Researchers at the MIT Media Lab are developing a new wearable device that turns the user's thumbnail into a miniature wireless track pad. They envision that the technology could let users control wireless devices when their hands are full -- answering the phone while cooking, for instance. It could also augment other interfaces, allowing someone texting on a cellphone, say, to toggle between symbol sets without interrupting his or her typing. Finally, it could enable subtle communication in circumstances that require it, such as sending a quick text to a child while ...

Selective breeding of maize over the last century to create hybrids with desirable shoot characteristics and increased yield may have contributed indirectly to the evolution of root systems that are more efficient in acquiring nutrients, such as nitrogen, from the soil, according to researchers. Their results suggest that future breeding efforts that directly select for positive root traits could lead to yield gains needed to help feed a growing world population, while reducing pollution from excess nitrogen and reducing farmers' fertilizer costs. About half of the ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (Mar. 16, 2015) - Osteoarthritis (OA), a debilitating and painful degenerative disease, strikes an estimated 14 percent of adults 25 years of age and older, a third of adults age 65 and older in the U.S. alone. Those who suffer from OA may one day have a new and effective cell therapy, thanks to a team of Czech researchers who studied the effectiveness of using an OA patient's own adipose (fat) cells in a unique transplant therapy aimed at reducing the symptoms of this prevalent and difficult to treat condition as well as healing some of the damage caused ...

The likelihood of Asian carp eggs being kept in suspension and hatching in the St. Joseph River in Michigan has been further evaluated using a model that examines a range of multiple flow and water temperature scenarios. Results illustrate the highest percentage of Asian carp eggs at risk of hatching occurs when the streamflow is low and when the water temperature is high. This new study by the University of Illinois and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is published in the Journal of Great Lakes Research. "In this study, the Fluvial Egg Drift Simulator (FluEgg) model ...

Biological diversity brings beauty and variety to our lives and to the world around us. It also could be the key to keeping ecosystems strong, according to a new University of Minnesota study published April 17 in the journal Science. The study, led by Yann Hautier a Marie Curie Fellow associated with the College of Biological Sciences at the University of Minnesota and with the University of Oxford, U.K., looked at 28 years' worth of data on plant growth, number of species, ecosystem stability and exposure to changes in nitrogen, carbon dioxide, fire, grazing and water ...

Through a combination of data analysis and numerical modeling work, researchers have found a record of the ancient Moon-forming giant impact observable in stony meteorites. Their work will appear in the April 2015 issue of the Journal Science. The work was done by NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) researchers led by Principal Investigator Bill Bottke of the Institute for the Science of Exploration Targets (ISET) team at the Southwest Research Institute and included Tim Swindle, director of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. The ...

A skin cell responsible for scarring, and a molecule that inhibits the cell's activity, have been identified by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The molecule slowed wound healing in mice but alleviated scarring, the researchers said. The researchers also found that the cell may play a role in the growth of melanoma and in skin damage caused by radiation. A drug that acts in the same way as the inhibitory molecule is already approved for use in humans as a treatment for type-2 diabetes, so it could potentially move quickly into clinical trials ...

For more than 250 million years, four-limbed land animals known as tetrapods have repeatedly conquered the Earth's oceans. These creatures--such as plesiosaurs, penguins and sea turtles--descended from separate groups of terrestrial vertebrates that convergently evolved to thrive in aquatic environments. In a new scientific review, a team of Smithsonian scientists synthesized decades of scientific discoveries to illuminate the common and unique patterns driving the extraordinary transitions that whales, dolphins, seals and other species underwent as they moved from land ...

Supermassive black holes, often with masses billions of times that of the Sun, are located at the heart of almost all galaxies in the Universe. These black holes can accrete huge amounts of matter in the form of a surrounding disc. While most of this matter is fed into the black hole, some can escape moments before capture and be flung out into space at close to the speed of light as part of a jet of plasma. How this happens is not well understood, although it is thought that strong magnetic fields, acting very close to the event horizon, play a crucial part in this process, ...

A global study on canine rabies, published today (16 April 2015), has found that 160 people die every single day from the disease. The report is the first study to consider the impact in terms of deaths and the economic costs of rabies across all countries. Even though the disease is preventable, the study says that around 59,000 people die every year of rabies transmitted by dogs. The multi-author study, by the Global Alliance for Rabies Control's Partners for Rabies Prevention Group, also shows that annual economic losses because of the disease are around 8.6 billion ...

Scientists have discovered a protein that plays a central role in promoting immunity to viruses and cancer, opening the door to new therapies. Experiments in mice and human cells have shown that the protein promotes the proliferation of cytotoxic T cells, which kill cancer cells and cells infected with viruses. The discovery was unexpected because the new protein had no known function and doesn't resemble any other protein. Researchers from Imperial College London who led the study are now developing a gene therapy designed to boost the infection-fighting cells, and ...

A major astrophysical mystery has centred on how massive, quiescent elliptical galaxies, common in the modern Universe, quenched their once furious rates of star formation. Such colossal galaxies, often also called spheroids because of their shape, typically pack in stars ten times as densely in the central regions as in our home galaxy, the Milky Way, and have about ten times its mass. Astronomers refer to these big galaxies as red and dead as they exhibit an ample abundance of ancient red stars, but lack young blue stars and show no evidence of new star formation. The ...

