Like top musicians, songbirds train from a young age to weed out errors and trim variability from their songs, ultimately becoming consistent and reliable performers. But as with human musicians, even the best are not machines. To learn and improve, the songbird brain needs to shake up its tried-and-true patterns with a healthy dose of creative experimentation. Until now, no one has found a specific mechanism by which this could occur. Now, researchers at UC San Francisco have discovered a neurological mechanism that could explain how songbirds' neural creativity-generator ...

WASHINGTON (Aug. 3, 2015)--A new analysis of early hominin body size evolution led by a George Washington University professor suggests that the earliest members of the Homo genus (which includes our species, Homo sapiens) may not have been larger than earlier hominin species. As almost all of the hows and whys of human evolution are tied to estimates of body size at particular points in time, these results challenge numerous adaptive hypotheses based around the idea that the origins of Homo coincided with, or were driven by, an increase in body mass. In "Body Mass ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. - Coaches and trainers strive to keep their players healthy so they can perform at their maximum potentials. Injury restrictions, or limits on athletes' physical activity due to illnesses or injuries, can keep athletes on the bench for a game or even an entire season. Now, University of Missouri researchers have found college football players are more likely to experience injuries during test weeks than during training camp. The effects of academic stress on injury occurrences are even more pronounced among starting players, the researchers found. "Stress ...

Many studies have been conducted on the dangers of endocrine disrupting chemicals that mimic or block estrogen, the primary female hormone. Now new research shows that similar harm can be done by chemicals that affect male hormones, or androgens. Natural androgenic steroids excreted by humans and animals and synthetic androgenic steroids widely used in daily life and livestock are important androgenic endocrine disrupting chemicals because of their constant discharge into the aquatic environment via wastewater. A new Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry study shows that ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. - Public affairs experts say easy and constant access by citizens to important government information, referred to as government transparency, is vital for good governance as well as the perception by citizens that the government is trustworthy. However, many local governments suffer from a lack of transparency. Now, University of Missouri researchers have found that county governments in densely populated urban areas tend to be more transparent on their official websites if their citizens have good Internet access. On the other hand, in counties with large ...

An analysis of data on more than 41,000 Danish women who received assisted reproductive fertility treatment shows that unsuccessful treatment is not linked with an increased risk of clinically diagnosed depression compared with successful treatment. The analysis also found that becoming a mother is an important trigger of clinically diagnosed depression after childbirth among women who conceive after fertility treatment, even though the child is long-awaited. The stress of having a new child thus seems to matter more in terms of developing clinical depression than undergoing ...

A team of New York University scientists has developed a technique that prompts microparticles to form ordered structures in a variety of materials. The advance, which appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) as an "Editors' Choice" article, offers a method to potentially improve the makeup and color of optical materials used in computer screens along with other consumer products. The work is centered on enhancing the arrangement of colloids--small particles suspended within a fluid medium. Colloidal dispersions are composed of such everyday items ...

Women are more likely to smoke during pregnancy when they live in areas where socio-economic resources are lower but also where smoking is more socially accepted, according to new study from Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research. "Where There's Smoke: Cigarette Use, Social Acceptability and Spatial Approaches to Multilevel Modeling" will appear in the September edition of Social Science and Medicine. The study examines how local factors impact health behavior. Heather O'Connell, a postdoctoral research fellow at Rice's Kinder Institute, finds contextual ...

San Francisco, CA - Since the classical studies of Jacob and Monod in the early 1960s, it has been evident that genome sequences contain not only blueprints for genes and the proteins that they encode, but also the instructions for a coordinated regulatory program that governs when, where and to what extent these genes and proteins are expressed. The execution of this regulatory code is what allows for the creation of very different cell- and tissue-types from the same set of genetic instructions found in the nucleus of every cell. A recent study published in PNAS (July ...

Nanotechnology could one day provide an inhaled vehicle to deliver targeted therapeutic genes for those suffering from life-threatening lung disorders. Researchers may have discovered first gene delivery system that efficiently penetrates the hard-to-breach human airway mucus barrier of lung tissue. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil have designed a DNA-loaded nanoparticle that can pass through the mucus barrier ...

The field of medical genetics is swiftly evolving. It's a period of rapid scientific discovery, new technologies and subsequent translation into medical practice, public policy and public health. But what role should the Medical Genetics specialist have since genetics impacts all patients and specialties in some way? In an effort to clearly define the changing role of the specialty of Medical Genetics and the distinction between Medical Geneticists and other genetics healthcare professionals, the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) has has just released ...

Various sight recovery therapies are being developed by companies around the world, offering new hope for people who are blind. But little is known about what the world will look like to patients who undergo those procedures. A new University of Washington study seeks to answer that question and offers visual simulations of what someone with restored vision might see. The study concludes that while important advancements have been made in the field, the vision provided by sight recovery technologies may be very different from what scientists and patients had previously ...

Recent research has shown that the more time employees spend in their chairs, the more likely they are to develop serious health problems such as diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. The July special issue of Ergonomics in Design examines the health and safety effects of the sedentary workplace, the pros and cons of alternatives to sitting at work (for example, sit-stand and treadmill workstations, ball chairs), and proposed workplace design solutions. The full text of the issue, guest edited by Jack Dennerlein, is now available online and may be found at http://erg.sagepub.com/content/current. "With ...

