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'I can hear a building over there' -- researchers study blind people's ability to echolocate

2011-05-26
Everybody has heard about echolocation in bats and dolphins. These creatures emit bursts of sounds and listen to the echoes that bounce back to detect objects in their environment. What is less well known is that people can echolocate, too. In fact, there are blind people who have learned to make clicks with their mouths and to use the returning echoes from those clicks to sense their surroundings. Some of these people are so adept at echolocation that they can use this skill to go mountain biking, play basketball, or navigate unknown environments. Researchers at Western's ...

Scientists discover fossil of giant ancient sea predator

Scientists discover fossil of giant ancient sea predator
2011-05-26
New Haven, Conn.—Paleontologists have discovered that a group of remarkable ancient sea creatures existed for much longer and grew to much larger sizes than previously thought, thanks to extraordinarily well-preserved fossils discovered in Morocco. The creatures, known as anomalocaridids, were already thought to be the largest animals of the Cambrian period, known for the "Cambrian Explosion" that saw the sudden appearance of all the major animal groups and the establishment of complex ecosystems about 540 to 500 million years ago. Fossils from this period suggested these ...

"Meet My Real Modern Family" with Acclaimed Author Andrew Solomon on The Surrogacy Lawyer Radio Show

"Meet My Real Modern Family" with Acclaimed Author Andrew Solomon on The Surrogacy Lawyer Radio Show
2011-05-26
Fans and critics of the ABC comedy "Modern Family" hail it as a landmark depiction of contemporary American life because, for one of the first times on television, a gay couple and their adopted Vietnamese daughter are included in the extended family unit. As the numbers of gay families grow either through adoption or assisted reproduction, real "modern families" are becoming more prevalent and accepted. In January of this year, Newsweek published "Meet My Real Modern Family" by acclaimed author Andrew Solomon. In the article Andrew described ...

ixDownload Review: Nuance Releases PDF Converter Software for Mac OS X

2011-05-26
Nuance Communications, Inc. has already proven itself a leading provider of imaging and speech solutions. It has previously introduced to the technology crowd its Nuance PDF Converter for Windows. The company follows up the move with another good one - the release of the Nuance PDF Converter for MAC. This action allows MAC users to do just about everything with PDF files. MAC versus Windows Though the MAC operating system (OS) is frequently encased in stylish exteriors, which Apple is known for, the OS itself is still just a runner up to Windows. So, the introduction ...

Bay Area Families and Mountain House Residents Share "100% Celebration" Day of Family Activities, New Home Tours and Social Media Fun

Bay Area Families and Mountain House Residents Share "100% Celebration" Day of Family Activities, New Home Tours and Social Media Fun
2011-05-26
Launching a busy summer with a wonderful day of community on May 21, the village of Questa at Mountain House hosted nearly 800 Bay Area home shoppers and established residents to "100% Celebration," a family-friendly day of food, fun, photo opps and Facebook postings, plus new home model tours at Questa, the latest village of Mountain House. Home to some 3,000 residents, Mountain House is a thriving new town east of Livermore. It prides itself on state-of-the art schools, a wealth of recreational opportunities and neighborhoods of charming and refined traditional ...

Study reveals most biologically rich island in Southern Ocean

2011-05-26
The first comprehensive study of sea creatures around the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia reveals a region that is richer in biodiversity than even many tropical sites, such as the Galapagos Islands. The study provides an important benchmark to monitor how these species will respond to future environmental change. Reporting this week in the online journal PLoS ONE, the team from British Antarctic Survey (BAS), funded by the British Government's Darwin Initiative and the South Georgia Heritage Trust, describe how they examined over 130 years of polar records. About ...

Discovery of a very massive, isolated star in a nearby galaxy

Discovery of a very massive, isolated star in a nearby galaxy
2011-05-26
Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing the discovery of a very massive, isolated star in a galaxy near our Milky Way. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the star VFTS 682 is one of the more massive stars ever known, because it is about 150 times the mass of the Sun. But the major surprise is that the star lies on its own and is not a member of a dense star cluster. The international team of astronomers [1] who are publishing this discovery is involved in a large survey of the Tarantula Nebula in the LMC. The region in and around the Tarantula Nebula is a ...

Long-term study of swine flu viruses shows increasing viral diversity

2011-05-26
DURHAM, NC and SINGAPORE – Increased transportation of live pigs appears to have driven an increase in the diversity of swine influenza viruses found in the animals in Hong Kong over the last three decades, according to a new study. In the longest study of its kind, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School researchers found that swine viruses crossed geographic borders and mixed with local viruses, increasing their diversity. "The majority of reported human infections have been people with close contact to farm animals," said Vijaykrishna Dhanasekaran, Ph.D., an assistant professor ...

