Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/04/niall-horan-on-alleged-naked-photo-not-me/
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Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Samsung Galaxy S4 versus HTC One: The editors face off
With the release of the Samsung Galaxy S4, the Android smartphone battle lines are drawn. Samsung’s new flagship will go up against the HTC One, and it’s sure to be a fierce fight. Samsung needs to maintain the lead it established in 2012; for HTC, the future of the company depends on the success of the HTC One.
So which one should you buy? As always, it’s never as simple as recommending one device over the other. That’s why we’re launching into a little discussion with Alex and Phil, where we’ll try to spell out exactly where each device is strongest.
Join us after the break as we go back and forth on the HTC One versus Galaxy S4. There’s also a good old-fashioned video comparison, if you’re into that sort of thing.
More: Samsung Galaxy S4 review
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/Q9Tq4-60L6g/story01.htm
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Tuesday’s reads are just a click away: Rachel Zoe: The number one fashion mistake moms make — Breezy Mama 10 pregnancy photos every mom-to-be should snap — The Stir West Virginia middle schooler arrested after a confrontation over his NRA shirt — ABC News 22 adorable (and affordable!) gifts for Mother’s Day — PopSugar A [...]
Source: http://feeds.celebritybabies.com/~r/celebrity-babies/~3/WLc2A7mDfAA/
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Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Cocktail of multiple pressures combine to threaten the world's pollinating insects
Apr. 22, 2013 ? A new review of insect pollinators of crops and wild plants has concluded they are under threat globally from a cocktail of multiple pressures, and their decline or loss could have profound environmental, human health and economic consequences.
Globally, insects provide pollination services to about 75% of crop species and enable reproduction in up to 94% of wild flowering plants. Pollination services provided by insects each year worldwide are valued at over US$200 billion.
The review, published April 22,? 2013 in the scientific journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, was carried out by an international team of 40 scientists from 27 institutions involved in the UK's Insect Pollinators Initiative (IPI), a ?10M research programme investigating the causes and consequences of pollinator decline.
Dr Adam Vanbergen from the UK's Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and science coordinator of the IPI led the review. He said, "There is no single smoking gun behind pollinator declines, instead there is a cocktail of multiple pressures that can combine to threaten these insects. For example, the loss of food resources in intensively-farmed landscapes, pesticides and diseases are individually important threats, but are also likely to combine and exacerbate the negative impacts on pollinators."
The review concluded that:
- Pollinator populations are declining in many regions, threatening human food supplies and ecosystem functions
- A suite of interacting pressures are having an impact on pollinator health, abundance, and diversity. These include land-use intensification, climate change, and the spread of alien species and diseases
- A complex interplay between pressures (e.g. lack of food sources, diseases, and pesticides) and biological processes (e.g. species dispersal and interactions) at a range of scales (from genes to ecosystems) underpins the general decline in insect-pollinator populations
- Interdisciplinary research and stakeholder collaboration are needed to help unravel how these multiple pressures affect different pollinators and will provide evidence-based solutions
- Current options to alleviate the pressure on pollinators include establishment of effective habitat networks, broadening of pesticide risk assessments, and the development and introduction of innovative disease therapies
Co-author Professor Simon Potts from the University of Reading said, "Pollinators are the unsung heroes of the insect world and ensure our crops are properly pollinated so we have a secure supply of nutritious food in our shops. The costs of taking action now to tackle the multiple threats to pollinators is much smaller than the long-term costs to our food security and ecosystem stability. Failure by governments to take decisive steps now only sets us up for bigger problems in the future."
Co-author Professor Graham Stone at Edinburgh University's Institute of Evolutionary Biology said, "a major challenge is going to be understanding the whole ecosystem effects of the specific threats faced by specific pollinators. Complicated as this is, this is nevertheless what we need to do if we want to predict overall impacts on pollination services."
