Analysis of a bronze battering ram from a 2000 year-old warship sheds light on how such an object would have been made in ancient times. Known as the Belgammel Ram, the 20kg artefact was discovered by a group of British divers off the coast of Libya near Tobruk in 1964. The ram is from a small Greek or Roman warship – a "tesseraria". These ships were equipped with massive bronze rams on the bow at the waterline and were used for ramming the side timbers of enemy ships. At 65cm long, the Belgammel Ram is smaller in size and would have been sited on the upper level on the ...

Scientists from the University of Notre Dame, The Nature Conservancy, and Central Michigan University have presented their findings of Asian carp DNA throughout the Great Lakes in a study published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. "The good news is that we have found no evidence that Asian carp are widespread in the Great Lakes basin, despite extensive surveys in Southern Lake Michigan and parts of lakes Erie and St Clair," Christopher Jerde, the paper's lead author and a scientist at the University of Notre Dame, said. "Looking at the overall ...

Amsterdam, NL, April 4, 2013 – In a study designed to differentiate why some stroke patients recover from aphasia and others do not, investigators have found that a compensatory reorganization of language function to right hemispheric brain regions bodes poorly for language recovery. Patients who recovered from aphasia showed a return to normal left-hemispheric language activation patterns. These results, which may open up new rehabilitation strategies, are available in the current issue of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience. "Overall, approximately 30% of patients ...

Children's sense of having and owning a body differs from that of adults, indicating that our sense of physical self develops over time, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Many of our senses — vision, touch, and body orientation — come together to inform our perception of having and owning a body. Psychological scientist Dorothy Cowie of Goldsmiths, University of London and colleagues hypothesized that there might be age differences in how these processes come together. To test this hypothesis, ...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found the farthest supernova so far of the type used to measure cosmic distances. Supernova UDS10Wil, nicknamed SN Wilson after American President Woodrow Wilson, exploded more than 10 billion years ago. SN Wilson belongs to a special class called Type Ia supernovae. These bright beacons are prized by astronomers because they provide a consistent level of brightness that can be used to measure the expansion of space. They also yield clues to the nature of dark energy, the mysterious force accelerating the rate of expansion. "This new ...

A technology being developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory promises to provide clear images of the brains of children, the elderly and people with Parkinson's and other diseases without the use of uncomfortable or intrusive restraints. Awake imaging provides motion compensation reconstruction, which removes blur caused by motion, allowing physicians to get a transparent picture of the functioning brain without anesthetics that can mask conditions and alter test results. The use of anesthetics, patient restraints or both is not ideal because they can trigger brain activities ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – For the first time, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have isolated adult stem cells from human intestinal tissue. The accomplishment provides a much-needed resource for scientists eager to uncover the true mechanisms of human stem cell biology. It also enables them to explore new tactics to treat inflammatory bowel disease or to ameliorate the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation, which often damage the gut. "Not having these cells to study has been a significant roadblock to research," said senior study author ...

WASHINGTON -- Significant investments over the past decade into disease surveillance and notification systems appear to have "paid off" and the systems "work remarkably well," says a Georgetown University Medical Center researcher who examined the public health response systems during the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. The findings are published online today in PLOS ONE. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. and the potential threat of bioterrorism, many new advanced systems for disease surveillance and notification have been developed and implemented throughout ...

The monetary cost of dementia in the United States ranges from $157 billion to $215 billion annually, making the disease more costly to the nation than either heart disease or cancer, according to a new RAND Corporation study. The greatest economic cost of dementia is associated with providing institutional and home-based long-term care rather than medical services, according to the findings published in the April 4 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. The study, funded by the National Institute on Aging, is the most-detailed examination done in recent decades ...

Treating patients with cells may one day become as common as it is now to treat the sick with drugs made from engineered proteins, antibodies or smaller chemicals, according to UC San Francisco researchers. They outlined their vision of cell-based therapeutics as a "third pillar of medicine" in an article published online April 3 in Science Translational Medicine. "Today, biomedical science sits on the cusp of a revolution: the use of human and microbial cells as therapeutic entities," said Wendell Lim, PhD, a UCSF professor and director of the UCSF Center for Systems ...

Wikipedia users who proclaim their political affiliations within the online community consider their identity as "Wikipedian" stronger than potentially divisive political affiliations, according to research published April 3 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by David Laniado and colleagues from Barcelona Media, Spain, and University of Southern California. Previous studies of blog networks have revealed that liberal and conservative blogs tend to link to others with similar political slants rather than to one another, described by researchers as "divided they blog". ...

Stable, specific 'breathprints' unique to an individual exist and may have applications as diagnostic tools in personalized medicine, according to research published April 3 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Renato Zenobi and colleagues from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) and the University Hospital Zürich, Switzerland. The researchers studied the chemicals present in exhaled breath from eleven participants, collected at different times of the day over an 11-day period. They found significant differences in the chemicals present in each person's ...

