Earth's magnetic field, which shields our planet from particles streaming outward from the Sun, often develops two holes that allow the largest leaks, according to researchers sponsored by NASA and the National Science Foundation. 

"The discovery overturns a long-standing belief about how and when most of the solar particles penetrate Earth's magnetic field, and could be used to predict when solar storms will be severe. Based on these results, we expect more severe storms during the upcoming solar cycle," said Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California, Los Angeles, Principal Investigator for NASA's THEMIS mission (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). THEMIS was used to discover the size of the leak. 

Rocky Mountain ski areas face dramatic changes this century as the climate warms, says a new Colorado study.

The study indicates snowlines -- elevations below which seasonal snowpack will not develop -- will continue to rise through this century, moving up more than 2,400 feet from the base areas of Colorado's Aspen Mountain and Utah's Park City Mountain by 2100, said University of Colorado at Boulder geography Professor Mark Williams. Williams and Brian Lazar of Stratus Consulting Inc. of Boulder combined temperature and precipitation data for Aspen Mountain and Park City Mountain with general climate circulation models for the study.

Schizophrenia and autism probably share a common origin, according to Dutch researcher Annemie Ploeger following an extensive literature study. The developmental psychologist says that both mental diseases have similar physical abnormalities which are formed during the first month of pregnancy. 

Since the early 1960s, it's become fashionable to use scare tactics about food and food groups to generate publicity and generate fundraising dollars.   The DDT mistake is forgivable but Alar?   Pure money-driven hysteria.

Neuroscientists from Duke University Medical Center have discovered that older people use their brains differently than younger people when it comes to storing memories, particularly those associated with negative emotions. 

The study, appearing in Psychological Science, is a novel look at how brain connections change with age. 

Parents of children with intellectual disabilities have long been frustrated by intelligence quotient (IQ) testing that tells them little to nothing about the long-term learning potential of their children.

That's because these tests are scored according to the mean performance of children without disabilities. The result is that the raw scores of many children with intellectual disabilities are converted into the lowest normalized score, typically a zero.

"We send back these reports that don't tell parents anything about their child," explained David Hessl, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry and a researcher at the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute.

New technology is often called 'the wave of the future' but it couldn't be any more literal in the case of wave energy.  Wave energy can be a large, widespread renewable resource that is environmentally benign and readily scalable. In some locations — the northwestern coasts of the United States, the western coast of Scotland, and the southern tips of South America, Africa and Australia,  a wave-absorbing device could theoretically generate 100 to 200 megawatts of electricity per kilometer of coastline.

The redox-active pigments responsible for the blue-green stain of the mucus that clogs the lungs of children and adults with cystic fibrosis (CF) are primarily signaling molecules that allow large clusters of the opportunistic infection agent, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, to organize themselves into structured communities, report Massachusetts Institute of Technology geobiologists at American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) 48th Annual Meeting, Dec. 13-17, 2008 in San Francisco.

For decades, these pigments, called phenazines, have been wrongly regarded as antibiotics, generated by P. aeruginosa, to kill off the microbe's bacterial competitors in the lungs. 

Unparalleled warming over the last few decades has triggered widespread ecosystem changes in many temperate North American and Western European lakes, say researchers at Queen's University and the Ontario Ministry of the Environment.

The team reports that striking changes are now occurring in many temperate lakes similar to those previously observed in the rapidly warming Arctic, although typically many decades later. The Arctic has long been considered a "bellwether" of what will eventually happen with warmer conditions farther south.

Raw milk advocates claim that unpasteurized milk cures or prevents disease, but no scientific evidence supports this notion. Testing raw milk, which has been suggested as an alternative to pasteurization, cannot ensure a product that is 100 percent safe and free of pathogens. Pasteurization remains the best way to reduce the unavoidable risk of contamination, according to the authors of a review published in the January 1, 2009 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases which examines the dangers of drinking raw milk.