The 24-year-old singer had pleaded not guilty to the hit-and-run charge last month when lesser charges of driving without a valid license and driving without proof of insurance were dismissed.

The "Turn Up the Music" singer allegedly ran into the rear of another car on May 21 in Los Angeles and fled the scene.

The charges filed by the Los Angeles city attorney led to a judge revoking Brown's probation due to the traffic accident, which could lead to jail for the Grammy-winning singer.

Brown has been on probation for assaulting his then-girlfriend, singer Rihanna, in 2009. He does not need to be convicted of a crime in order to be found in violation of his probation.

The Los Angeles city attorney objected to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Christine Ewell dismissing the hit-and-run charge, city attorney spokesman Frank Mateljan said.

Prosecutors had alleged that Brown acted aggressively and "castigated" the driver following the accident and then fled. There were no injuries reported and damage to the cars was minimal.

Brown is due back in court on Friday for a probation hearing.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and Bill Trott)

LONDON (Reuters) - Puffins as well as other coastal species are under threat in Britain as erosion and climate change destroy their habitat, the country's National Trust warned on Friday.

According to the organisation, Britain's 8,050-mile (12,955 kms) coastline is already seeing rising sea levels, with projections suggesting waters could be half a metre higher than at present by 2100.

In a bid to show how plants, animals and humans would have to live alongside "an increasing rate of environmental change", the Trust published a list of six species or "six canaries in the mine", referring to the birds sent down mines to reveal the presence of dangerous gases.

It said puffins, whose black back, white underparts and brightly coloured beak make the birds instantly recognisable, were among those which could be "seriously affected" by unpredictable weather.

"Climate change could change the face of our coastal flora and fauna," Matthew Oates, the Trust's National Specialist on Nature and Wildlife, said in a statement.

"Wildlife which relies on the gradual erosion of soft rock cliffs or lives on loose sand and shingle habitats could be caught out by an increasingly mobile landscape as a result of extremes in weather."

Britain has been recording more hottest, coldest, wettest or driest months on record, potentially affecting costal habitats.

"Even on hard rock cliffs less affected by increased erosion, we are likely to see the boom and bust of more specialist plants and animals, as they suffer from increased flooding, salt deposition or drought stress," Oates said.

"Unfortunately there may be more bust than boom."

The Trust said puffins, whose main prey is sand eel, have turned to eating snake pipefish as a result of overfishing and warming seas. Puffin chicks have occasionally been found dead, having choked trying to swallow pipefish, it said.

Bad weather and a shortage of food hit burrow-nesting puffins earlier this year when hundreds of puffins and other seabirds were washed up along Britain's northeastern coast.

However a summer census on the Farne Islands showed there had been an 8 percent increase in the number of puffins from the last count in 2008, the Trust said.

As well as seabirds, plants, fish and insects could also be affected, according to the report.

Extreme storms could wash away oysterplants, which grow in exposed shingle beaches while the habitat of Glanville fritillary butterflies has been geographically restricted.

However the report added warmer seas have also brought new species. Triggerfish, usually found in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, have now turned up off the coast of North Wales.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif (Reuters) - It was a black-and-white home movie of an old man, diminutive and cancer-stricken, performing Chinese martial arts techniques in a Hong Kong apartment that spurred director Wong Kar Wai to make his latest film, the Kung Fu epic "The Grandmaster."

Wong, best known as an auteur of pensive and brooding urban dramas "Chungking Express" and "In the Mood for Love," said he was deeply puzzled by the intentions behind the homemade film of Kung Fu master Ip Man, made days before his death in 1972.

"I keep asking myself why he wanted to do it and much later I realized that there's a saying in Chinese martial arts that's like 'to keep the fire burning,'" Wong, 57, told Reuters.

"So what I think he intended to do is to do this: he wanted to preserve his technique so it can be shared and taught to future generations," the director added.

"The Grandmaster," in U.S. theaters on Friday, is Wong's attempt at sharing that legacy, telling the story of Ip - the trainer of Kung Fu film icon Bruce Lee - as a man whose calling as one of China's martial arts masters was taken from him by the upheaval of World War 2.

