It happens to all of us at least once each winter in Montreal. You're walking on the sidewalk and before you know it you are slipping on a patch of ice hidden under a dusting of snow. Sometimes you fall. Surprisingly often you manage to recover your balance and walk away unscathed. McGill researchers now understand what's going on in the brain when you manage to recover your balance in these situations. And it is not just a matter of good luck. Prof. Kathleen Cullen and her PhD student Jess Brooks of the Dept of Physiology have been able to identify a distinct and surprisingly ...

By observing the eye movements of schizophrenia patients while playing a simple video game, a University of British Columbia researcher has discovered a potential explanation for some of their symptoms, including difficulty with everyday tasks. The research, published in a recent issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, shows that, compared to healthy controls, schizophrenia patients had a harder time tracking a moving dot on the computer monitor with their eyes and predicting its trajectory. But the impairment of their eye movements was not severe enough to explain the ...

How harmful we perceive an act to be depends on whether we see the act as intentional, reveals new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The new research shows that people significantly overestimate the monetary cost of intentional harm, even when they are given a financial incentive to be accurate. "The law already recognizes intentional harm as more wrong than unintentional harm," explain researchers Daniel Ames and Susan Fiske of Princeton University. "But it assumes that people can assess compensatory ...

DALLAS – July 29, 2013 – A seafood contaminant that thrives in brackish water during the summer works like a spy to infiltrate cells and quickly open communication channels to sicken the host, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center report. Vibrio parahaemolyticus bacteria, which cause gastroenteritis, inject proteins called effectors into host cells. One of those effectors, VopQ, almost immediately starts to disrupt the important process of autophagy via a novel channel-forming mechanism, the scientists report in the investigation available online at the Proceedings ...

Stable survival rates were observed for HIV-associated lymphoma patients during the antiretroviral therapy (ART) era in the US, according to a new study published July 26 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Studies have shown that HIV infection increases the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) and Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) and that incidence for many lymphoma types has not decreased in the ART era. Furthermore, lymphoma is the most frequent cancer-related cause of death among HIV-infected persons. However, trends in presentation and survival have not been investigated ...

Since the start of the recession, the rate of unemployment for people with mental health problems has risen more than twice as much than for people without mental health problems, according to new research from King's College London. The authors warn that, across Europe, people with mental health problems have been disproportionately affected by the economic crisis, further increasing social exclusion amongst this vulnerable group. Published in PLOS ONE, the study also found that this gap in employment rates was even greater for men and for those with low levels of ...

Irvine, Calif. — Aiming to quell heated national debate about gun control with factual answers, two UC Irvine mathematicians have designed parameters to measure how to best prevent both one-on-one killings and mass shootings in the United States. Their paper appears Friday in the journal PLOS ONE. "It's time to bring a scientific framework to this problem," said lead author Dominik Wodarz, a mathematical biologist who works on disease and evolutionary dynamics. His co-author and wife, Natalia Komarova, a mathematician who studies biomedical and social trends, added: "Can ...

PHILADELPHIA – The network of arteries supplying blood flow to the brain is more likely to be incomplete in people who suffer migraine, a new study by researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania reports. Variations in arterial anatomy lead to asymmetries in cerebral blood flow that might contribute to the process triggering migraines. The arterial supply of blood to the brain is protected by a series of connections between the major arteries, termed the "circle of Willis" after the English physician who first described it in the 17th ...

25th July 2013 - Scientists at A*STAR's Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) led in a study that has identified genes that are potential targets for therapeutic drugs against aggressive breast cancer. These findings were reported in the July 2013 issue of PNAS. Out of the 1.5 million women diagnosed with breast cancer in the world annually, nearly one in seven of these is classified as triple negative. Patients with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) have tumours that are missing three important proteins that are found in other types of breast cancer. The absence of ...

SAN FRANCISCO, July 26, 2013 -- In the first study of its kind, SF State researchers have shown that younger children who use gestures outperform their peers in a problem-solving task. The task itself is relatively simple -- sorting cards printed with colored shapes first by color, and then by shape. But the switch from color to shape can be tricky for children younger than 5, says Professor of Psychology Patricia Miller. In a new study due to be published in the August, 2013 issue of Developmental Psychology, Miller and SF State graduate student Gina O'Neill found that ...

The Expedition 36 crew completed packing the Materials International Space Station Experiment-8 (MISSE-8) Payload Experiment Container (PEC) and Optical Reflector Materials Experiment-III (ORMatE-III) after it was retrieved during the spacewalk. The MISSE-8 samples have been in orbit for a little over two years and the PEC and ORMatE are manifested for return to Earth on SpaceX 3. MISSE-8 is test bed for materials and computing elements, attached to the outside of the International Space Station, that are being evaluated for the effects of atomic oxygen, ultraviolet direct ...

PHILADELPHIA — Humans are far more than merely the sum total of all the cells that form the organs and tissues. The digestive tract is also home to a vast colony of bacteria of all varieties, as well as the myriad viruses that prey upon them. Because the types of bacteria carried inside the body vary from person to person, so does this viral population, known as the virome. By closely following and analyzing the virome of one individual over two-and-a-half years, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, led by professor of ...

New Rochelle, NY, July 26, 2013 -- Researchers have generated functional hepatocytes from human stem cells, transplanted them into mice with acute liver injury, and shown the ability of these stem-cell derived human liver cells to function normally and increase survival of the treated animals. This promising advance in the development of cell-based therapies to treat liver failure resulting from injury or disease relied on the development of scalable, reproducible methods to produce stem cell-derived hepatocytes in bioreactors, as described in an article in Stem Cells and ...