Monkeys can play Monday morning quarterback too

Monkeys can play Monday morning quarterback too
2011-05-26
Regret has long been viewed as an exclusively human thought, one which helps prevent us from repeating bad choices but becomes debilitating when it triggers obsessive thoughts about past actions. Now a new study by Yale University researchers shows that monkeys also can be Monday morning quarterbacks and visualize alternative, hypothetical outcomes. The findings, reported in the May 26 issue of the journal Neuron, pinpoint areas of the brain where this process takes place and may give scientists new clues into how to treat diseases such as depression and schizophrenia. "Regret ...

SRC and UCLA advance design-dependent process monitoring for semiconductor wafer manufacturing

2011-05-26
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. - May 25, 2011 - Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the world's leading university-research consortium for semiconductors and related technologies, and researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a new method of design-dependent process monitoring for semiconductor wafer manufacturing. The advance promises to provide semiconductor chip manufacturing cost and productivity savings up to 15 percent, potentially increase profit per chip by as much as 12 percent and ultimately lead ...

Scientists trick the brain into Barbie-doll size

2011-05-26
Imagine shrinking to the size of a doll in your sleep. When you wake up, will you perceive yourself as tiny or the world as being populated by giants? Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden may have found the answer. According to the textbooks, our perception of size and distance is a product of how the brain interprets different visual cues, such as the size of an object on the retina and its movement across the visual field. Some researchers have claimed that our bodies also influence our perception of the world, so that the taller you are, the shorter distances ...

New tool aims to improve measurement of primary care depression outcomes

2011-05-26
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Primary care doctors have long been on the front lines of depression treatment. Depression is listed as a diagnosis for 1 in 10 office visits and primary care doctors prescribe more than half of all antidepressants. Now doctors at the University of Michigan Health System have developed a new tool that may help family physicians better evaluate the extent to which a patient's depression has improved. The issue, the researchers explain, is that the official definition of when a patient's symptoms are in remission doesn't always match up with what doctors ...

International trial finds polypill halves predicted heart disease and stroke risk

2011-05-26
The world's first international polypill trial has shown that a four-in-one combination pill can halve the predicted risk of heart disease and stroke. The results are published online today in the open access journal PLoS One [1]. The once-a-day polypill contains aspirin and agents to lower blood pressure and cholesterol. These drugs are currently prescribed separately to millions of patients and are known individually to cut the risk of disease, but many experts believe that combining them into a single pill will encourage people to take the medications more reliably. The ...

Targeted adalimumab treatment can optimize long-term outcomes for patients with early RA

2011-05-26
Results of a study of 1032 patients with early (less than one year), active RA initially assessed response to treatment after 26 weeks with ADA 40mg every other week + MTX versus MTX alone. Results show that 44% of patients treated with the combination therapy achieved the target of sustained low disease activity at week 26, versus 24% of those treated with MTX alone. Patients reaching the target on ADA+MTX were considered responders and then further randomised to continue or withdraw from treatment with ADA 40mg every other week. Patients who continued treatment maintained ...

Children experience wrist and finger pain when using gaming devices and mobile phones over time

2011-05-26
The study, involving 257 students, highlights that a higher degree of pain was experienced with the use of gaming devices compared to mobile phones. Pain reported by children using Xbox and Gameboy was statistically higher than pain reported for the iPhone (p=0.036 and p=0.042 respectively). Importantly, the length of time spent on the devices heightened the pain suffered, as the data demonstrated that length of time was independently associated with the pain reported, with the odds of reporting pain increasing by two (95* CI [1.50, 2.89, p END ...

US study shows that tofacitinib is an efficacious treatment for active RA

2011-05-26
Most adverse events were mild and no new safety signals were reported, according to study authors. Results of the 12 month multinational study, conducted with 792 patients also show that 36.6% and 16.2% of patients achieved ACR50 and ACR70 responses respectively in the 10mg BID group, a significant improvement in symptoms compared to placebo, where 31.2%, 12.7% and 3.2% of patients achieved ACR 20, 50 and 70 respectively. Significant improvements in the Disease Activity Score physician index (DAS28***) were also observed in the treatment groups compared to placebo, along ...

