Findings of UCLA study hold promise for fight against diabetes.

Simply put, people develop diabetes because they don't have enough pancreatic beta cells to produce the insulin necessary to regulate their blood sugar levels.

But what if other cells in the body could be coaxed into becoming pancreatic beta cells? Could we potentially cure diabetes?

Researchers from UCLA's Larry L. Hillblom Islet Research Center have taken an important step in that direction. They report in the April issue of the journal Developmental Cell that they may have discovered the underlying mechanism that could convert other cell types into pancreatic beta cells.

While the current standard of treatment for diabetes - insulin therapy - helps patients maintain sugar levels, it isn't perfect, and many patients remain at high risk of developing a variety of medical complications. Replenishing lost beta cells could serve as a more permanent solution, both for those who have lost such cells due to an immune assault (Type 1 diabetes) and those who acquire diabetes later in life due to insulin resistance (Type 2).

"Our work shows that beta cells and related endocrine cells can easily be converted into each other," said study co-author Dr. Anil Bhushan, an associate professor of medicine in the endocrinology division at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and in the UCLA Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology.

The report this story is based on is available online here.

The massive subduction zone earthquake in Japan caused a significant level of soil "liquefaction" that has surprised researchers with its widespread severity, a new analysis shows.

The findings also raise questions about whether existing building codes and engineering technologies are adequately accounting for this phenomenon in other vulnerable locations, which in the U.S. include Portland, Ore., parts of the Willamette Valley and other areas of Oregon, Washington and California.

A preliminary report about some of the damage in Japan has just been concluded by the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance, or GEER advance team, in work supported by the National Science Foundation.

The broad geographic extent of the liquefaction over hundreds of miles was daunting to experienced engineers who are accustomed to seeing disaster sites, including the recent earthquakes in Chile and New Zealand.

"We've seen localized examples of soil liquefaction as extreme as this before, but the distance and extent of damage in Japan were unusually severe," said Scott Ashford, a professor of geotechnical engineering at Oregon State University and a member of this research team.

Proving that the FIRST program is much more than games of robotic awesomeness, a team of Girl Scouts in Iowa engineered a prosthetic device that allowed a Georgia toddler to write for the first time. The device won an inaugural X Prize Global Innovation Award and the team has applied for a patent.

The Flying Monkeys robotics team from Ames, Iowa, developed a prosthetic tool for a 3-year-old girl who was born without fingers on her dominant hand. The device, called the BOB-1, allowed young Danielle to hold a pencil and draw for the first time, according to the Girl Scouts. The team hopes the invention could help others with hand abnormalities or injuries hold and stabilize a wide range of items.

The Flying Monkeys, who are all between 11 and 13 years old, built the BOB-1 as part of the FIRST Lego League, a robotics competition for middle school students. One of the team members has a limb deficiency that inspired their work.

The Girl Scouts visited a prosthetics manufacturer and an occupational therapist to learn about existing prosthetics, and they learned they're expensive and cumbersome, so they wanted to build something that was simple to put on and use. The BOB-1 involves a plastic platform attached to a user's arm, with a perpendicular piece that can grip a pencil or another utensil.

This amazing image shows Jupiter's Great Red Spot in unprecedented detail.

Collated from data gathered over 30 years ago, the recently completed image has undergone digital enhancement.

Now it is possible to clearly see the Great Red Spot, a hurricane twice the size of Earth that has been raging for longer than telescopes have been able to view it.

The image data was taken by Voyager 1 during a fly-by in 1979.

Nasa launched Voyager 1 in 1977 and, 34 years later, it is currently making its way towards the outer edges of our solar system.

In modern ecology, the removal or addition of a predator to an ecosystem can produce dramatic changes in the population of prey species. For the first time, scientists have observed the same dynamics in the fossil record, thanks to a mass extinction that decimated ocean life 360 million years ago.

What was bad for fish was good for the fish's food, according to a paper published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers from the University of Chicago, West Virginia University, and The Ohio State University find that the mass extinction known as the Hangenberg event produced a "natural experiment" in the fossil record with results that mirror modern observations about predator-prey relationships.

"This is the first time that specific, long-term predator-prey interactions have been seen in the fossil record," said Lauren Sallan, graduate student in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago and lead author. "It tells us a lot about the recovery from mass extinctions, especially mass extinctions that involved a loss of predators."

Paleontologists know the Devonian Period, which spanned from 416 to 359 million years ago, as the Age of Fishes, a time of astonishing diversity for marine vertebrate species. That thriving world was devastated by the Hangenberg event, a mass extinction of unknown origin that set the stage for modern biodiversity.