San Antonio -- April 16, 2015 -- A NASA-funded research team led by Dr. Bill Bottke of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) independently estimated the Moon's age as slightly less than 4.5 billion years by analyzing impact-heated shock signatures found in stony meteorites originating from the Main Asteroid Belt. Their work will appear in the April 2015 issue of the journal Science. "This research is helping to refine our time scales for 'what happened when' on other worlds in the solar system," said Bottke, of the Institute for the Science of Exploration Targets (ISET). ...

April 16, 2015, NEW HAVEN, CT - With poor sanitation estimated to cause 280,000 deaths per year worldwide, improving sanitation is a key policy goal in many developing countries. Yet governments and major development institutions disagree over how to address the problem. A new study released in Science today found that in Bangladesh, a community-motivation model that has been used in over 60 countries to increase use of hygienic latrines had no effect, yet latrine coverage expands substantially when that model is combined with subsidies for hygienic latrines targeted to ...

Astronomers from Chalmers University of Technology have used the giant telescope Alma to reveal an extremely powerful magnetic field very close to a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy. The results appear in the 17 April 2015 issue of the journal Science. A team of five astronomers from Chalmers University of Technology have revealed an extremely powerful magnetic field, beyond anything previously detected in the core of a galaxy, very close to the event horizon of a supermassive black hole. This new observation helps astronomers to understand the structure and ...

Astronomers have shown for the first time how star formation in "dead" galaxies sputtered out billions of years ago. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) have revealed that three billion years after the Big Bang, these galaxies still made stars on their outskirts, but no longer in their interiors. The quenching of star formation seems to have started in the cores of the galaxies and then spread to the outer parts. The results will be published in the 17 April 2015 issue of the journal Science. A major astrophysical mystery has centred ...

"The answers to extinction, survival and evolution are right here in the dirt," says University of Cincinnati Quaternary science researcher Ken Tankersley, associate professor of anthropology and geology. "And we are continually surprised by what we find." While many scientists focus on species' extinction wherever there has been rapid and profound climate change, Tankersley looks closely at why certain species survived. For many years he has invited students and faculty from archeology and geology, and representatives from the Cincinnati Museum Center and Kentucky ...

Washington, DC--Drinking sugar-sweetened beverages can suppress the hormone cortisol and stress responses in the brain, but diet beverages sweetened with aspartame do not have the same effect, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. "This is the first evidence that high sugar - but not aspartame - consumption may relieve stress in humans," said one of the study's authors, Kevin D. Laugero, PhD, of the University of California, Davis, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service. ...

Washington, DC--People who have osteoporosis face a 1.76-fold higher risk of developing sudden deafness than those who do not have the bone disease, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. Osteoporosis is a progressive condition in which bones become structurally weak and are more likely to fracture or break, according to the Hormone Health Network. More than 40 million people nationwide already have osteoporosis or are at risk of developing the condition due to low bone mass, according to the National ...

This news release is available in French. Quebec City, April 16, 2015--An international study led by researchers from Université Laval and CHU de Québec-Université Laval has identified significant vascular changes in the brains of people with Huntington's disease. This breakthrough, the details of which are published in the most recent issue of Annals of Neurology, will have significant implications for our understanding of the disease and could open the door to new therapeutic targets for treating this fatal neurodegenerative condition. Huntington's ...

If you are looking to raise money online for your favorite cause, listen up. A real-world analysis of human behavior reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on April 16 shows that men treat online giving as a competitive enterprise. Men will donate four times more money to an attractive female fundraiser in response to the contribution of another male. Researchers say that they suspect this tendency is a subconscious part of human psychology that exists because it is (or was) evolutionarily beneficial to us. "People are really generous and are right, a lot ...

The body plan of octopuses is nothing if not unique, with a sophisticated brain in a soft, bilaterally symmetrical body, encircled by eight radially symmetrical and incredibly flexible arms. Now, researchers reporting the first detailed kinematic analysis of octopus arm coordination in crawling show that the animals have a unique motor control strategy to match their "odd" form. The researchers report their findings in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on April 16. "Octopuses use unique locomotion strategies that are different from those found in other animals," ...

Bacteria that naturally reside in the gut are important for health, but recent studies consistently show that a modern lifestyle depletes the gut's collection of microbes. How lifestyle affects the diversity of this gut "microbiome" is unclear, but an analysis of the gut microbiomes of Papua New Guinean and US residents in Cell Reports now suggests that western lifestyle may diminish the variety of bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract by limiting their ability to be transmitted among humans. "There are several aspects of western lifestyle that have been hypothesized ...

Oral infections are the most common diseases of mankind and are also a key risk factor for heart disease, which is the leading cause of death worldwide. In a review article published in Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism on April 16, researchers summarize the latest clinical evidence supporting a link between oral infections, which are caused by the bacteria in our mouth, and heart disease, and they emphasize the important role of inflammation in both of these conditions. "Given the high prevalence of oral infections, any risk they contribute to future cardiovascular ...

By analyzing the activity of "GPS" neurons in mice, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered that the mental maps created by these cells accumulate errors, which are corrected when the animal encounters a wall. The findings support the theory that these cells, called grid cells, use an animal's perceived speed and direction to help it navigate familiar places. Thus, as you stumble through your pitch-black kitchen in the middle of the night for a glass of water, your body knows how many steps to take and when to turn to get to the sink. ...