The Insect Pollinators Initiative (IPI) is funded jointly by the BBSRC, Defra, NERC, the Scottish Government and the Wellcome Trust, under the auspices of the Living with Environmental Change programme.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Centre for Ecology & Hydrology.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- Adam J Vanbergen, the Insect Pollinators Initiative. Threats to an ecosystem service: pressures on pollinators. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 2013; : 130422054656003 DOI: 10.1890/120126
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/7YAncCqHxr4/130422101149.htm
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AGU: Wildfires can burn hot without ruining soil, new study finds
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Public release date: 23-Apr-2013[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Peter Weiss
pweiss@agu.org
202-777-7507
American Geophysical Union
WASHINGTON - When scientists torched an entire 22-acre watershed in Portugal in a recent experiment, their research yielded a counterintuitive result: Large, hot fires do not necessarily beget hot, scorched soil.
It's well known that wildfires can leave surface soil burned and barren, which increases the risk of erosion and hinders a landscape's ability to recover. But the scientists' fiery test found that the hotter the fire-and the denser the vegetation feeding the flames-the less the underlying soil heated up, an inverse effect which runs contrary to previous studies and conventional wisdom.
Rather, the soil temperature was most affected by the fire's speed, the direction of heat travel and the landscape's initial moisture content. These new findings could help forest managers plan when and where to ignite small controlled burns to reduce dry vegetation and restore the ecosystem in at-risk areas, said Cathelijne Stoof, the soil and water scientist who led this study as part of her PhD research at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
A report about the experiment by Stoof, who is now at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and her colleagues has been accepted for publication by Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
To study the real-world effects of landscape and fire dynamics on soil temperature, the research team mapped the watershed and installed instruments before setting the test area ablaze. During the burn the scientists monitored the fire and the resulting soil temperatures. As expected, the fire was most intense in the heavily vegetated areas, but the topsoil in these regions remained "surprisingly cool" during the duration of the fire, Stoof explained.
"Vegetation is fuel, so the areas with more vegetation had more intense fire," Stoof said. "But the heavily vegetated regions also were also more moist, which protected the soil."
The areas with the hottest soil temperatures were in direct sunlight and had sparse, dry vegetation. "Because it's already dried out, it doesn't have the moisture shield that more densely vegetated areas have to preserve the soil," Stoof said.
Other, previously observed behavior of fires could also help explain the new result, Stoof added. "Fires moving fast will quickly burn up all the vegetation and also have little effect on the soil, but slow-moving fires will have much more time to heat up the soil and burn up its organic matter and seeds," she noted.
Prior to this study, most of the research concerning fire effects on soil "took place in small scale field or laboratory settings, where they only burned small plots," Stoof said. "But these plots have less variation than a real watershed. If you have homogeneous conditions, you cannot extrapolate those results to the larger scale, where fire, soil and vegetation are heterogeneous."
Fire researcher Guillermo Rein of the Imperial College, London, called the results from Stoof and her colleagues "thought-provoking." They "go against the currently prevalent theory of soil heating," he said. "This paper ought to quickly mobilize the fire science community so that this soil heating theory can be reconfirmed, refuted or reformulated."
From the new results, Stoof has devised a strategy to minimize soil damage during controlled burns. "You need to burn heterogeneous areas in two stages," Stoof said. "Burn the driest area first when it has some moisture. The damp area will be too damp, and therefore will not carry fire. Then go back and burn the damp area when it's dried out enough so that it will burn. This way you end up with minimum soil damage."
But in order to apply the results of this study universally, soil and fire scientists need to work together and study other types of landscapes, Stoof added. "We just studied one type of environment and one fire. This experiment needs to be replicated so we can understand how different vegetation and soil types are affected. If soil scientists work with fire scientists, they can predict where the damage is going to occur and put up barriers to prevent erosion, or plan prescribed burns strategically to minimize soil depletion."
###
A scholarship from the International Association of Wildland Fire and a European Commission contract funded this work.
