Philosophers and scientists have long puzzled over where human imagination comes from. In other words, what makes humans able to create art, invent tools, think scientifically and perform other incredibly diverse behaviors? The answer, Dartmouth researchers conclude in a new study, lies in a widespread neural network -- the brain's "mental workspace" -- that consciously manipulates images, symbols, ideas and theories and gives humans the laser-like mental focus needed to solve complex problems and come up with new ideas. Their findings, titled "Network structure and ...

Scientists at the University of Leeds have solved a 300-year-old riddle about which direction the centre of the earth spins. The Earth's inner core, made up of solid iron, 'superrotates' in an eastward direction – meaning it spins faster than the rest of the planet – while the outer core, comprising mainly molten iron, spins westwards at a slower pace. Although Edmund Halley – who also discovered the famous comet – showed the westward-drifting motion of the Earth's geomagnetic field in 1692, it is the first time that scientists have been able to link the way the inner ...

TORONTO, Sept. 13, 2013 – If aboriginal women had the same income and education levels as non-aboriginal women, their risk of being abused by a partner could drop by 40 per cent, according to a new study by researchers at St. Michael's Hospital. The new study indicates that socio-economic position is a major factor influencing risks of abuse for aboriginal women. "The unfortunate reality is that aboriginal women in Canada are almost four times more likely to experience gender violence, but we wanted to know why," said Dr. Janet Smylie, a scientist at the hospital's ...

Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have developed a revolutionary new method for identifying and characterizing antibiotics, an advance that could lead to the discovery of new antibiotics to treat antibiotic resistant bacteria. The researchers, who published their findings in this week's early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, made their discovery by developing a way to perform the equivalent of an autopsy on bacterial cells. "This will provide a powerful new tool for identifying compounds that kill bacteria ...

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 16, 2013 -- A team of researchers led by San Francisco State University's Weining Man is the first to build and demonstrate the ability of two-dimensional disordered photonic band gap material, designed to be a platform to control light in unprecedented ways. The new material could allow researchers to manipulate the flow and radiation of light in new ways by breaking away from the highly angular and constrained pathways for light dictated inside orderly photonic crystals. Instead, the material could lead to arbitrarily shaped, wavy, curved, and sharply ...

BOSTON -- Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) is a genetic disease that causes progressive loss of vision and is caused by mutations in more than 50 genes. Conventional methods for identification of both RP mutations and novel RP genes involve the screening of DNA coding sequences. In a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the Massachusetts Eye and Ear, Harvard Medical School, the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and others tested DNA with the use of whole genome sequencing, a technique that takes into account all variants from both ...

Vaccinating cattle against the E. coli O157 bacterium could cut the number of human cases of the disease by 85%, according to scientists. The bacteria, which cause severe gastrointestinal illness and even death in humans, are spread by consuming contaminated food and water, or by contact with livestock faeces in the environment. Cattle are the main reservoir for the bacterium. The vaccines that are available for cattle are rarely used, buc could be significant. The research was lead by a team of researchers at the University of Glasgow in collaboration with the ...

Copper bracelets and magnet wrist straps have no real effect on pain, swelling, or disease progression in rheumatoid arthritis, according to new findings from a study conducted at the University of York. In the first randomised controlled trial to study the effects of copper bracelets and magnetic wrist straps on rheumatoid arthritis, 70 patients with active symptoms each wore four different devices over a five-month period, reporting on their pain, disability, and medication use throughout the study. Participants also provided blood samples, after wearing each device ...

BOSTON -- Young women with breast cancer often overestimate the odds that cancer will occur in their other, healthy breast, and decide to have the healthy breast surgically removed, a survey conducted by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute investigators indicates. The survey also shows that many patients opt for the procedure -- known as a contralateral prophylactic mastectomy, or CPM -- despite knowing it will be unlikely to improve their chance of survival. The study, published in the Sept. 17 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, shows a certain disconnect between ...

LA JOLLA, Calif., September 16, 2013 – Scientists at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) today announced the discovery that a gene encoding an enzyme, phosphoinositide-dependent kinase-1 (PDK1), plays an essential role in the development and progression of melanoma. The finding offers a new approach to treating this life-threatening disease. The team of researchers, led by Ze'ev Ronai, Ph.D., professor and scientific director of Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla (San Diego, Calif.), used genetic mouse melanoma models to show ...

Researchers at the Vanderbilt Heart and Vascular Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital have identified a biomarker that can predict diabetes risk up to 10 years before onset of the disease. Thomas J. Wang, M.D., director of the Division of Cardiology at Vanderbilt, along with colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital, report their findings in the October issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation. The researchers conducted a study of 188 individuals who developed type 2 diabetes mellitus and 188 individuals without diabetes who were followed for 12 years ...

Humberto is the second "zombie" tropical storm of the Atlantic Ocean season. That is, it's the second tropical storm that degenerated into a remnant low pressure area only to make a comeback as a tropical storm. NASA's HS3 hurricane mission sent an unmanned Global Hawk Aircraft out to the eastern Atlantic to investigate Humberto on Sept. 16. On Sunday, Sept. 15, Humberto weakened to a remnant low pressure area when it hit an area of strong wind shear. The wind shear eased and Humberto regained tropical storm strength on Sept. 16, making it the second "zombie" storm in ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Two assistant professors of management at the University of California, Riverside and several other researchers have previously shown that men with wider faces are more aggressive, less trustworthy and more prone to engaging in deception. Now, in a just-published paper, they have shown, in a series of four studies, that individuals behave more selfishly when interacting with men with wider faces and this selfish behavior elicits selfish behavior in others. "This clearly shows that this behavior is also socially driven, not just biologically driven," ...

