Magma sitting 4-5 kilometers beneath the surface of Oregon's Mount Hood has been stored in near-solid conditions for thousands of years but that doesn't mean it won't change rapidly. 

The time it takes to liquefy and potentially erupt is surprisingly short - perhaps as short as a few months.

The key seems to be elevation of the temperature of the rock to more than 750 degrees Celsius, which can happen when hot magma from deep within the Earth's crust rises to the surface. 

It was the mixing of hot liquid lava with cooler solid magma that triggered Mount Hood's last two eruptions about 220 and 1,500 years ago, said Adam Kent, an Oregon State University (OSU) geologist and co-author of a paper reporting the new findings.

Ann Arbor, Mich. – Costs of care differ significantly across hospitals for children born with heart defects, according to new research led by a University of Michigan researcher. Congenital heart defects are known to be the most common birth defects, impacting nearly 1 in every 100 births.

The cost of care for children with congenital heart disease undergoing surgical repair varied as much as nine times across a large group of U.S. children's hospitals, says lead author Sara K. Pasquali, M.D., M.H.S., associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School and C.S. Mott Children's Hospital Congenital Heart Center.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Pregnant and postpartum women with bipolar disorder more frequently have significant mental health and early mothering challenges than other perinatal women undergoing psychiatric treatment, according to a study in the Journal of Affective Disorders. The findings indicate the importance of properly identifying the disorder and developing specific treatments for women during and after pregnancy, the lead author said.

"Similar to what you find with bipolar disorder in the nonperinatal population, the overall level of clinical severity and functional impairment really stands out as being of concern," said Cynthia Battle, associate professor (research) of psychiatry and human behavior in the Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

"Mottronics" is a term seemingly destined to become familiar to aficionados of electronic gadgets. Named for the Nobel laureate Nevill Francis Mott, Mottronics involve materials – mostly metal oxides - that can be induced to transition between electrically conductive and insulating phases. If these phase transitions can be controlled, Mott materials hold great promise for future transistors and memories that feature higher energy efficiencies and faster switching speeds than today's devices. A team of researchers working at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS) have demonstrated the conducting/insulating phases of ultra-thin films of Mott materials can be controlled by applying an epitaxial strain to the crystal lattice.

PHILADELPHIA (February 24, 2014) – The increasing use of expensive medical imaging procedures in the U.S. like positron emission tomography (PET) scans is being driven, in part, by patient decisions made after obtaining information from lay media and non-experts, and not from health care providers.

That is the result from a three-year-long analysis of survey data, and is published in the article , "Associations between Cancer-Related Information Seeking and Receiving PET Imaging for Routine Cancer Surveillance – An Analysis of Longitudinal Survey Data," appearing in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. Andy S.

When it comes to the names of lipsticks, anyone who has attempted to combine the ‘Presentation of Self’ theories of Erving Goffman and the semiotic modelling methods of Roland Gérard Barthes could well consult the work of professor Debra Merskin (of the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon, US), who has categorised the names of no less than 1,722 lipsticks.

“The names of lipsticks and how they penetrate women’s psyches as semiotic tools used in branding are the foci of the present study.”

The professor’s study delineated 14 name-categories for the lipsticks, and then allocated the names accordingly – the results are listed here in order of their popularity.

On face value, if you read Anita Clayton's Huffington Post piece entitled “The FDA, Sexual Dysfunction and Gender Inequality,” you could not come to any conclusion other that the FDA is overtly sexist.

People believe that they know what moves them to act; marketers seem to agree.  To learn what people think and feel about a product or message, just ask them, right?

In times of easy access to the Internet and cheap travel, we consider ourselves part of a global society, but how connected this really makes us will surprise many of us.

The criticism of wind farms is that they are expensive, don't product enough electricity to be meaningful and change the weather patterns even a thousand miles away.

That may have a benefit; they may weaken hurricanes before landfall.

Imagine a 2012 US presidential election without New York City media whipping up a "Super Storm" and implying that Republican candidate Mitt Romney would cause hurricanes? He still would have lost but it would have given environmentalists one less reason to be against protecting people by embracing common-sense changes like waterproof subway doors and a seawall.