VIDEO: Humans perceive numerous categories of objects and actions, but where are these categories represented spatially in the brain? Researchers reporting in the Dec. 20 issue of the Cell Press journal... Click here for more information. Humans perceive numerous categories of objects and actions, but where are these categories represented spatially in the brain? Researchers reporting in the December 20 issue of the Cell Press journal Neuron present their study that undertook ...

After conducting the largest online intelligence study on record, a Western University-led research team has concluded that the notion of measuring one's intelligence quotient or IQ by a singular, standardized test is highly misleading. The findings from the landmark study, which included more than 100,000 participants, were published today in the journal Neuron. The article, "Fractionating human intelligence," was written by Adrian M. Owen and Adam Hampshire from Western's Brain and Mind Institute (London, Canada) and Roger Highfield, Director of External Affairs, Science ...

SAN ANTONIO (Dec. 19, 2012) — Given that epilepsy impacts more than 2 million Americans, there is a pressing need for new therapies to prevent this disabling neurological disorder. New findings from the neuroscience laboratory of Mark S. Shapiro, Ph.D., at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, published Dec. 20 in the high-impact scientific journal, Neuron, may provide hope. "A large fraction of epilepsy sufferers cannot take drugs for their disorder or the existing drugs do not manage it," said Dr. Shapiro, professor of physiology in the School ...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Scarring of the airways can lead to long-term breathing problems for some people exposed to high levels of chlorine gas from events such as an industrial accident, chemical spill following a train derailment or terroristic chemical warfare. Household mishaps from mixing bleach with acidic cleaning products also can cause release of chlorine gas; if this occurs in a poorly ventilated space, chlorine levels could be high enough to cause lung injury. University of Louisville scientist Gary Hoyle, Ph.D., School of Public Health and Information Sciences ...

Washington, D.C.— An international team of scientists, including Carnegie's Paul Butler, has discovered that Tau Ceti, one of the closest and most Sun-like stars, may have five planets. Their work is published by Astronomy & Astrophysics and is available online. At a distance of twelve light years and visible with a naked eye in the evening sky, Tau Ceti is the closest single star with the same spectral classification as our Sun. Its five planets are estimated to have masses between two and six times the mass of the Earth--making it the lowest-mass planetary system yet ...

A research study from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) has yielded important breakthroughs on how the body loses muscle, paving the way for new treatments for aging, obesity and diabetes. The study found that by inhibiting a particular molecule produced naturally in the body, muscle loss due to aging or illnesses can be prevented. Blocking the same molecule will also trigger the body to go into a 'fat-burning mode' which will fight obesity and also treat the common form of diabetes. The exciting discoveries have led NTU scientists to embark on joint clinical research ...

A research coordinated by the UAB has succeeded in testing a vaccine against leishmaniasis. The vaccine was tested with the best animal model existing, the golden hamster, and can be produced at low costs by using insect larvae. The research, published in the latest edition of PLoS ONE, is an important step towards the fight against a disease which causes the death of 70,000 people each year in developing countries and of countless dogs, which also suffer from this disease and are its natural reservoir. Leishmaniasis is one of the main health problems existing at global ...

This press release is available in Spanish. VIDEO: This is a cauliflower. Click here for more information. The scientists have found a formula that describes how the patterns found in a multitude of natural structures are formed. "We have found a model that describes, in detail, the evolution in time and in space of cauliflower-type fractal morphologies for nanoscopic systems", explains ...

Numerous geo-engineering schemes have been suggested as possible ways to reduce levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and so reduce the risk of global warming and climate change. One such technology involves dispersing large quantities of iron salts in the oceans to fertilize otherwise barren parts of the sea and trigger the growth of algal blooms and other photosynthesizing marine life. Photosynthesis requires carbon dioxide as its feedstock and when the algae die they will sink to the bottom of the sea taking the locked in carbon with them. Unfortunately, ...

Scientists at The University of Manchester have identified a protein that appears to hold the key to creating more effective drug treatments for melanoma, one of the deadliest cancers. Researchers funded by Cancer Research UK have been looking at why new drugs called "MEK inhibitors", which are currently being tested in clinical trials, aren't as effective at killing cancer cells as they should be. They discovered that MITF - a protein that helps cells to produce pigment but also helps melanoma cells to grow and survive - is able to provide cancer cells with a resistance ...