Massive explosion helps Warwick researcher spot universe's most distant object

Massive explosion helps Warwick researcher spot universes most distant object
2011-05-26
An international team of UK and US astronomers have spotted the most distant explosion, and possibly the most distant object, ever seen in the Universe. University of Warwick astronomer Dr Andrew Levan was one of the first members of that team to spot the exploding star, known as a Gamma-ray Burst (GRB), which was briefly as bright as several thousand galaxies (more than a million million times the brightness of the sun). This very bright explosion allowed it to be detected at an extreme estimated distance of 13.14 billion light years - putting it 96% of the way to ...

Northridge Dentists, Dr. Ariz and Dr. Arami, Are Now Using New Technologies to Provide Safer and More Comfortable Treatments for Their Patients

Northridge Dentists, Dr. Ariz and Dr. Arami, Are Now Using New Technologies to Provide Safer and More Comfortable Treatments for Their Patients
2011-05-26
Northridge dentist, Dr. Farshid Ariz, DMD, and Dr. Shahdad Arami, DDS, are popular with local residents for many reasons. The technologies that are provided to diagnose and treat dental problems constantly evolve, but these dentists make new investments in technology and stay current with the required education to provide safe and precision dental care. The i-CAT and E4D technologies are now used at Northridge Dental Group to provide patients with safer and more comfortable treatments. Early detection is a key component in diagnosing severe gum diseases like periodontal ...

Dangerous side effect of common drug combination discovered by Stanford data mining

2011-05-26
STANFORD, Calif. — A widely used combination of two common medications may cause unexpected increases in blood glucose levels, according to a study conducted at the Stanford University School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University and Harvard Medical School. Researchers were surprised at the finding because neither of the two drugs — one, an antidepressant marketed as Paxil, and the other, a cholesterol-lowering medication called Pravachol — has a similar effect alone. The increase is more pronounced in people who are diabetic, and in whom the control of blood sugar levels ...

Japan disaster's impact reaches far beyond slow-down in auto exports

2011-05-26
Japan's earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant damage have done more than reduce shipments of popular automobiles and car parts to the United States. Damage from the March disaster at Japanese chemical plants that produce raw materials for the electronics components, although modest in itself, has had some of the most severe impacts in history on the global electronics industry. That's the message from one story in a package of status reports on the disaster in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine. In the articles, C&EN ...

'Sweet wheat' for tastier and more healthful baking

2011-05-26
"Sweet wheat" has the potential for joining that summertime delight among vegetables — sweet corn — as a tasty and healthful part of the diet, the scientific team that developed this mutant form of wheat concludes in a new study. The report appears in the ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Just as sweet corn arose as a mutation in field corn — being discovered and grown by Native American tribes with the Iroquois introducing European settlers to it in 1779 — sweet wheat (SW) originated from mutations in field wheat. Toshiki Nakamura, Tomoya Shimbata and ...

Recycling of Alzheimer's proteins could be key to new treatments

2011-05-26
The formation of abnormal strands of protein called amyloid fibrils — associated with two dozen diseases ranging from Alzheimer's to type-2 diabetes — may not be permanent and irreversible as previously thought, scientists are reporting in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Rather, protein molecules are constantly attaching and detaching from the fibrils, in a recycling process that could be manipulated to yield new treatments for Alzheimer's and other diseases. In a study that focused on the fibrils associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD), Natàlia Carulla ...

8 hours of resistance

2011-05-26
Temptations to exceed the speed limit are always plentiful, but only reckless drivers give in to such impulses. Likewise, numerous growth factors always abound in our bodies, but only cancerous cells are quickly "tempted" by these chemicals to divide again and again. Healthy cells, in contrast, divide only after being exposed to growth factors for eight continuous hours. What happens during these eight hours in a healthy cell that resists the call to divide? And even more important, what fails to work properly in the cancerous cell during these same hours? Why do cancerous ...

Listening with 1 atom

2011-05-26
The lab, though it may seem quiet and insulated, can be as full of background noise as a crowded train station when we're trying to catch the announcements. Our brains can filter out the noise and focus on the message up to a certain point, but turning up the volume on the loudspeakers – improving the signal-to-noise ratio – helps as well. Separating out the signal from the noise – increasing one while reducing the other – is so basic that much of scientific research could not take place without it. One common method, developed by the physicist Robert Dicke at Princeton ...

Immune system release valve

2011-05-26
The molecular machines that defend our body against infection don't huff and puff, but some of them The molecular machines that defend our body against infection don't huff and puff, but some of them apparently operate on the same principle as a steam engine. Weizmann Institute scientists have discovered a mechanism that controls inflammation similarly to a steam-engine valve: Just when the inflammatory mechanism that protects cells against viruses reaches its peak of activity, the molecular "steam-release valve" interferes, restoring this mechanism to its resting state, ...
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