Starring longtime Wong collaborator Tony Leung as Ip, the film is divided into three parts that span the Kung Fu master's adulthood in 1930s southern China and his exile in Hong Kong following the Chinese revolution in 1949.

The story of Ip, who was born in Foshan, China, in 1893, has also experienced a revival in recent years with a 2008 biopic and a TV miniseries broadcast earlier this year in Hong Kong, China and other Asian countries.

But Wong said he wanted to differentiate his film, which was released in parts of Asia and Europe earlier this year, from others by conveying technical authenticity, specifically the Wing Chun style of Kung Fu.

"I wanted to make a film about Chinese martial arts in a different way, to tell you more about what is the value of Chinese martial arts," he said, adding that Leung twice broke his arm while training for the role.

Other Chinese martial arts in "The Grandmaster" include Baji and Xinjyi, each characterized by swift and powerful handwork.

FRUSTRATED LOVE AND EXILE

What defines "The Grandmaster" are Wong's trademark themes of frustrated love and exile, his plot-less and episodic storytelling, and sumptuous cinematography by Philippe Le Sourd.

The film, Wong's first attempt at a martial arts movie after 1994's box-office flop "Ashes of Time," also writes in a fictional love story between Ip and Gong Er, the daughter of a Kung Fu grandmaster played by Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi.

"It's so physical and there's an animal quality in it," Wong said about the first sparring match between Ip and Gong, after which Gong pursues him by exchanging letters.

"During that part (the fight), it's like two beautiful animals fighting each other. I think that tells a bit more about this relationship than just a normal romantic story," he said.

Both of the characters are uprooted by the Japanese invasion of China, which began in 1937, and end up reuniting in Hong Kong as refugees in the 1950s, their families in China now dead.

"Gong Er is in a way a symbol of a time that he (Ip) wants to go back to. It's almost like a lost paradise," Wong said.

Their reunion in Hong Kong, to which Wong moved from Shanghai at age 5, punctuates the film's legacy theme amid its masses of dislocated people.

"Hong Kong is a place for all these immigrants after the war," Wong said. "They're coming from all parts of China: north and south, and they come in all walks of life: businessmen, martial artists, intellectuals, politicians."

Wong said he is able to feel this sense of exile handed down from past generations and how they struggled to adapt while also trying to preserve their former life.

"And this film, actually, we trace back even more to see what is the time before Hong Kong, where they came from, what is their life. And you can feel this sense of loss when you compare these two periods," the director said.

(Refile to fix typo in Beverly Hills in dateline)

(Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and Ken Wills)

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexicans hoping their president will make good on a campaign promise to boost wages may be in for a long wait, as the country aims to dodge Brazil's mistakes by betting on economic reforms that will take years to translate into labor gains.

President Enrique Pena Nieto came to office in December promising to boost productivity and raise low wages in Latin America's No. 2 economy, which have changed little in over a decade, averaging $21 a day in the formal sector.

A boost in wages would help consumption, which has been flagging since the money that Mexicans living abroad send home tapered, government spending slowed and U.S. demand for Mexican exports grew shaky.

The boom-and-bust situation in regional rival Brazil, where rising wages and easy credit have given way to weak growth and high inflation, serves as a cautionary tale.

So Pena Nieto is betting a host of ambitious economic reforms will translate into productivity gains that eventually boost salaries - just not right away.

"It would be at least three to five years, before you would begin to notice an impact," said Claudio Loser, a former IMF economist, who added that Brazil's consumption-fed model was bound to lead to overheating.

"Boosting consumption gives a short-term push, but it's not like an oil lamp, it's like a match," he said.

While many economists agree boosting productivity through reforms is key to sustainable wage rises, Mexicans may not be content to wait, as remittances so far this year hit a three-year-low.

"I don't have even one extra peso," said Ana Martinez, an 18-year-old office cleaner in Mexico City who earns 3,000 pesos ($230) a month for 12-hour work days.

"I would like to buy myself one of those cell phones with Internet, but just think, given what I earn," she said.

