Scientists have reported that an experimental vaccine targeting one of the most common genetic drivers of pancreatic cancer, called mutant KRAS, is safe and generated a durable immune responses aimed at preventing the cancer.
Earth's radiation belts, called Van Allen belts, were discovered after the very first launches of satellites in 1958 by James Van Allen. Subsequent missions have observed parts of the belts but what causes such dynamic variation in the belts has remained something of a mystery. Seemingly similar storms from the sun have at times caused completely different effects in the belts, or have sometimes led to no change at all.
Researchers usingt the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia say they have discovered an important pair of prebiotic molecules in interstellar space. The discoveries indicate that some basic chemicals that are key steps on the way to life may have formed on dusty ice grains floating between the stars.
Researchers have electronically linked the brains of pairs of rats, enabling them to communicate directly to solve simple behavioral puzzles - even thousands of miles apart, one in Durham, N.C., and one in Natal, Brazil.
The results of these projects suggest the future potential for linking multiple brains to form what the research team is calling an "organic computer," which could allow sharing of motor and sensory information among groups of animals.
Light from two massive stars that exploded hundreds of millions of years ago recently reached Earth, and each event was identified as a supernova. A supernova discovered Feb. 6th exploded about 450 million years ago while the second, discovered Nov. 20th, 2012, exploded about 230 million years ago.
For a government that likes military action but not losing American lives, drones are the next big thing. Drones have been, and will continue to be, used in more and more applications outside the military, including citizen surveillance and natural disaster research.
But military spending is what is driving optimization and the U.S. Department of Defense reports that drone accidents happen 50 times more often than mishaps involving human-operated aircraft. The U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps reported 43 mishaps that involved human factors issues associated with drone ground control workstations and technology during the years 2006 and 2007.
Chronic or acute liver failure can be deadly. Toxins take over, the skin turns yellow and higher brain function slows. A line of special liver cells could change that, says Neil Talbot, a Research Animal Scientist for the USDA Agricultural Research Service, in an interview with the American Society of Animal Science.
Astronomers using new data from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array - NuSTAR - and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray satellites have measured the supermassive black hole at the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 1365, more than 2 million miles across, and discover it is spinning so fast that its surface is traveling at nearly the speed of light.
A black hole's gravity is so strong that, as the black hole spins, it drags the surrounding space along. The edge of this spinning hole is called the event horizon. Any material crossing the event horizon is pulled into the black hole. Inspiraling matter collects into an accretion disk, where friction heats it and causes it to emit X-rays.
America leads the world in science and Nobel prizes but we may never compete in men's soccer. The reason may be because men are too smart to hit things with their heads. A paper on the effects of young women who hit things with their heads is why.
The ongoing effects of a boxer hitting you in the head (bad) or Ronda Rousey arm-barring you into unconsciousness (kind of awesome - once, anyway) would seem obvious but a new paper says even less forceful actions, like 'heading' a soccer ball, can lead to changes in performance on certain cognitive tasks. It may be the American academia is out to kill sports. With science saying hockey and football are also bad for brains, and psychologists claiming competition hurts psyches, our future looks bleak.
A new paper says a hockey player's birthday strongly biases how professional teams assess his talent.
The authors found that, on average, National Hockey League (NHL) draftees born between July and December are much more likely than those born in the first three months of the year to have successful careers. In particular, 34 percent of draftees were born in the last six months of the year, but these individuals played 42 percent of the games and scored 44 percent of the points accumulated by those in the study. By contrast, those born in the first three months of the year constituted 36 percent of draftees but only played 28 percent of the games and only scored 25 percent of the points.
The presence of an animal can significantly increase positive social behaviors in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), according to a new paper.
Obesity rates across Canada are at alarming levels and continuing to climb, according to a new paper in the Canadian Journal of Public Health, which provides the first comprehensive look at adult obesity rates across Canada since 1998 - complete with "obesity maps."
If you liked FoxTrax, that glowing hockey puck shooting around the ice during NHL games, you will love what engineers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Electro-Communications (UEC) in Tokyo have done: they put a camera inside a football.
The camera is embedded in the side of a rubber-sheathed plastic foam football can record video while the ball is in flight. Want a ball's-eye view of the playing field? Now you have it. But because a football can spin at 600 rpm, the raw video is an unwatchable blur so the researchers also developed a computer algorithm that converts the raw video into a stable, wide-angle view.