Notes for Journalists
Journalists and public information officers (PIOs) of educational and scientific institutions who have registered with AGU can download a PDF copy of this accepted article by clicking on this link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50299/abstract
Or, you may order a copy of the final paper by emailing your request to Sarah Charley at scharley@agu.org. Please provide your name, the name of your publication, and your phone number.
Neither the paper nor this press release are under embargo.
Title:
"Hot Fire, Cool Soil"
Authors:
Cathelijne R. Stoof: Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, Land Degradation and Development Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands, and Centro de Estudos de Recursos Naturais, Ambiente e Sociedade, Escola Superior Agrria de Coimbra. Bencanta, Coimbra, Portugal;
Demie Moore: Land Degradation and Development Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands;
Paulo M. Fernandes: Centro de Investigao e de Tecnologias Agro-Ambientais e Biolgicas, Universidade de Trs-os-Montes e Alto Douro. Vila Real, Portugal;
Jetse J. Stoorvogel: Land Dynamics Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands;
Ricardo E.S. Fernandes: Gabinete Tcnico Florestal, Cmara Municipal da Lous, Rua Dr. Joo Santos, Lous, Portugal;
Antnio J.D. Ferreira: Centro de Estudos de Recursos Naturais, Ambiente e Sociedade, Escola Superior Agrria de Coimbra. Bencanta, Coimbra, Portugal;
Coen J. Ritsema: Land Degradation and Development Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands, and Soil Physics and Land Use Team, Alterra Green World Research, Wageningen UR, Wageningen, The Netherlands.
Contact information for the author:
Cathelijne Stoof, Email: Cathelijne.Stoof@cornell.edu, Phone: +1 (607)255-4992
The following news release and accompanying images can be found at http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/2013/2013-14.shtml
AGU Contacts:
Sarah Charley
+1 (202) 777-7516
scharley@agu.org
Peter Weiss
+1 (202) 777-7507
pweiss@agu.org
Cornell University Press Relations Office Contact
John Carberry
+1 (607) 255-5353
jjc338@cornell.edu
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Public release date: 23-Apr-2013[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Peter Weiss
pweiss@agu.org
202-777-7507
American Geophysical Union
WASHINGTON - When scientists torched an entire 22-acre watershed in Portugal in a recent experiment, their research yielded a counterintuitive result: Large, hot fires do not necessarily beget hot, scorched soil.
It's well known that wildfires can leave surface soil burned and barren, which increases the risk of erosion and hinders a landscape's ability to recover. But the scientists' fiery test found that the hotter the fire-and the denser the vegetation feeding the flames-the less the underlying soil heated up, an inverse effect which runs contrary to previous studies and conventional wisdom.
Rather, the soil temperature was most affected by the fire's speed, the direction of heat travel and the landscape's initial moisture content. These new findings could help forest managers plan when and where to ignite small controlled burns to reduce dry vegetation and restore the ecosystem in at-risk areas, said Cathelijne Stoof, the soil and water scientist who led this study as part of her PhD research at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
A report about the experiment by Stoof, who is now at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and her colleagues has been accepted for publication by Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
To study the real-world effects of landscape and fire dynamics on soil temperature, the research team mapped the watershed and installed instruments before setting the test area ablaze. During the burn the scientists monitored the fire and the resulting soil temperatures. As expected, the fire was most intense in the heavily vegetated areas, but the topsoil in these regions remained "surprisingly cool" during the duration of the fire, Stoof explained.
"Vegetation is fuel, so the areas with more vegetation had more intense fire," Stoof said. "But the heavily vegetated regions also were also more moist, which protected the soil."
The areas with the hottest soil temperatures were in direct sunlight and had sparse, dry vegetation. "Because it's already dried out, it doesn't have the moisture shield that more densely vegetated areas have to preserve the soil," Stoof said.
Other, previously observed behavior of fires could also help explain the new result, Stoof added. "Fires moving fast will quickly burn up all the vegetation and also have little effect on the soil, but slow-moving fires will have much more time to heat up the soil and burn up its organic matter and seeds," she noted.