CHEAPER THAN CHINA

Mexico's low wages, a drag on consumption, are helping Mexican exports regain market share in the United States and luring firms like German carmaker Volkswagen to open plants.

At under $2.50 an hour, manufacturing wages are nearly 20 percent cheaper than in China, according to a recent Bank of America study.

The average tax-paying worker earns 271.58 pesos ($21.26) a day, up just over a dollar from the average wage adjusted for inflation a decade ago, according to IMSS, Mexico's social security institute.

"It's a very comfortable situation for the government and businessmen, and for companies, it's very profitable," said Alfredo Coutino, Latin America director for Moody's Analytics.

But it is weighing on consumption, which has lost steam over the past year.

Bulk sales - which predict the rhythm of retail sales - fell 5.5 percent from January to May, and consumer confidence in June hit its lowest level in nine months.

"It's a constraint of the Mexican model because if you have an export model, it's all based on cost," said Enrique Alvarez, an analyst at IDEAglobal in New York. "Unfortunately, those costs have to stay low, so you never really have a great deal of expansion in the consumer class."

The drag has been more worrying as a slowdown in the United States, Mexico's biggest trading partner, has hit industry and reduced remittance flows, which totaled $10.7 billion in the first half of the year, down nearly 10 percent from 2012.

Factory exports eased slightly in June, while the HSBC PMI data showed factory activity contracted in July for the first time since the series began over two years ago.

The government is now expecting the economy to grow 3.1 percent this year, down from 3.9 percent in 2012. Analysts polled by the central bank are more pessimistic, and have cut their 2013 growth forecast to 2.65 percent.

Economists say Mexican wages face headwinds from a slack labor market and low productivity.

In Mexico, an estimated 1 million new job seekers compete for half as many jobs each year, putting little pressure on employers to boost wages.

Mexican employee productivity grew only 16 percent from 1992 to 2012, while Brazilian, Chilean and Peruvian workers became 30, 57 and 113 percent more productive respectively, according to the Conference Board Total Economy Database.

Pena Nieto has said he wants to tackle the problem.

"This is the final goal ... that our economic policies are pushing for: That families can earn more, have better incomes, by being more productive," he said in May.

He signed a pact with opposition parties when he took office to spearhead reforms including bids to boost the country's paltry tax take and production at ailing state oil giant Pemex, to raise growth to 6 percent per year.

The reforms, including an already approved overhaul of the school system and a measure to buoy competition in the telecoms sector, are designed to boost worker productivity by improving education and making companies more efficient.

But Pena Nieto's labor reform, which took effect in December, has yet to translate into a promised boost in hiring.

Since he took office, Mexico has created 62,485 jobs, just a quarter of those created in the same period a year earlier.

The average minimum wage adjusted for inflation continued its fall over the past decade to 58.10 pesos ($4.55) a day in 2013 from 60.06 pesos, according to Mexico's minimum wage commission.

KEEP OFF THE STEROIDS

But slow change is better than overheating, economists say, pointing to Brazil.

There, a tight labor market, wages indexed to growth and easy credit pumped up a consumption-fueled boom that helped growth average nearly 4 percent a year over the past decade, and allowed millions of Brazilians to join the middle class.

That boom is fading as default rates have hit record highs over the past two years, and high inflation is curbing Brazilian spending. Growth last year notched a paltry 0.9 percent.

"You cannot make the economy grow on steroids," said Alberto Ramos, an economist with Goldman Sachs.

Average monthly wages of Brazilian workers rose by nearly a third in real terms over the past decade, and Mexicans may yet see a nudge.

"Mexico is going in the right direction, but it's going to take time," said Coutino.

($1 = 12.7752 Mexican pesos)

(With additional reporting by Alonso Soto in Brasilia; Editing by Simon Gardner and Peter Cooney)

One of four astronauts who flew NASA's original prototype orbiter on atmospheric test flights, . He piloted the shuttle program's third mission in 1982 and, three years later, was commander when an engine shutdown ended in the shuttle's only inflight abort.

Fullerton followed up his 382 hours in space with 22 years of service as a NASA research pilot. Combined with his experience as a test pilot in the U.S. Air Force, Fullerton logged a total of more than 16,000 hours at the controls of more than 135 different types of aircraft, including NASA's B-52 heavy-lift airborne launch aircraft and the .

