8 of the top 10 U.S. cities that have seen an increase in nuisance flooding, which causes road closures, overwhelmed storm drains and compromised infrastructure, are on the East Coast, according to a new NOAA technical report.

Credit: University of Arizona

Researchers have sequenced the complete genome of Oryza glaberrima (African rice), which will enhance scientists' and agriculturalists' understanding of the growing patterns of African rice, as well as enable the development of new rice varieties that are better able to cope with increasing environmental stressors to help solve global hunger challenges.

There are websites that encourage anorexia, there are websites that glorify stepping on animals with high heels and killing them, so it is no surprise that there are websites that glorify suicide. There are also websites that can talk people down from the ledge. In a free Internet, they can both be found rather easily.

An upcoming paper looked for information on suicides using popular search engines (Google, Bing) in Austria and the USA and found that protective information is significantly more plentiful than harmful information, about 2:1. 

Since emerging from the primordial ooze, organic life has been doing unnatural things in defiance of nature. Nothing is as unnatural as endurance running but sentient beings like to push boundaries.

Endurance running is impressive, but it is risky. There are calls for pre-participation electrocardiogram (ECG) screenings because of an alarming number of sudden death occurrences in athletes. including undetected heart disease in a young and seemingly healthy people, but it turns out heart attack is not the greatest health risk for runners, as is commonly believed. 

When something captures your interest, like this article, unique electrical rhythms called gamma oscillations sweep through your brain.

These gamma oscillations reflect a symphony of cells—both excitatory and inhibitory—playing together in an orchestrated way. Though their role has been debated, gamma waves have been associated with higher-level brain function, and disturbances in the patterns have been tied to schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease, autism, epilepsy and other disorders.

Now, new research from the Salk Institute shows that little known supportive cells in the brain known as astrocytes may in fact be major players that control these waves.

 

If you have watched the NASA channel recently, you might have witnessed a series of experiments regarding flames. 

On the surface, pardon the pun, it may have seemed like a minor thing, but how flames behave outside our atmosphere has led to discovery of a new type of cool burning flames.  A better understanding of the cool flames' chemistry could help improve internal combustion engines in cars, for example by developing homogenous-charge compression ignition.