Prior to this study, most of the research concerning fire effects on soil "took place in small scale field or laboratory settings, where they only burned small plots," Stoof said. "But these plots have less variation than a real watershed. If you have homogeneous conditions, you cannot extrapolate those results to the larger scale, where fire, soil and vegetation are heterogeneous."
Fire researcher Guillermo Rein of the Imperial College, London, called the results from Stoof and her colleagues "thought-provoking." They "go against the currently prevalent theory of soil heating," he said. "This paper ought to quickly mobilize the fire science community so that this soil heating theory can be reconfirmed, refuted or reformulated."
From the new results, Stoof has devised a strategy to minimize soil damage during controlled burns. "You need to burn heterogeneous areas in two stages," Stoof said. "Burn the driest area first when it has some moisture. The damp area will be too damp, and therefore will not carry fire. Then go back and burn the damp area when it's dried out enough so that it will burn. This way you end up with minimum soil damage."
But in order to apply the results of this study universally, soil and fire scientists need to work together and study other types of landscapes, Stoof added. "We just studied one type of environment and one fire. This experiment needs to be replicated so we can understand how different vegetation and soil types are affected. If soil scientists work with fire scientists, they can predict where the damage is going to occur and put up barriers to prevent erosion, or plan prescribed burns strategically to minimize soil depletion."
###
A scholarship from the International Association of Wildland Fire and a European Commission contract funded this work.
Notes for Journalists
Journalists and public information officers (PIOs) of educational and scientific institutions who have registered with AGU can download a PDF copy of this accepted article by clicking on this link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50299/abstract
Or, you may order a copy of the final paper by emailing your request to Sarah Charley at scharley@agu.org. Please provide your name, the name of your publication, and your phone number.
Neither the paper nor this press release are under embargo.
Title:
"Hot Fire, Cool Soil"
Authors:
Cathelijne R. Stoof: Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, Land Degradation and Development Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands, and Centro de Estudos de Recursos Naturais, Ambiente e Sociedade, Escola Superior Agrria de Coimbra. Bencanta, Coimbra, Portugal;
Demie Moore: Land Degradation and Development Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands;
Paulo M. Fernandes: Centro de Investigao e de Tecnologias Agro-Ambientais e Biolgicas, Universidade de Trs-os-Montes e Alto Douro. Vila Real, Portugal;
Jetse J. Stoorvogel: Land Dynamics Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands;
Ricardo E.S. Fernandes: Gabinete Tcnico Florestal, Cmara Municipal da Lous, Rua Dr. Joo Santos, Lous, Portugal;
Antnio J.D. Ferreira: Centro de Estudos de Recursos Naturais, Ambiente e Sociedade, Escola Superior Agrria de Coimbra. Bencanta, Coimbra, Portugal;
Coen J. Ritsema: Land Degradation and Development Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands, and Soil Physics and Land Use Team, Alterra Green World Research, Wageningen UR, Wageningen, The Netherlands.
Contact information for the author:
Cathelijne Stoof, Email: Cathelijne.Stoof@cornell.edu, Phone: +1 (607)255-4992
The following news release and accompanying images can be found at http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/2013/2013-14.shtml
AGU Contacts:
Sarah Charley
+1 (202) 777-7516
scharley@agu.org
Peter Weiss
+1 (202) 777-7507
pweiss@agu.org
Cornell University Press Relations Office Contact
John Carberry
+1 (607) 255-5353
jjc338@cornell.edu
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-04/agu-awc042313.php
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Sniffing out solutions for millions of Americans with smell loss
Apr. 21, 2013 ? Snot. It's not something most of us spend a lot of time thinking about, but, for a team of researchers in Washington, D.C., it's front and center.
Robert I. Henkin, founder of the Taste and Smell Clinic in is charmingly self-deprecating. He says with a chuckle that he's often called a "spit and snot doctor," but he knows all too well that for his patients -- those who no longer can appreciate the fragrance of fresh-cut grass or the intricacies of an herb-infused sauce -- such loss is no laughing matter.