A group of international scientists including a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher have confirmed that life really could have come from out of this world. The team shock compressed an icy mixture, similar to what is found in comets, which then created a number of amino acids – the building blocks of life. The research appears in advanced online publication Sept. 15 on the Nature Geosciences journal website. This is the first experimental confirmation of what LLNL scientist Nir Goldman first predicted in 2010 and again in 2013 using computer simulations ...

LEBANON, NH (Sept. 16, 2013) – Consumers should be wary when watching those advertisements for pharmaceuticals on the nightly TV news, as six out of 10 claims could potentially mislead the viewer, say researchers in an article published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Researchers Adrienne E. Faerber of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice and David H. Kreling of The University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy found that potentially misleading claims are prevalent throughout consumer-targeted prescription and non-prescription ...

LA JOLLA, CA—September 16, 2013—Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found a way to make dramatic improvements to the cancer cell-killing power of vinblastine, one of the most successful chemotherapy drugs of the past few decades. The team's modified versions of vinblastine showed 10 to 200 times greater potency than the clinical drug. Even more significantly, these new compounds overcome the drug resistance that emerges upon treatment relapse, which renders continued or subsequent vinblastine treatment ineffective in some patients. The TSRI researchers ...

A multi-institutional team of engineers has developed a new approach to the fabrication of nanostructures for the semiconductor and magnetic storage industries. This approach combines top-down advanced ink-jet printing technology with a bottom-up approach that involves self-assembling block copolymers, a type of material that can spontaneously form ultrafine structures. The team, consisting of nine researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Chicago and Hanyang University in Korea, was able to increase the resolution of their intricate ...

New Rochelle, NY, September 16, 2013—If you are ready to commit "virtual identity suicide," delete your Facebook account, and say good-bye to social networking sites, you are not alone. A social networking counter movement is emerging, and Facebook quitters, who remove their accounts, differ from Facebook users in several key ways, as described in an article in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking website. Stefan ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — When public health budgets are constrained, mammography screening should begin later and occur less frequently, a cost-effectiveness analysis for California's Every Woman Counts (EWC) program concludes. As outlined in a paper published in Value in Health, the analysis focused on several policy questions, including the effect on EWC program costs and outcomes of starting screening at age 50 years instead of 40 and of screening every two years instead of every year. The study was conducted in response to recent government funding cutbacks. "This ...

When a person has cancer, some of the cells in his or her body have changed and are growing uncontrollably. Most cancer drugs try to treat the disease by killing those fast-growing cells, but another approach called immunotherapy tries to stimulate a person's own immune system to attack the cancer itself. Now, scientists at the University of Washington have developed a strategy to slow tumor growth and prolong survival in mice with cancer by targeting and destroying a type of cell that dampens the body's immune response to cancer. The researchers published their findings ...

Hospitalizations for endocarditis, a deadly heart infection that disproportionately affects older heart patients, have declined in recent years despite recommendations for limited use of antibiotics to prevent the illness. These findings were recently published by Yale School of Medicine researchers in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Endocarditis is the most serious infection of the cardiovascular system, and the risk increases with surgical procedures. Past studies showed a marked increase in endocarditis hospitalization rates during the 1990s. As ...

HOUSTON – (Sept. 16, 2013) – A "vicious cycle" produces mucus that protects uterine and pancreatic cancer cells and promotes their proliferation, according to researchers at Rice University. The researchers offer hope for a therapeutic solution. They found that protein receptors on the surface of cancer cells go into overdrive to stimulate the production of MUC1, a glycoprotein that forms mucin, aka mucus. It covers the exposed tips of the elongated epithelial cells that coat internal organs like lungs, stomachs and intestines to protect them from infection. But when ...

AUDIO: Researchers from around the world, led by scientists at the Genome Institute at Washington University School of Medicine and the University of Michigan School of Public Gealth, have identified a... Click here for more information. An international team of researchers, led by scientists at The Genome Institute at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Michigan School of Public Health in Ann Arbor, has identified a gene mutation ...

The risk of death following bone marrow transplantation can be reduced about 60 percent using a new technique to identify bone marrow donors who make the most potent cancer-fighting immune cells, according to research from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. The findings appear in the September 16 online issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The research builds on an earlier St. Jude discovery that specialized immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells dispatched cancer cells more efficiently when the NK cells carried a particular version of a KIR protein on ...

Arginine therapy may be a safe and inexpensive treatment for acute pain episodes in patients with sickle cell disease, according to results of a recent clinical study. The study was the first randomized placebo-controlled study to demonstrate benefits of arginine therapy in children with sickle cell disease hospitalized for severe pain. Sickle cell disease is an inherited condition in which the body makes red blood cells containing abnormal hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen from the lungs to other cells in the body. This abnormal hemoglobin (hemoglobin S) causes ...