultraviolet, laser-like beam capable of producing tightly-focused light in a region of the electromagnetic spectrum not previously accessible to scientists. Between 10-100 times shorter than visible light waves, the extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) wavelengths will allow researchers to "see" tiny features and carve miniature patterns, with applications in such fields as microscopy, lithography and nanotechnology. The achievement is based on a new structure called a "waveguide," a hollow glass tube with internal humps that coax light waves into traveling along at the same speed and help the waves reinforce each other.
In what may be one of the most important steps in understanding sunspots since they were discovered by Chinese sky watchers more than two millennia ago, researchers have discovered that the lines of magnetic force that surge out of sunspots appear to peel apart like husk off an ear of corn as some of the lines are dragged back beneath the surface by a sort of solar quicksand. This "quicksand" and the magnetic fields it bends create the penumbrae around some sunspots, the strange rings of mid-darkness that have eluded explanation by astronomers since Galileo first sketched them. With the help of sophisticated computer models and data from solar telescopes that give spectacular views of the sun, researchers at the University of Rochester, University of Colorado, University of Cambridge, and University of Leeds have reported an answer to several mysteries of sunspots in the current issue of Nature.
All systems on NASA's Stardust spacecraft performed successfully when tested in a flyby of asteroid Annefrank on Friday, heightening anticipation for Stardust's encounter with its primary target, comet Wild 2, 14 months from now. As a bonus, Stardust discovered that Annefrank is about twice the size anticipated, but with a dimmer surface. The dimmer surface increased the challenge of sighting the object as the spacecraft approached.
The Cassini Imaging Team today is releasing a color composite image of Saturn and its moon, Titan, 20 months before the Cassini spacecraft arrives at the planet. The image is available online from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at and from the Cassini Imaging Team's University of Arizona site. The image shows the shadow of the planet falling across its famous rings and includes Saturn's largest moon, Titan.
Reddish spots on the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa may indicate pockets of warmer ice rising from below. This upwelling could provide an elevator ride to the surface for material in an ocean beneath the ice, say scientists studying data from NASA's Galileo spacecraft.
