News Articles

It's said that being an astronaut is no longer a bold endeavor. The job works program nature of NASA and a no-risk approach to missions by government has meant a drop in prestige among the public. It used to be risky and that captured the public's imagination.
Some day, if presidents stop canceling the space programs of their predecessors, man may leave orbit again, and astronauts will gain some new respect, because even if the mission is successful astronauts are paying a price - their cells are aging faster in microgravity.

Head Start, the nation's largest federally funded early childhood education program, which serves nearly one million low-income children, has a problem.
Women employed under the program report higher than expected levels of physical and mental health problems, according to scholars who created the first-ever survey conducted on the health of Head Start staff. 
The anonymous, online survey of staff working in 66 Pennsylvania Head Start programs. Of those who participated in the survey, the researchers focused on 2,122 female respondents, which included managers and classroom teachers of three and four year olds, as well as those making home visits to families of infants and toddlers participating in Early Head Start.

A new paper says that unpredictability is a consistent trait in the animal world, just like it is humans.
Anyone who owns a cat knows that, right?
Not really. Though animals are known to show consistent individual differences in behavior, and pet owners may refer to it as them displaying 'personality', a new paper refutes prior beliefs and says that some individual animals, just like humans, are consistently more unpredictable than others over time.
Unpredictability is a known and accepted aspect of human behavior much like we've always viewed predictable aspects of personality. However, until now it has never been studied in animals, the authors say.

A team of international scientists has isolated a very close relative of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) from horseshoe bats in China, confirming them as the origin of the virus responsible for the 2002-3 pandemi, which killed 774 people of the 8094 people infected and led to diagnosed cases across the world, impacting international travel and trade.

Wind farms can be part of our future energy mix assuming the cost of offshore turbine energy versus their efficiency can be made manageable. A new computer projection found a better way to arrange the turbines is a step in the right direction. A team from the University of Delaware found that staggering and spacing out turbines in an offshore wind farm can improve performance by as much as 33 percent. 

A team of psychologists have determined that stress eating is more of a yo-yo than a simple pattern; they say stress eaters show a dynamic pattern of eating behavior that could have benefits in non-stressful situations. 

A brain imaging study says that babies can learn lullabies while still in utero.
The paper focused on 24 women during the final trimester of their pregnancies. Half of the women played the melody of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to their babies five days a week for the final stages of their pregnancies. 
The brains of the babies who heard the melody while in the womb reacted more strongly to the familiar melody both immediately and four months after birth when compared with the control group. The authors conclude that fetuses can recognize and remember sounds from the outside world well before they are born.  

Both drug-eluting stents (DES) with biocompatible polymers and DES with biodegradable polymers were associated with low major adverse coronary events, demonstrating the non-inferiority of the biocompatible polymer stents in patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).
The findings of the SORT-OUT VI trial were presented today at the 25th annual Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) scientific symposium. Sponsored by the Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF), TCT is the world's premier educational meeting specializing in interventional cardiovascular medicine.

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is a brain cancer that kills approximately 13,000 Americans a year. It is aggressive and incurable.
A research team has demonstrated delivery of a therapeutic delivered using nanotechnology that turns off a critical gene in this complex cancer, increasing survival rates significantly - in animals.
The drug is designed to target a specific cancer-causing gene in cells. The drug simply flips the switch of the troublesome oncogene to "off," silencing the gene, which knocks out the proteins that keep cancer cells immortal. 

Kepler-78b is a planet that shouldn't exist because the blazing hot lava world circles its star every 8.5 hours at a distance of less than one million miles - one of the tightest known orbits. According to current beliefs about planet formation, it couldn't have formed so close to its star, nor could it have moved there.
Kepler-78b a mystery world. And it is doomed. 

A newly discovered planet, Kepler-78b, is in the constellation of Cygnus but it's a lot like Earth. If Earth were 2,000 degrees hotter and orbited the sun every 8 hours. But otherwise it is a lot like our planet, about 20% larger and 169% of our mass, and that makes it the smallest exoplanet to-date that has a confirmed mass and radius. The size is about the same, the density is about the same - and that's part of the mystery. How did it form so close to its star?

The sun emitted another significant solar flare, peaking at 5:54 p.m. on Oct. 29th, 2013  – the fourth X-class flare in the last week.
Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation and while the radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, when intense enough they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. The disruption to radio signals occurs for as long as the flare is ongoing, anywhere from minutes to hours.
This flare is classified as an X2.3 class flare. "X-class" denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, etc.