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In 1991, the Pinatubo volcano eruption was a disaster for the Philippines and the effects were noticed across the world - it threw tons of ash and other particles into the atmosphere, which caused less sunlight to reach the Earth's surface. Global temperatures dropped by half a degree for years after that.
Clearly, volcanic eruptions can have a strong short-term impact on climate but a group of researchers are delighting doomsday believers by contending climate change will have an impact on volcanic eruptions. The researchers from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and Harvard University say they have strong evidence by using models of major volcanic eruptions around the Pacific Ocean over the past 1 million years.

Collagen, the most abundant protein in the body, is widely used to build scaffolds for tissue engineering because it is biocompatible and biodegradable. Collagen is, however, hard to work with in its natural form because it is largely insoluble in water, and common processing techniques reduce its strength and disrupt its fibrous structure.

Researchers have fabricated an artificial protein in the laboratory and examined the ways living cells respond to it. 

Can social networks determine which students need the most help and which ones excel and might be guided to further study or careers in that subject area?  Information Systems graduates say they can do it.

Our ability to imitate facial expressions depends on learning and visual feedback, say psychologists. Marketing people knew that already. The 'chameleon effect' is commonly used in interpersonal negotiations because imitating another person's postures and expressions is an important social lubricant.
How do we learn to imitate with accuracy when we can't see our own facial expressions and we can't feel the facial expressions of others?

Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine physician at U.C. Davis, says more restricting of gun purchases will prevent mentally ill people from engaging in future firearm violence, including mass shooting catastrophes such as those that occurred at Newtown, Connecticut, Virginia Tech in Virginia and Aurora and Columbine in Colorado - though those incidents had little in common except mental illness by the murderers.

A piranha's specialized jaw morphology and mean nature allow them to be in an extreme biting Hall of Fame.  And it isn't a new development.  While
Serrasalmus rhombeus, the black piranha, is a contender for most powerful bite for its size today, an ancient relative of piranhas,
Megapiranha paranensis, which weighed only about 20 pounds, delivered a bite with greater force more fierce than prehistoric whale-eating sharks, the four-ton ocean-dwelling Dunkleosteus terrelli and even Tyrannosaurus rex.
Modern piranhas can tear through soft tissue but Megapiranha paranensis was able to pierce thick shells and crack armoring and bones, according to Stephanie Crofts, a University of Washington doctoral student in biology.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has reviewed field performance data of the BOVIGAM(R)Interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma) test and recommended such tests for inclusion in the official list of stand-alone tests for bovine tuberculosis (TB). BOVIGAM is currently widely used as a supplementary test in addition to skin testing. The Prionics company believes the positive EFSA opinion will lead to the use of BOVIGAM as a stand-alone TB test in the European Union. 

Health Robotics has informed customers it will raise prices so as to be able to fully comply with The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), including health insurance benefits for its USA-based employees.  The price increases will apply to both commercial and non-profit customers.

Shocks to your metabolism are a good thing but you can't let them be persistent.  
People who are jet-lagged,  work graveyard shifts and late-night snackers are engaging in activities that upset the body's "food clock," a collection of interacting genes and molecules known technically as the food-entrainable oscillator, which keeps the human body on a metabolic even keel.  That happens with binge eating during the holidays too.

In classical physics, phase space trajectories give rise to flow-fields representing the dynamics of the system along its trajectories; they yield additional insight into a system's behavior.Quantum theory phase space trajectories do not exist because Heisenberg's uncertainty principle does not allow for the formation of sharply defined trajectories. But quantum physicists have not given up entirely on phase space, and so the study of the next best thing, the movement of quantum physics' phase space-based probability distributions, has actually boomed in recent years.

Ambulatory health care took off in the 1980s as the cost of health care rose, more people got health insurance, and both the government and health insurers sought to contain the runaway costs associated with hospital visits by keeping people out of hospitals.