December 24, 2018

Good Morning,

Saturn's rings are disappearing...at an alarming rate! I can't image a day when Saturn would be ring-less, can you?

Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Saturn's rings disappearing at 'worst-case-scenario' rate --*

Scientists knew Saturn was losing its rings, but they weren't sure how fast. New research suggests the rings are disappearing at the fastest rate estimated by the Voyager 1 and 2 missions -- the "worst-case-scenario" rate.

The grains of ice and dust that form Saturn's rings are constantly pulled into the gas giant's body by gravity. The paths of falling "ring rains" are influenced by Saturn's magnetic field.

Cassini's final flybys observed additional ring loss mechanisms. The probe observed ring particles moving quickly into Saturn's equator.

Scientists used Cassini data to more accurately estimate Saturn's ring material loss rate.

"We estimate that this ring rain drains an amount of water products that could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool from Saturn's rings in half an hour," James O'Donoghue, scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a news release. "From this alone, the entire ring system will be gone in 300 million years, but add to this the Cassini-spacecraft measured ring-material detected falling into Saturn's equator, and the rings have less than 100 million years to live. This is relatively short, compared to Saturn's age of over 4 billion years."

The research, published in the journal Icarus, suggests Saturn's rings are relatively young, having only formed 100 million years ago. The findings support the hypothesis that ring systems are relatively short-lived. Saturn's rings are in the middle of their lifespan.

"If rings are temporary, perhaps we just missed out on seeing giant ring systems of Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, which have only thin ringlets today," O'Donoghue said.

At any given moment, the majority of the water ice grains that form Saturn's rings maintain a stable trajectory. Their orbital path is the product of an equilibrium between two forces, Saturn's gravity and their orbital velocity. Some grains, however, become excited by ultraviolet light, causing them to react to Saturn's magnetic field.

The gas giant's magnetic force pushes the charged particles inward. When the equilibrium is comprised, gravity pulls the particles into its upper atmosphere along the planet's invisible magnetic field lines.

Ring rains react with Saturn's ionosphere to increase the longevity of charged particles called trihydrogen cation, H3 ions. Scientists can measure the infrared glow of these ions across bands in Saturn's atmosphere where ring rains are heaviest.

In future studies, scientists aim to measure the effects of Saturn's seasons on ring loss rates.

*-- New tool could improve asthma prediction in children --*

A new tool has could supplant the old standard for predicting asthma in children, a study says.

Some doctors say using the Asthma Predictive Index, or API, to forecast asthma in kids isn't always reliable -- and researchers may have a solution for that.

Research published Thursday in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology showed that API and the new method Pediatric Asthma Risk Score, or PARS, both predicted asthma risk for children with the most risk factors. But the API missed 43 percent of asthmatic children that PARS picked up as mild to moderate risk.

"PARS is superior to the Asthma Predictive Index (API) in its ability to predict asthma in children with mild to moderate asthma risk, with an 11 percent increase in sensitivity," Gurjit Khurana Hershey, director of Asthma Research at Cincinnati Children's and study senior author, said in a news release. "Children with mild to moderate risk may be the most likely asthma patients to respond favorably to prevention strategies."

Dr. Hershey and other researchers devised the method with data from 762 infants born between 2001 and 2003 whose parents had at least one allergy symptom.

Each year, the doctors tested the children's skin at ages 1, 2, 3, 4 and 7 for 15 airborne and food allergens that included cat, dog, cockroach, dust mites, trees, mold, weeds, grass, cow's milk and hen's egg. They also tested 589 of kids from the same group when they reached seven, and 11 percent of them had asthma.

In all, the PARS test was 11 percent more sensitive than the API.

This PARS web application provides a scoring system that quickly evaluates a user's risk score.

More than 26 million people in the U.S. have asthma, and black people die from the condition at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Our PARS model either outperforms and/or is less invasive than 30 existing models intended to predict asthma development," Hershey said. "The PARS also may be more clinically useful and applicable in an office setting."

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