(CHICAGO) – The results of a new study by neurological researchers at Rush University Medical Center show that a sudden decrease of testosterone, the male sex hormone, may cause Parkinson's like symptoms in male mice. The findings were recently published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. One of the major roadblocks for discovering drugs against Parkinson's disease is the unavailability of a reliable animal model for this disease. "While scientists use different toxins and a number of complex genetic approaches to model Parkinson's disease in mice, we have found ...

NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of smoke from northern Oregon's Sunnyside Turnoff Fire on July 25 as the satellite passed overhead in space. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that flies aboard Aqua captured an image of the smoke and heat from the Sunnyside Turnoff Fire on July 25 at 21:10 UTC (5:10 p.m. EDT/2:10 p.m. PDT). MODIS has the ability to detect hot spots or fires and they appear red in the image. The Incident Information System called InciWeb noted the Sunnyside Turnoff Fire had covered 48,916 acres by July 26, 2013. ...

Boulder, Colo., USA – July 2013 GSA Bulletin postings cover the solid Earth's influence on the sea; the diverging geologic histories of the North America Cordillera; "ghost glaciers" in Greenland; the Picuris Orogeny, New Mexico, USA; the Corner Brook Lake Block in the Appalachian orogen of western Newfoundland; the Cryogenian Perry Canyon Formation in Utah, USA; geochronology of the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming, USA; and "A cosmic trip: 25 years of cosmogenic nuclides in geology." GSA BULLETIN articles published ahead of print are online at http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/content/early/recent; ...

UCLA chemists and molecular biologists have for the first time used a "structure-based" approach to drug design to identify compounds with the potential to delay or treat Alzheimer's disease, and possibly Parkinson's, Lou Gehrig's disease and other degenerative disorders. All of these diseases are marked by harmful, elongated, rope-like structures known as amyloid fibrils, linked protein molecules that form in the brains of patients. Structure-based drug design, in which the physical structure of a targeted protein is used to help identify compounds that will interact ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new report projects that by the middle of this century there will be an average 56 percent drop in the amount of water stored in peak snowpack in the McKenzie River watershed of the Oregon Cascade Range - and that similar impacts may be found on low-elevation maritime snow packs around the world. The findings by scientists at Oregon State University, which are based on a projected 3.6 degree Fahrenheit temperature increase, highlight the special risks facing many low-elevation, mountainous regions where snow often falls near the freezing point. In ...

There is a shortage of dead wood in forests because fallen branches and trees tend to be cleared away. This wood, if available, ought to be decomposing, as it is the habitat of many living beings like lignicolous fungi. These fungi are capable of decomposing dead wood and turning it into organic and inorganic matter. So clearing away the dead wood from the forests is ecologically harmful for the fungi. Nerea Abrego-Antia and Isabel Salcedo-Larralde, biologists in the Department of Plant Biology and Ecology of the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country, have recently quantified ...

Researchers at McGill University have discovered a new way to join materials together using ultrasound. Ultrasound – sound so high it cannot be heard – is normally used to smash particles apart in water. In a recent study, the team of researchers, led by McGill professor Jake Barralet, from the faculties of Dentistry and Medicine, found that if particles were coated with phosphate, they could instead bond together into strong agglomerates, about the size of grains of sand. Their results are published in the journal Advanced Materials. Nanoparticles are extremely useful ...

Tampa, FL (July 25, 2013) -- Many experts believe that chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) has several root causes including some viruses. Now, lead scientists Shara Pantry, Maria Medveczky and Peter Medveczky of the University of South Florida's Morsani College of Medicine, along with the help of several collaborating scientists and clinicians, have published an article in the Journal of Medical Virology suggesting that a common virus, Human Herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6), is the possible cause of some CFS cases. Over 95 percent of the population is infected with HHV-6 by age 3, ...

Environmental consultants, research ecologists, nature conservation agencies, city managers, translators, and many others, all need to put names to plants at one time or another. The sources used often are not scientifically up-to-date, making it difficult to figure out the accepted name or proper vernacular to use in a vast country like Canada. The VASCAN database simplifies this task for all users. The database content was developed by a team of botanists led by Dr. Luc Brouillet, a specialist of the Canadian flora, curator of the Marie-Victorin Herbarium, and a researcher ...

Scientists use tools called gradients to understand how molecules interact in biological systems. Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new technique for creating biomolecular gradients that is both simpler than existing techniques and that creates additional surface characteristics that allow scientists to monitor other aspects of molecular behavior. A gradient is a material that has a specific molecule on its surface, with the concentration of the molecule sloping from a high concentration on one end to a low concentration at the other end. ...

The new species Echinophyllia tarae is described from the remote and poorly studied Gambier Islands, French Polynesia. Although the new species is common in the lagoon of Gambier Islands, its occurrence elsewhere is unknown. Echinophyllia tarae lives in protected reef habitats and was observed between 5 and 20 m depth. It is a zooxanthellate species which commonly grows on dead coral fragments, which are also covered by crustose coralline algae and fleshy macroalgae. This species can grow on well illuminated surfaces but also encrusts shaded underhangs and contributes ...

This news release is available in German. As part of the innate immune system natural killer cells (NK cells) play an important role in immune responses. For a long time they have been known as the first line of defense in the fight against infectious diseases. Therefore, researchers assumed that the body needs as many active NK cells as possible. However, scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) have now shown that the principle "the more the better" does not apply to this type of immune cells. "During certain phases of the immune response ...