News Articles

Scientists have discovered a deep ocean current with a volume equivalent to 40 Amazon Rivers near the Kerguelen plateau, in the Indian Ocean sector of the Southern Ocean.Writing in Nature Geoscience, the researchers say the current – more than three kilometers below the Ocean's surface – is an important pathway in a global network of ocean currents that influence climate patterns.While earlier expeditions had detected evidence of the current system, they were not able to determine how much water the current carried. The new experiment deployed current-meter moorings anchored to the sea floor at depths of up to 4500m. Each mooring reached from the sea floor to a depth of 1000m and measured current speed, temperature and salinity for a two-year period.

A study in Applied and Environmental Microbiology suggests that bacteria common to spacecraft may be able to survive the harsh conditions on Mars long enough to inadvertently contaminate the planet with terrestrial life.Despite sterilization efforts made to reduce the bioload on spacecraft, recent research has shown that diverse microbial communities remain at the time of launch, including acinetobacter, bacillus, escherichia, staphylococcus and streptococcus.

The fossilized jaw of a 95 million-year-old pterosaur discovered in Texas in 2006 has been identified as a new genus and species of flying reptile - Aetodactylus halli.The rare pterosaur — literally a winged lizard — is also one of the youngest members in the world of the family Ornithocheiridae, and only the second ornithocheirid ever documented in North America.The newly-named lizard is described in the Journal of vertebrate Paleontology.

A long lost light reflector left on the lunar surface by the Soviet Union nearly 40 years ago has been found by a team of NASA physicists. The French-built laser reflector was sent aboard the unmanned Luna 17 mission, which landed on the moon November 17, 1970, releasing a robotic rover that roamed the lunar surface and carried the missing laser reflector. The Soviet lander and its rover, called Lunokhod 1, were last heard from on September 14, 1971.

Researchers have developed and tested a modified enzyme called CocE that can break down cocaine into inactive products nearly 1,000 times faster than the human body does regularly. In combination with previous studies that demonstrate CocE's effectiveness in rodent models, the new results suggest that CocE may be a good candidate for clinical treatment of cocaine toxicity. The research was presented at the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics annual meeting on April 25.

Scientists have discovered a series of 400,000-year-old asphalt volcanoes about 10 miles off the California coast, at the bottom of the Santa Barbara Channel.The largest of these undersea Ice Age domes lies at a depth of 700 feet (220 meters), too deep for scuba diving, which explains why the volcanoes have never before been spotted by humans. The discovery is documented this week in Nature Geoscience."They're larger than a football-field-long and as tall as a six-story building," says David Valentine, a geoscientist at University of California, Santa Barbara. "They're massive features, and are made completely out of asphalt."

If you find politically vocal celebrities annoying, you may be able to take comfort in new research  which suggests that movie stars are unlikely to influence the outcome of political elections. Two new studies from North Carolina State University show that young voters are not swayed by celebrity endorsements of political candidates – and sometimes voters like the candidate less as a result of receiving a celebrity's endorsement. God bless America's young people. The research was presented April 22 at the 68th Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago.

Regular aerobic exercise keeps you physically healthy, but scientists are beginning to uncover evidence that it may also improve your cognition. Researchers writing in Neuroscience say they have found that regular exercise speeds learning and improves blood flow to the brain.While there is ample evidence of the beneficial effects of exercise on cognition in animal models, it has been unclear whether the same holds true for humans. The new study tested the hypothesis in monkeys and provides information that is more comparable to human physiology as a result.

The idea that the blind have a more acute sense of smell than the sighted is a myth, according to an ongoing study at the Université de Montréal. Vision loss doesn't enhance the sense of smell, researchers say, blind people just pay more attention to how they perceive smells."If you enter a room in which coffee is brewing, you will quickly look for the coffee machine. The blind person entering the same room will only have the smell of coffee as information," says Mathilde Beaulieu-Lefebvre, a graduate student at the Université de Montréal Department of Psychology. "That smell will therefore become very important for their spatial representation."

If you thought that rapid and potentially catastrophic climate change was all bad, think again. High in the Mackenzie Mountains in Canada, a treasure trove of ancient hunting tools is being revealed as warming temperatures melt patches of ice that have been in place for thousands of years.Ice patches are accumulations of annual snow that, until recently, remained frozen all year. For millennia, caribou seeking relief from summer heat and insects have made their way to ice patches where they bed down until cooler temperatures prevail. Hunters noticed caribou were, in effect, marooned on these ice islands and took advantage.

Consumption of 100 percent fruit juice is closely linked to improved nutrient intake and overall diet quality in children, according to the PR firm for the makers of apple juice.Despite the fact that fruit juice is nutritionally very similar to soda, two new studies from the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center and Baylor College of Medicine clearly highlight the benefits of drinking 100 percent fruit juice, say the people who want to sell more juice.

A new study in Nature Geoscience suggests that as global temperatures increase, microbes in soil become less efficient over time at converting carbon in soil into carbon dioxide, a key contributor to climate warming.The results contradict those of earlier studies that assume microbes will continue to spew ever-increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the climate continues to warm. If microbial efficiency declines in a warmer world, carbon dioxide emissions will fall back to pre-warming levels, a pattern seen in field experiments. But if microbes manage to adapt to the warmth – for instance, through increased enzyme activity – emissions could intensify.