Born on Oct. 11, 1936 in Rochester, NY, Charles Gordon Fullerton earned both his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, in 1957 and l958, respectively. After working briefly as a mechanical design engineer for Hughes Aircraft Company, he entered the Air Force in July 1958. [ )]

First trained as an F-86 interceptor pilot, Fullerton became a B-47 bomber pilot at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. Fullerton was then selected to attend the Aerospace Research Pilot School (now the Air Force Test Pilot School) at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., in 1964. Upon graduation he was assigned as a test pilot with the Bomber Operations Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

It was Fullerton's test flight experience that led to his first spaceflight assignment. The Air Force selected Fullerton in 1966 to train as a crew member for its Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program.

Three years later, when the reconnaissance space station was canceled before being launched, Fullerton transferred to NASA's civilian astronaut corps, where he first served on the support crews for the last four .

"I did the launch phase for Apollo [missions] 14, 15, and 16, and then on 17 I handed over, and then I went down and was the guy that closed the hatch [on the command module] for 17, the last one, because I wanted to see a launch," Fullerton recounted in a 2002 NASA oral history. "So that kind of closed out the program."

Fullerton's first flight experience with the shuttle came as a pilot for the Approach and Landing Test (ALT) program in 1977. Paired with Apollo 13 pilot Fred Haise, Fullerton flew thefor two captive and three free flights from atop the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft.

"We were doing stuff that there wasn't a procedure for," Fullerton said. "We were writing the procedure and then flying it for the first time."

Theproved that a spacecraft could return to Earth as an unpowered glider, an ability Fullerton would help demonstrate on his first trip into space in a location that would be unique throughout the shuttle's 30-year history.

OTTAWA (Reuters) - The Canadian government is watching smartphone maker BlackBerry Ltd carefully as it explores options including sale of the company but will not comment on its affairs, Industry Minister James Moore said on Wednesday.

Loss-making BlackBerry, which has bled market share to Apple's iPhone and phones using Google's Android operating system, said last week it was weighing options that could include an outright sale.

The company's new phones, introduced earlier this year, have sold less quickly than expected and BlackBerry expects more red ink for the current quarter at least.

Speaking in an interview with Reuters, Moore said it was "unfortunate" that BlackBerry's new Q10 and the Z10 smartphones had not taken off with consumers.

"I know that they're facing their challenges and they're adjusting their firm internally in the way that best suits their interests," he said. "And all I can say is, we wish them well, and we're keeping a close eye on the situation."

Moore declined to speculate about whether a foreign bid for BlackBerry could run afoul of national security regulations. Asked if the government wanted BlackBerry to stay Canadian, he replied: "We want them to do well, keep employing Canadians, keeping putting out innovative technologies and platforms, and we're paying close attention."

BlackBerry, formerly known as Research In Motion, made on-your-hip email possible with its first pagers and smartphones, coupled with strong security features.

But the company was slow to embrace the important consumer market and rivals are rapidly pushing into the corporate and government market that BlackBerry used to own.

(Writing by Janet Guttsman; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Bernanke's comments on Wednesday to lawmakers in Congress could well set the tone in markets for the rest of the summer. In particular, investors will be looking for any further guidance on when the Fed will start to reduce its monetary stimulus.

The Fed is currently spending $85 billion a month buying financial assets in the hope of keeping long-term borrowing rates low and stimulating the U.S. economy. The new money created in recent years has been one of the key drivers of markets.

U.S. economic figures are being largely viewed through the prism of Fed policy. Tuesday's batch of number did little to affect expectations. The 0.3 percent monthly rise in industrial production during June was in line with expectations while the uptick in the annual inflation rate to 1.8 percent from 1.4 percent was largely discounted because it was due to a sharp rise in gasoline prices.

"It's certainly possible that they could begin tapering their bond purchases later this year, but the absence of higher inflation and the stubbornly high jobless rate suggests that it may not need to do so in the near-term, particularly if those growth expectations fail to materialize," said Jim Baird, chief investment officer for Plante Moran Financial Advisors.