But some species survived the carnage of the Hangenberg event. The next 15 million years in the fossil record are dominated by crinoids, species similar to modern sea lilies and related to starfish. So abundant and diverse were these marine animals that the period is known as the Age of the Crinoids; entire limestone deposits from the era are made up of crinoid fossils.

Harvesting of a parasitic fungus that grows high on the Tibetan Plateau in China is infusing hordes of cash into rural communities, scientists say.
The fungus, Ophiocordyceps sinensis, takes over the bodies of caterpillar larvae then shoots up like finger-size blades of grass out of the dead insects' heads.

Known as yartsa gunbu - or "summer grass winter worm" - by Chinese consumers, the nutty-tasting fungus is highly valued for its purported medicinal benefits, for instance, as a treatment for cancer and aging and as a libido booster. Far away in the booming cities of Beijing and Shanghai, demand for the fungus has soared.

"Medically, it seems to deliver," according to Daniel Winkler, a fungus researcher and head of Eco-Montane Consulting in Seattle, Washington.

"Even the whole thing that it's an aphrodisiac - yes, it might really help."

Some Chinese grind up the fungus and sell it as a powder, and others use it whole as a garnish - and therefore a display of wealth.

Green flashes from the Sun at sunset are a rare phenomenon, but even rarer are green flashes from a setting Moon. With the unique atmospheric conditions at Cerro Paranal in Chile, a photographer from ESO's Very Large Telescope managed to what are likely the best images ever taken of the Moon's green flash. ESO Photo Ambassador Gerhard Hüdepohl took a series of images of the setting full Moon crossing the horizon, taken on a clear early morning from the Paranal Residencia.

What happens that makes the green flashes appear?

The Earth's atmosphere bends, or refracts, light, like a giant prism. The effect is greater in the lower denser layers of the atmosphere, so rays of light from the Sun or Moon are curved slightly downwards. Shorter wavelengths of light are bent more than longer wavelengths, so that the green light from the Sun or Moon appears to be coming from a slightly higher position than the orange and red light, from the point of view of an observer. When the conditions are just right, with an additional mirage effect due to the temperature gradient in the atmosphere, the elusive green flash is briefly visible at the upper edge of the solar or lunar disc when it is close to the horizon.

An unexpectedly bright asteroid that sported short-lived plumes had collided with a smaller body, scientists have said.

The aftermath of the impact on Scheila was first spotted by the University of Arrizona's Catalina Sky Survey on December 11 last year.

It revealed Scheila to be twice as bright as expected and immersed in a faint comet-like glow.

Looking through the survey's archived images, astronomers inferred the outburst began between November 11 and December 3.

Data from Nasa's Swift satellite and Hubble Space Telescope then showed these changes likely occurred after Scheila was struck by a much smaller asteroid.

'Collisions between asteroids create rock fragments, from fine dust to huge boulders, that impact planets and their moons,' said lead Swift researcher Dennis Bodewits, from the University of Maryland.

'Yet this is the first time we've been able to catch one just weeks after the smash-up, long before the evidence fades away.'

Asteroids are rocky fragments thought to be debris from the formation and evolution of the solar system approximately 4.6billion years ago.

A team of scientists led by Rice University has figured out why the Colorado Plateau -- a 130,000-square-mile region that straddles Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico -- is rising even while parts of its lower crust appear to be falling. The massive, tectonically stable region of the western United States has long puzzled geologists.

A paper published April 27 in the journal Nature shows how magmatic material from the depths slowly rises to invade the lithosphere -- Earth's crust and strong uppermost mantle. This movement forces layers to peel away and sink, said lead author Alan Levander, professor and the Carey Croneis Chair in Geology at Rice University.

The invading asthenosphere is two-faced. Deep in the upper mantle, between about 60 and 185 miles down, it's usually slightly less dense and much less viscous than the overlying mantle lithosphere of the tectonic plates; the plates there can move over its malleable surface.

But when the asthenosphere finds a means to, it can invade the lithosphere and erode it from the bottom up. The partially molten material expands and cools as it flows upward. It infiltrates the stronger lithosphere, where it solidifies and makes the brittle crust and uppermost mantle heavy enough to break away and sink. The buoyant asthenosphere then fills the space left above, where it expands and thus lifts the plateau.

Girls really do prefer pink - and not just because it is pretty.

Scientists have shown that females are drawn to pinks and reds and men to blues and greens - and they believe the explanation lies our hunter-gatherer past.

As the gatherers of the operation, women's brains became fine-tuned to the purples and reds of ripe fruits and berries.

The men, meanwhile, developed a preference for the clear blue skies that signalled good weather for hunting.

The theory comes from Chinese scientists who asked more than 350 students to study 11 colours for three minutes and then rank them in order of preference.

The students also underwent personality tests.