Science

Global ocean surface temperature fifth warmest

November 17, 2009 -- The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the sixth warmest October on record, according to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. Based on records going back to 1880, the monthly National Climatic Data Center analysis is part of the suite of climate services NOAA provides.

NCDC scientists reported that the average land surface temperature for October was also the sixth warmest on record. Additionally, the global ocean surface temperature was the fifth warmest on record for October.
Global Temperature Highlights    » read more »

Nov. 17, 2009 -- WASHINGTON -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or Wise, is chilled out, sporting a sunshade and getting ready to roll. NASA's newest spacecraft is scheduled to roll to the pad on Friday, Nov. 20, its last stop before launching into space to survey the entire sky in infrared light.

Wise is scheduled to launch no earlier than 9:09 a.m. EST on Dec. 9 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It will circle Earth over the poles, scanning the entire sky one-and-a-half times in nine months. The mission will uncover hidden cosmic objects, including the coolest stars, dark asteroids and the most luminous galaxies.    » read more »

November 18, 2009 -- If you’re watching the complex processes in a living cell, it is easy to miss something important—especially if you are watching changes that take a long time to unfold and require high-spatial-resolution imaging. But new research* makes it possible to scrutinize activities that occur over hours or even days inside cells, potentially solving many of the mysteries associated with molecular-scale events occurring in these tiny living things.    » read more »

Just the Beginning of a Sustained Commitment to Science

November 17, 2009 -- Washington, D.C. – Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Congressman Rush Holt, Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon, Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming Chairman Edward Markey, Congressman Bill Foster, and Robert Shelton, President of the University of Arizona, held a press conference this afternoon to highlight the benefits of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to the science and research community.

The Recovery Act provided $22 billion for scientific research and development at universities, to establish new facilities, and to purchase lab equipment. Below are the Speaker’s remarks as prepared:    » read more »

Six-core upgrade has 70 percent more computational muscle than last year’s quad-core

November 16, 2009 -- Washington, DC —An upgrade to a Cray XT5 high-performance computing system deployed by the Department of Energy has made the “Jaguar” supercomputer the world’s fastest. Located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Jaguar is the scientific research community’s most powerful computational tool for exploring solutions to some of today’s most difficult problems.

The upgrade, funded with $19.9 million under the Recovery Act, will enable scientific simulations for exploring solutions to climate change and the development of new energy technologies.    » read more »

Nov. 16, 2009 -- WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a second national strategies workshop to examine the impacts of climate change and extreme weather variability on native peoples and their homelands. The workshop, which will study the impacts from an indigenous cultural, spiritual and scientific perspective, will take place Nov. 18 - 21 at the Mystic Lake Casino Hotel in Prior Lake, Minn.

"This workshop will bring native indigenous knowledge together with science, education, and technologies to address the challenges of climate and environmental change," said Nancy Maynard of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.    » read more »

November 17, 2009 -- The current pandemic of H1N1 influenza highlights vulnerabilities in the world’s plans for dealing with widespread health emergencies, but also offers opportunities to better prepare for more deadly epidemics that will surely arise in the future, experts said at a recent symposium held in New York City.

The 16 October meeting, sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and the journal Science, brought together experts on science, economics, public health and foreign relations to assess the impact of the flu pandemic and future implications.    » read more »

November 16, 2009 -- BOULDER, Colo.— Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated the first “universal” programmable quantum information processor able to run any program allowed by quantum mechanics—the rules governing the submicroscopic world—using two quantum bits (qubits) of information. The processor could be a module in a future quantum computer, which theoretically could solve some important problems that are intractable today.    » read more »

Nov. 13, 2009 -- MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. -- Preliminary data from NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates the mission successfully uncovered water in a permanently shadowed lunar crater. The discovery opens a new chapter in our understanding of the moon.

The LCROSS spacecraft and a companion rocket stage made twin impacts in the Cabeus crater Oct. 9 that created a plume of material from the bottom of a crater that has not seen sunlight in billions of years. The plume traveled at a high angle beyond the rim of Cabeus and into sunlight, while an additional curtain of debris was ejected more laterally.    » read more »

12 November 2009 -- Pinpointing obesity triggers in humans is hard because of uncontrollable genetic, cultural, and environmental factors. Recent studies have thrown another element into the mix: the microbiota—a distinct community of microorganisms that reside in the human gut and play an active role in its environment.

This “living organ” is composed of billions of bacteria that provide a variety of valuable functions to its human hosts, such as degrading and promoting the absorption of food that would otherwise be indigestible.    » read more »

A domain of the NR2B subunit of the NMDA receptor is mapped in exquisite detail

November 13, 2009 --
Cold Spring Harbor, NY -- A team of scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) reports on Thursday their success in solving the molecular structure of a key portion of a cellular receptor implicated in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other serious illnesses.

Assistant Professor Hiro Furukawa, Ph.D., and colleagues at CSHL, in cooperation with the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory, obtained crystal structures for one of several "subunits" of the NMDA receptor. This receptor, formally called the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor, belongs to a family of cellular receptors that mediate excitatory nerve transmission in the brain.    » read more »

By applying just the right compression to thin films of bismuth ferrite, Berkeley Lab researchers have produced a lead-free alternative to the current crop of piezoelectric materials.

November 13, 2009 -- BERKELEY, CA - There is good news for the global effort to reduce the amount of lead in the environment and for the growing array of technologies that rely upon the piezoelectric effect. A lead-free alternative to the current crop of piezoelectric materials has been identified by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC), Berkeley.    » read more »

State’s Supercomputer enables Projects Eligibility for Funding

November 13, 2009 -- SANTA FE -- New Mexico Governor Richardson today announced that the National Science Foundation has awarded the University of New Mexico $41M for collaborative projects involving the state’s supercomputer, Encanto.

The New Mexico Computing Applications Center, which oversees Encanto, is under contract for $5.3 million in support of those grants. The awards will provide funding over a five-year period to the supercomputing center.    » read more »

Five Main Research Centers Will Drive Scientific Innovation

November 09, 2009 -- NEW YORK -- Pfizer Inc today announced its global research and development network, marking an important step in implementing a new R&D model as part of the integration of Pfizer and Wyeth. This global network brings together scientific strengths from both companies, continues efforts to increase research productivity, focuses disease-area research in single locations and more efficiently uses the company’s real estate.    » read more »

Philadelphia, PA (November 11, 2009) – Results from a large, retrospective analysis of inmates with a serious mental illness (SMI) underscores the financial burden of mental illness on the criminal justice and health and human services (HHS) systems, and may provide useful information to policy makers. The results of the analysis, which evaluated patterns of arrest, utilization of services, and corresponding expenditures among nearly 3,800 inmates in a large urban county of Florida, were presented this week at the 137th American Public Health Association (APHA) Annual Meeting & Exposition.    » read more »