A new system for isolating rare circulating tumor cells (CTCs) – living solid tumor cells found at low levels in the bloodstream – shows significant improvement over previously developed devices and does not require prior identification of tumor-specific target molecules. Developed at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Center for Engineering in Medicine and the MGH Cancer Center, the device rapidly delivers a population of unlabeled tumor cells that can be analyzed with both standard clinical diagnostic cytopathology and advanced genetic and molecular technology. ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Amyloids — clumps of misfolded proteins found in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders — are the quintessential bad boys of neurobiology. They're thought to muck up the seamless workings of the neurons responsible for memory and movement, and researchers around the world have devoted themselves to devising ways of blocking their production or accumulation in humans. But now a pair of recent research studies from the Stanford University School of Medicine sets a solid course toward rehabilitating the reputation ...

Humans favor speech as the primary means of linguistic communication. Spoken languages are so common many think language and speech are one and the same. But the prevalence of sign languages suggests otherwise. Not only can Deaf communities generate language using manual gestures, but their languages share some of their design and neural mechanisms with spoken languages. New research by Northeastern University's Prof. Iris Berent further underscores the flexibility of human language and its robustness across both spoken and signed channels of communication. In a paper ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Taking a break from hormone-blocking prostate cancer treatments once the cancer seems to be stabilized is not equivalent to continuing therapy, a new large-scale international study finds. Based on previous smaller studies, it looked like an approach called intermittent androgen deprivation therapy might be just as good as continuous androgen deprivation in terms of survival while meanwhile giving patients a breather from the side effects of therapy. In fact, researchers believed intermittent therapy might help overcome treatment resistance that occurs ...

DURHAM, NC – By tracking the very earliest days of one person's robust immune response to HIV, researchers have charted a new route for developing a long-sought vaccine that could boost the body's ability to neutralize the virus. The research team, led by Barton F. Haynes, M.D., director of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute, and John Mascola, M.D., acting director of the NIH Vaccine Research Center, have for the first time described the co-evolution of antibodies and virus in a person with HIV whose immune system mounted a broad attack against the pathogen. Findings are ...

MADISON — If the sheet of ice covering Greenland were to melt in its entirety tomorrow, global sea levels would rise by 24 feet. Three million cubic kilometers of ice won't wash into the ocean overnight, but researchers have been tracking increasing melt rates since at least 1979. Last summer, however, the melt was so large that similar events show up in ice core records only once every 150 years or so over the last four millennia. "In July 2012, a historically rare period of extended surface melting raised questions about the frequency and extent of such events," says ...

New genetic factors predisposing to schizophrenia have been uncovered in five families with several affected relatives. The psychiatric disorder can disrupt thinking, feeling, and acting, and blur the border between reality and imagination. Dr. Debby W. Tsuang, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and Dr. Marshall S. Horwitz, professor of pathology, both at the University of Washington in Seattle, led the multi-institutional study. Tsuang is also a staff physician at the Puget Sound Veterans Administration Health Care System. The results are published in ...

Long-life batteries and satellite tagging have been used to fill in the blanks of female white sharks' (Carcharodon carcharias) lifestyles. Research published in the launch edition of BioMed Central's open access journal Animal Biotelemetry defines a two year migratory pattern in the Pacific Ocean. Pregnant females travel between the mating area at Guadalupe Island and nursery in Baja California, putting them and their young at risk from commercial fishing. White sharks are pelagic much of their time, living in the open ocean. However they are also philopatric, in that ...

Bodily fluids contain lots of information about the health status of a person. Medical doctors routinely have blood and urine analysed in order to obtain hints for infectious and metabolic diseases, to diagnose cancer and organ failure, and to check the dose of medication, based on compounds present in these body fluids. Researchers at ETH Zurich and at the University Hospital Zurich now propose to extend such analyses to breath, and in particular to take advantage of modern high-resolution analytical methods that can provide real-time information on the chemical composition ...

Male pattern baldness is linked to an increased risk of coronary heart disease, but only if it's on the top/crown of the head, rather than at the front, finds an analysis of published evidence in the online journal BMJ Open. A receding hairline is not linked to an increased risk, the analysis indicates. The researchers trawled the Medline and the Cochrane Library databases for research published on male pattern baldness and coronary heart disease, and came up with 850 possible studies, published between 1950 and 2012. But only six satisfied all the eligibility criteria ...

Low testosterone levels may herald the subsequent development of rheumatoid arthritis in men, suggests research published online in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases. Sex hormones are thought to play a part in the development of rheumatoid arthritis, and both men and women with the condition tend to have lower levels of testosterone in their blood than healthy people. But it is not clear whether this is a contributory factor or a consequence of the disease. The researchers based their findings on participants of the Swedish Malmo Preventive Medicine Program (MPMP), ...

In an advance for HIV vaccine research, scientists have for the first time determined how both the virus and a resulting strong antibody response co-evolved in one HIV-infected individual. The findings could help researchers identify which proteins to use in investigational vaccines to induce antibodies capable of preventing infection from an array of HIV strains. Previously, a study of antibody genetics enabled scientists to deduce the step-by-step evolution of certain broadly neutralizing antibodies—those that can prevent infection by the majority of HIV strains found ...

The Gilbert Island reefs in the Central Pacific were once home to two species of sharks not previously reported in historic records or contemporary studies. The species were discovered in a new analysis of weapons made from shark teeth and used by 19th century islanders, reported in a study published April 3 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Joshua Drew from Columbia University and colleagues from the Field Museum of Natural History. Sharks were culturally important to the Gilbertese Islanders; historic records indicate a complex ritual system surrounding shark fishing ...