Trading was cautious Tuesday in both Europe and the U.S. following what's been a strong month for most markets.

The FTSE 100 index of leading British shares was down 0.3 percent at 6,567 while Germany's DAX fell 0.5 percent at 8,197. The CAC-40 in France was 0.7 percent lower at 3,851.

In the U.S., the Dow Jones industrial average was down 0.1 percent at 15,469 while the broader S&P 500 index fell the same rate to 1,680. On Monday, both closed at record highs while the S&P posted its eighth straight day of gains, its longest such streak since January.

Tuesday's run of corporate news had little impact despite solid earnings from Goldman Sachs and Johnson & Johnson. Coca-Cola's, though, were disappointing as it reported falling profits and weak volume growth, particularly in North America.

Once Bernanke's appearance before lawmakers is over, markets, particularly in the U.S., may return their focus to the earnings reports.

"Corporate earnings season is going to play a much bigger part in driving market sentiment in the coming weeks, than it has over the last couple of years," said Craig Erlam, market analyst at Alpari. "With investors no longer able to rely on the Fed to drive equity markets higher, they have to make do with focusing more on the fundamentals, and nothing gives us a better overview of these than company earnings reports and their expectations for the coming quarters."

Earlier in Asia, South Korea's Kospi fell 0.5 percent to 1,866.36 while Hong Kong's Hang Seng was flat at 21,312.38. China's Shanghai Composite Index rose 0.3 percent to 2,065.72.

Elsewhere, trading was fairly flat. In currency markets, the euro was up 0.4 percent at $1.3108 while the dollar fell 0.4 percent to 99.61 yen.

Oil prices were steady too, with the benchmark New York rate up 19 cents at $106.51 a barrel.

SAN FRANCISCO/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California, whose green ambitions helped the solar and wind industries take root, is taking an essential next step by proposing a sharp rise in energy storage to better integrate renewable power with the rest of the grid.

Power from sun and wind fluctuates dramatically, so capturing it for later use makes the supply more predictable.

"We can't just rely on sunlight," Governor Jerry Brown told the Intersolar conference in San Francisco last month. "We've got to bottle the sunlight."

California's storage push comes as renewables move toward a mandated one-third of the state's electricity supply by 2020. The proposal has fired up a technology race that has already attracted venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Vinod Khosla, large-scale battery makers such as LG Chem, and establishment forces like General Electric Co and Microsoft Corp founder Bill Gates.

It isn't just about California. Germany is a storage pioneer, and in the United States, stimulus funds have backed projects in states such as New York and Texas.

But the Golden State's aggressive renewables target is forcing the issue here: it wants storage of up to 1.3 gigawatts by 2020. That capacity is enough for traditional plants to power more than a million homes.

Lux Research analyst Steven Minnihan said California's proposal is the first legislation that will have an immediate and lasting impact on the grid storage market, which he estimates will soar to installations worth $10.4 billion in 2017 from just $200 million last year.

But storage is costly when compared to building new gas plants, and many storage projects were set up with the help of stimulus funds that have since run dry, meaning utility customers will end up with much of the tab. There are also risks that unproven storage technologies will not deliver on their promise.

"The ratepayers would be on the hook," said Farzad Ghazzagh, who is analyzing the proposal for the Division of Ratepayer Advocates, an arm of the California Public Utilities Commission. His analysis is not complete, but Ghazzagh has seen estimates of $1 billion to $3 billion to install so much storage.

Proponents argue ratepayers will benefit because storage enables utilities to avoid building power plants or transmission to meet peak demand, simply by providing extra power for a few hours a day. The Electric Power Research Institute found in a report for California's grid regulator this summer that storage's cost is worth it if all benefits are considered.

As in solar manufacturing, the storage business has had its share of difficulties as it struggled to bring costs down and prove technologies. Battery maker A123 Systems and flywheel maker Beacon Power LLC were among the most high profile, both filing for bankruptcy after receiving generous support from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE).

