News Articles

The explosion of a binary star inside a planetary nebula has been captured by a team of researchers – an event that has not been witnessed for more than 100 years. The study, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, predicts that the combined mass of the two stars in the system may be high enough for the stars to eventually spiral into each other, triggering an even larger supernova explosion.

Scientists are reporting the first genome-wide sequence of an extinct animal, according to Webb Miller, Penn State professor of biology, one of the project's two leaders. The animal is the woolly mammoth, an extinct species of elephant that was adapted to living in the cold environment of the northern hemisphere and they did it by sequencing four billion DNA bases using next-generation DNA-sequencing instruments and a novel approach that reads ancient DNA with high efficiency.

A ban on fast food advertisements in the United States could reduce the number of overweight children by as much as 18 percent, according to a new study being published this month in the Journal of Law and Economics. The study also reports that eliminating the tax deductibility associated with television advertising would result in a reduction of childhood obesity, though in smaller numbers. The authors found that a ban on fast food television advertisements during children's programming would reduce the number of overweight children ages 3-11 by 18 percent, while also lowering the number of overweight adolescents ages 12-18 by 14 percent. The effect is more pronounced for males than females. 

A detailed analysis of black carbon, the residue of burned organic matter,  in computer climate models suggests they may be overestimating global warming predictions.  A new Cornell study in Nature Geosciences quantified the amount of black carbon in Australian soils and found that there was far more than expected, said Johannes Lehmann, the paper's lead author and a Cornell professor of biogeochemistry. The survey was the largest of black carbon ever published.

Analysis of newly revealed items found at the site of what is believed to be the mausoleum of King Herod at Herodium (Herodion in Greek) have provided Hebrew University of Jerusalem archaeological researchers with more evidence affirming that this was indeed the site of the famed ruler's 1st century B.C.E. grave.Herod was the Roman-appointed king of Judea from 37 to 4 B.C.E., who was renowned for his many monumental building projects, including the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the palace at Masada, the harbor and city of Caesarea, as well as the palatial complex at Herodium, 15 kilometers south of Jerusalem. 

The first tissue-engineered trachea (windpipe), utilizing the patient's own stem cells, has been successfully transplanted into a young woman with a failing airway. The bioengineered trachea immediately provided the patient with a normally functioning airway, thereby saving her life. These remarkable results provide crucial new evidence that adult stem cells, combined with biologically compatible materials, can offer genuine solutions to other serious illnesses.

Global land use patterns and increasing pressures on water resources demand creative urban stormwater management. Traditional stormwater management focuses on regulating the flow of runoff to waterways, but generally does little to restore the hydrologic cycle disrupted by extensive pavement and compacted urban soils with low permeability. The lack of infiltration opportunities affects groundwater recharge and has negative repercussions on water quality downstream.

One of the biggest threats to today's farmlands is the loss of soil organic carbon (SOC) and soil organic matter (SOM) from poor land-management practices. The presence of these materials is essential as they do everything from providing plants with proper nutrients to filtering harmful chemical compounds to the prevention of soil erosion. Sustainable management practices for crop residues are critical for maintaining soil productivity, but being able to measure a loss in the quality of soil can be difficult.

In contrast to recent findings, two of the most common medications used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) do not appear to cause genetic damage in children who take them as prescribed, according to a new study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Duke University Medical Center.ADHD is a disorder characterized by attention problems, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. About 3 percent of children in the United States have been diagnosed with the disorder, although some studies suggest 7 to 12 percent of children may be affected.

We don't have ten years, as Al Gore predicted in 2006, dangerous levels of carbon dioxide are already here, say 10 scientists, and the level of globe-warming carbon dioxide in the air has probably already reached a point where world climate will change disastrously unless the level can be reduced in coming decades. Their new study is markedly different from consensus projections that carbon dioxide levels would become critical later this century.   They publish their new estimates in the current edition of the Open Atmospheric Science Journal.

A new study by researchers at the Bradley Hasbro Children's Research Center suggests that the incidence of heterosexual anal sex is increasing among teens and young adults – particularly those who have recently had unprotected vaginal sex. These findings mirror recent data that show anal sex rates among adults doubled between the years 1995 and 2004.The study, published online by the American Journal of Public Health, is among the first to report on the little-known factors associated with heterosexual anal intercourse among adolescents and young adults.

by Diane Banegas, National Science FoundationResearchers at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities are studying a remarkable species of bacteria, Geobacter sulfurreducens, that produces electric current when attached to a graphite electrode or other conductive surface.Geobacter's current capability already has been harnessed in so-called "microbial fuel cells" that use bacteria to convert wastewater organic compounds into electricity. Daniel Bond, a microbiologist at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and his team have demonstrated the same phenomenon can be harnessed for use in batteries and biosensors.