"You might think: 'Oh well, you can still hear. You can still see.' But it's amazingly important to be able to taste and smell," Henkin says. "When you say 'hello' in (some parts of China), you don't say 'hello' -- you say 'Have you eaten yet?' In other words, the social aspects of being able to eat and enjoy that are critical, and to lose that -- you lose a significant part of life."
Henkin, who at the National Institutes of Health established the first clinical program to study taste and smell dysfunction, has spent the better part of his professional life trying to get the lay of the land when it comes to the fluids that contribute to those two senses. He and his team over the years have conducted countless experiments to figure out what makes up nasal mucus and saliva and how those components affect taste and smell.
"The thing to recognize is there are 21 million people in the United States who have some abnormality of smell function. That's an amazing number," says Henkin.
On Sunday, April 21, Henkin will present new research results at the Experimental Biology 2013 conference with the hope that attendees there also will take the mission seriously, build upon his findings and come up with new therapies for patients like his.
Henkin's newest work describes the concentrations of cytokines, molecules involved in cell signaling, in nasal mucus. He'll present his findings at the annual meeting of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, which is being held in conjunction with the Experimental Biology 2013 conference.
"In a rather na?ve way, we went ahead and looked at these cytokines in nasal mucus because nobody's ever done it before," Henkin explains. This kind of strategy is par for the course for Henkin, who also was the first to report which proteins are present in saliva in 1978 and which proteins are present in nasal mucus in 2000. He emphasizes that "you can't understand the (disease) mechanisms unless you understand what's there."
"This whole role of nasal mucus -- what's there, how it works -- is something that (researchers) haven't really considered," he says. "It takes a dumb guy like me to go ahead and say 'OK, let's figure out what's there, and then we can see what we're going to do about it. It's a different approach."
What's so different about it? Henkin says most of his patients come to him as a last resort, because their primary physicians and even specialists can't offer any lasting solutions.
"The people who are interested in (smell loss) are primarily otolaryngologists, and they're trained as surgeons ? They're not trained to think about this" on the molecular level, Henkin says. "So they look at the nose, and if there's a polyp they'll take it out and say, 'Aha, there's the answer. We'll make the nasal cavity cleaner.' Well, these (molecular) structures in the nose that cause these problems are manifestations of some underlying disease process, which they've been trying to figure out for a while but haven't really succeeded."
Henkin's group has succeeded in restoring smell loss in many patients -- and sometimes by seemingly unconventional means. A few years back, they tested out a drug long used in asthmatics, theophylline, and they found that oral use could induce higher levels of a protein called cAMP in nasal mucus, which improved some patients' ability to smell. The team later found that administering a smaller dose intranasally produced a more profound effect.
Henkin says examples like that underscore the importance of understanding the molecular makeup of nasal mucus and the interactions within, rather than immediately turning to surgery or, another common practice, giving patients steroids.
"Because they've used these (steroids) to inhibit polyp formation in the nose, what happens is that in some people the smell comes back for a limited period of time. It may come back for a day or a week. And then when the drug wears off, they can't smell again," Henkin says. "We now understand a little bit about how that works -- how it affects those cytokines and other substances."
Cytokines are molecules that deliver information and induce some kind of response -- usually during immunological and inflammatory processes. Henkin's team found that in nasal mucus of patients with smell loss the concentration of anti-inflammatory cytokines was much higher than the concentrations of pro-inflammatory cytokines . This balance is important, he says, because the cytokine interleukin-6, which is pro-inflammatory, was particularly abundant.
"We'd looked at the literature and recognized that IL-6 is obviously elevated in a number of inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis. As a matter of fact, with rheumatoid arthritis you commonly have smell loss," Henkin says. "We're trying to make these connections, you see, and understand the relationships in these underlying interactions -- to give people some idea (about) homeostasis in the nasal cavity, how it's occurring, what's in nasal mucus and how each of these substances plays a specific role in smell function."
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Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), via Newswise.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/5N55NUeUWDw/130421151622.htm
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