Both have reinvented themselves under new ownership. A123 was bought for $257 million by the U.S. unit of Chinese auto parts maker Wanxiang, and still makes grid-scale batteries, selling one to Hawaii's Maui Electric Company in June.

Beacon was snapped up by energy-focused private equity firm Rockland Capital for $30.5 million and is working on a new project in Pennsylvania with government backing. A third project will not need government support, according to Scott Harlan, Rockland's managing partner.

Beyond batteries, Gates, Thiel and Khosla all invested this year in compressed air startup LightSail Energy, which in May was awarded $1.7 million from the California Energy Commission to demonstrate its technology at a Ventura County naval base. Gates and Khosla also invested together in another storage startup - battery company Ambri.

"Grid scale storage has always been one of the areas that we knew and know will happen. It's a matter of timing," said Andrew Chung, a partner with Khosla Ventures.

California's push "really cracks open the door" for startups that until now have had difficulty expanding small pilot projects into big purchases, Chung added.

The true impact of California's initiative will be felt between 2020 and 2030, Lux's Minnihan said, and he expects the move to inspire efforts by other states.

"HOLY GRAIL"

Storage is seen as energy's "holy grail" because of the efficiency it brings to any grid. For example, California has 51 gigawatts of peak capacity to handle heat that boosts air-conditioning demand, even if only two-thirds of that is needed for most of the year.

Still, without more government money, utilities like PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego's Sempra Energy will shoulder much of the upfront costs.

A natural gas-fired plant costs about $1,000 per kilowatt to build, whereas EPRI's base case for a battery substitute has a breakeven capital cost of $1,684 per kilowatt.

"We all agree, as we sit here today, storage is uneconomic," SunPower Corp Chief Executive Tom Werner told a meeting of utility executives in San Francisco. "But if you go out five years, I wouldn't bet against it."

The market potential means many are willing to play the odds.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk, who founded Tesla Motors, is deploying the car maker's battery technology in solar systems installed by another company he backs: SolarCity.

"I am increasingly confident that there will be major breakthroughs in electricity storage tech," Musk told the Reuters Global Markets Forum chat room.

Germany, having subsidized a massive roll-out of rooftop solar, is aggressively funding storage to balance its grid, driving a domestic market predicted to be worth $19 billion by 2017.

Germany's Gildemeister is providing vanadium energy storage batteries for miner American Vanadium to market and sell in the United States. The batteries can recharge electric vehicles, store wind and solar power for electric power grids, and set up micro grids when main power sources are not available. In Nevada, American Vanadium is developing the only U.S. mine that will produce the little-known metal.

American Vanadium CEO Bill Radvak sees particular interest among building owners and public service providers on the U.S. East Coast after the power disruptions of Hurricane Sandy.

Among power companies, AES has 1 GW of storage planned, mostly using lithium-ion batteries, and says its projects require no government incentives to pay off.

Most projects are still government backed. PG&E has unveiled in San Jose a 4-megawatt sodium-sulfur battery from Japan's NGK Insulators, while LG Chem is supplying a 32 MW-hour lithium-ion system to an Edison wind farm in Tehachapi - California's wind power hub. PG&E's project was aided by a $3.3 million state grant and Edison's got $25 million in DoE funds.

Meanwhile, however, GE says a new sodium nickel chloride battery system integrated into its own Tehachapi turbines is cheaper than grid-scale batteries at wind farms because it requires less investment in certain hardware.

The technology makes a turbine's power steady over periods of 15 to 30 minutes thanks to a battery roughly equivalent to one in GM's Volt electric car. Project developer Invenergy will install three at a Texas wind farm this year.

Venture capitalists poured $2.2 billion into storage in the last five years, according to the Cleantech Group, or well over double that of the previous five years. Werner, of San Jose-based SunPower, noted that the same minds behind smartphones are moving into smart meters and storage in Silicon Valley.

"These are capitalists. They're not doing this as a science experiment."

(Reporting by Braden Reddall in San Francisco and Nichola Groom in Los Angeles; Editing by Patricia Kranz, Martin Howell and Richard Chang)

The new study, published in the journal Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), looked at whether urban or rural locales played a role in postpartum depression rates.