Scientists from the University of Leeds have uncovered further evidence that the protective buffers at the ends of chromosomes - known as telomeres - are fundamental to the understanding of the deadliest form of skin cancer, melanoma. A team of international researchers, co-led by Dr Mark Iles from the University's School of Medicine and St James's University Hospital in Leeds, has uncovered five new common genetic risk factors for melanoma. They have also confirmed two others previously suspected to be risk factors. Dr Iles said: "This research establishes further ...

Researchers led by the University of Cambridge have found the earliest example of reproduction in a complex organism. Their new study has found that some organisms known as rangeomorphs, which lived 565 million years ago, reproduced by taking a joint approach: they first sent out an 'advance party' to settle in a new area, followed by rapid colonisation of the new neighbourhood. The results, reported today in the journal Nature, could aid in revealing the origins of our modern marine environment. Using statistical techniques to assess the distribution of populations ...

High-dose vitamin D supplementation in postmenopausal women was not associated with beneficial effects on bone mineral density, muscle function, muscle mass or falls, according to the results of a randomized clinical trial published online by JAMA Internal Medicine. Low levels of vitamin D contribute to osteoporosis because of decreased total fractional calcium absorption (TFCA) and nearly half of postmenopausal women sustain an osteoporotic fracture. However, experts disagree on the optimal vitamin D level for skeletal health. Some experts contend that optimal serum ...

A recently discovered family of small RNA molecules, some of which have been implicated in cancer progression, has just gotten much larger thanks to a new RNA sequencing technique developed by researchers at UC Santa Cruz. The technique, described in a paper published August 3 in Nature Methods, provides sensitive detection of small RNAs that are chemically modified (methylated) after being transcribed from the genome. The researchers used the technique to reveal an abundance of modified fragments derived from transfer RNA molecules in both yeast cells and human cells. "Transfer ...

Skeletal muscle is one of the most abundant tissue types in the human body, but has proven difficult to produce in large quantities in the lab. Unlike other cell types, such as heart cells, neurons and cells found in the gut, previous attempts to efficiently and accurately derive muscle cells from pre-cursor cells or culture have not been fruitful. In a new study published this week in Nature Biotechnology, investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) report that by identifying and mimicking important developmental cues, they have been able to drive cells to grow ...

LA JOLLA--T cells are the guardians of our bodies: they constantly search for harmful invaders and diseased cells, ready to swarm and kill off any threats. A better understanding of these watchful sentries could allow scientists to boost the immune response against evasive dangers (e.g., cancer or infections), or to silence it when it mistakenly attacks the body itself (e.g., autoimmune disorders or allergies). Now, scientists at the Salk Institute have discovered that T cell triggering relies on a dynamic protein network at the cell surface, as reported in August 3, ...

New brain research has mapped a key trouble spot likely to contribute to intellectual disability in Down syndrome. In a paper published in Nature Neuroscience [3 Aug], scientists from the University of Bristol and UCL suggest the findings could be used to inform future therapies which normalise the function of disrupted brain networks in the condition. Down syndrome is the most common genetic cause of intellectual disability, and is triggered by an extra copy of chromosome 21. These findings shed new light on precisely which part of the brain's vast neural network contribute ...

Greenhouse-gas emissions from human activities do not only cause rapid warming of the seas, but also ocean acidification at an unprecedented rate. Artificial carbon dioxide removal (CDR) from the atmosphere has been proposed to reduce both risks to marine life. A new study based on computer calculations now shows that this strategy would not work if applied too late. CDR cannot compensate for soaring business-as-usual emissions throughout the century and beyond, even if the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration would be restored to pre-industrial levels at some ...

NEW YORK, NY (August 3, 2015) - Scientists at The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute successfully designed a revolutionary, high-throughput, robotic platform that automates and standardizes the process of transforming patient samples into stem cells. This unique platform, the NYSCF Global Stem Cell ArrayTM, for the first time gives researchers the scale to look at diverse populations to better understand the underlying causes of disease and create new individually tailored treatments, enabling precision medicine in patient care. A paper published ...

When it comes to making decisions involving others, the impression we have of their character weighs more heavily than do our assessments of how they can benefit us, a team of New York University researchers has found. "When we learn and make decisions about people, we don't simply look at the positive or negative outcomes they bring to us--such as whether they gave us a loan or helped us move," explains Leor Hackel, a doctoral candidate in NYU's Department of Psychology and the study's lead author. "Instead, we often look beyond concrete outcomes to form trait impressions, ...

Our brains are constantly barraged with sensory information, but have an amazing ability to filter out just what they need to understand what's going on around us. For instance, if you stand perfectly still in a room, and that room rotates around you, it's terrifying. But stand still in a room and turn your eyes, and the same visual input feels perfectly normal. That's thanks to a complex process in our brain that tell us when and how to pay attention to sensory input. Specifically, we ignore visual input caused by our own eye movements. Now, researchers at The Rockefeller ...

Skygazers at northern latitudes are familiar with the W-shaped star pattern of Cassiopeia the Queen. This circumpolar constellation is visible year-round near the North Star. Tucked next to one leg of the W lies a modest 5th-magnitude star named HD 219134 that has been hiding a secret. Astronomers have now teased out that secret: a planet in a 3-day orbit that transits, or crosses in front of its star. At a distance of just 21 light-years, it is by far the closest transiting planet to Earth, which makes it ideal for follow-up studies. Moreover, it is the nearest rocky ...