More than 6,400 women who lived in a variety of different geographical areas, including urban, rural, semi-urban and semi-rural areas, participated in the 2006 Canadian Maternity Experiences Survey. (Rural living was defined as settlements with fewer than 1,000 people but more than 400 people per square kilometer. Semirural settings included up to 30,000 people, while semi-urban was defined as including 30,000 to 499,999 residents and urban areas included 500,000 people or more.) They also accounted for whether a woman commuted for work to urban places.

(MORE:)

Overall, 7.5% of the women who had recently given birth in the weeks prior to the survey developed postpartum depression, but women from urban areas were at a greater risk, with a 10% rate, compared to 6% of women in rural areas, nearly 7% in semi-rural areas and 5% in semi-urban areas who developed the condition. The discrepancy is likely due to the disproportionate distribution of known risk factors such as social support and a prior history of depression that have been previously associated with postpartum depression. In the current study, for example, many of the city-dwelling mothers who developed postpartum were members of immigrant populations, which typically have weaker social support networks.

That could explain the counterintuitive result that a woman living among thousands of people in an urban setting, where post natal care and support may be more accessible than in less populated rural areas, can still experience social isolation that can contribute to feelings of helplessness and despondence. Paula Caplan, a clinical and research psychologist at Harvard University and author of Dont Blame Mother: Mending the Mother-Daughter Relationship, who was not affiliated with the study, says that women living in urban environments are also likely to be working multiple , and to be living in poverty. These stressors, on top of raising children, can test the limits of a new mothers coping skills.

People say poor mothers suffer from depression. Why is this a surprise? If youre trying to be a good mother, it is very hard if you are poor and if you are isolated without having a sense of helplessness, says Caplan.

(MORE: )

Changes in the family dynamic also play a role; women are more likely to live further away from home than they have in the past, which means they are forced to manage without help from family members. While social networks may be more extensive thanks to social media, those connections still cant replace the support and reassurance provided by the physicalpresenceof a friend or loved one especially for a new mother. There are mommy blogs and social media, but there is nosubstitutefor having someone right there who can break down our isolation and tell you youre doing fine and your kids are okay, says Caplan.

While hormones as well as possiblehave also been connected to postpartum depression, Caplan believes that classifying the condition as a mental or physiological problem could take the focus away from social changes that could be made to support mothers. As the study results suggest, isolation and lack of social support can intensify feelings of discouragement, being overwhelmed, and loneliness that any new mother naturally experiences.

(MORE: )

We have completely unreasonable expectations for mothers, says Caplan. We live in a mother-blaming society where mothers get blamed for almost anything that goes wrong with their child. Mothers can feel isolated or scared to death.There are social changes that need to be made. These women do not need to be treated for alleged mental illness. The study authors say better daycare options and more supportive services for women who have recently given birth could alleviate some of the burden that mothers feel. And as the results show, these services are needed not just in sparsely populated areas but in densely packed urban ones as well, since its possible to feel lonely even when youre surrounded by people.

(Logo: )

Events taking place at NASA Johnson Space Center's Ellington Field that day include a briefing with mission scientists and flight crews, followed by tours of the aircraft and interviews. U.S. reporters must register by Monday, Aug. 19. To arrange for credentials, contact William Jeffs at 281-483-5111 or .

The campaign currently underway is NASA's most complex airborne science study of the year, drawing together coordinated observations from NASA satellites, aircraft and ground sites. The mission's primary aircraft are the DC-8, carrying 31 scientific instruments, and the high-altitude single-pilot ER-2, with 15 instruments.

More than 200 scientists and support personnel are involved in the mission that is flying across the southern United States into September. Aircraft participating in the Studies of Emissions, Atmospheric Composition, Clouds and Climate Coupling by Regional Surveys mission -- also known as SEAC4RS -- will fly out of Ellington Field.

The SEAC4RS media event follows another media opportunity at Ellington Field that day where plans to relocate the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft to Space Center Houston will be announced. For more information about this separate event, contact Jack Moore with Space Center Houston at 281-244-2137 or .

For more information about the SEAC4RS mission, visit:

SOURCE NASA