Researchers at the RUB and from the MPI Dortmund have uncovered the mechanism that switches off the cell transport regulating proteins. They were able to resolve in detail how the central switch protein Rab is down-regulated with two "protein fingers" by its interaction partners. The structural and dynamic data is reported by the researchers led by Prof. Dr. Klaus Gerwert (Chair of Biophysics, RUB) and Prof. Dr. Roger S. Goody (Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology, Dortmund, Germany) in the Online Early Edition of the journal PNAS. "Unlike in the cell growth protein ...

Scientists found that badgers which strayed away from the family burrow in favour of sleeping in outlying dens were more likely to carry TB. The 12-month study of 40 wild badgers was funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and could have implications for the management of bovine TB in parts of the UK. The behaviour of individual animals is thought to be a key factor in how the disease is spread among animals and livestock. The new findings could help to understand and develop measures to manage TB in badgers. The study is published ...

The researchers reveal the role of the innate immune cells, especially the dendritic cells, that cause the activation of the killer T-lymphocytes whose action is directed against the p pancreatic cells. The results obtained in mice make it possible to consider new ways of regulating the auto-immune reaction generated by the innate immune cells. Type 1 diabetes, or insulin-dependent diabetes, is an auto-immune disease characterised by the destruction of insulin-producing pancreatic β cells that are present in the Islets of Langerhans which are themselves in the pancreas. ...

Apart from the common European cockchafer (Melolontha melolontha), the European forest cockchafer (Melolontha hippocastani) is the most common species of the Melolontha genus. These insects can damage huge areas of broadleaf trees and conifers in woodlands and on heaths. Cockchafers house microbes in their guts that help them to digest their woody food, such as lignocelluloses and xylans. Scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, have now performed comprehensive RNA analyses and identified the microbiota of cockchafer larvae feeding on ...

New Rochelle, NY, December 19, 2012—Acute liver failure is usually fatal without a liver transplant, but the liver can regenerate and recover if given time to heal. A bioartificial liver machine that can provide temporary support while organ regeneration takes place has been scaled up for testing in a large animal model and is described in an article in BioResearch Open Access, a bimonthly peer-reviewed open access journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available on the BioResearch Open Access website . A team of researchers from University College ...

In 1991, it was a disaster for the villages nearby the erupting Philippine volcano Pinatubo. But the effects were felt even as far away as Europe. The volcano threw up many tons of ash and other particles into the atmosphere causing less sunlight than usual to reach the Earth's surface. For the first few years after the eruption, global temperatures dropped by half a degree. In general, volcanic eruptions can have a strong short-term impact on climate. Conversely, the idea that climate may also affect volcanic eruptions on a global scale and over long periods of time is ...

Researchers at the University of Jaen (Spain) have mixed waste from the paper industry with ceramic material used in the construction industry. The result is a brick that has low thermal conductivity meaning it acts as a good insulator. However, its mechanical resistance still requires improvement. "The use of paper industry waste could bring about economic and environmental benefits as it means that material considered as waste can be reused as raw material." – This is one of the conclusions of the study developed by researchers at the Upper Polytechnic School of Linares ...

Optical fibers –the backbone of the Internet–carry movies, messages, and music at the speed of light. But for all their efficiency, these ultrathin strands of pristine glass must connect to sluggish signal switches, routers, and buffers in order to transmit data. Hoping to do away with these information speed bumps, researchers have developed a new, dual-core optical fiber that can perform the same functions just by applying a miniscule amount of mechanical pressure. These new nanomechanical fibers, which have their light-carrying cores suspended less than 1 micrometer ...

Cholesterol plays a key role in regulating proteins involved in cell signaling and may be important to many other cell processes, an international team of researchers has found. The results of their study are reported in the journal Nature Communications. Cholesterol's role in heart disease has given it a bad reputation. But inside the thin membrane of a cell, the tight regulation of cholesterol at high levels (30 to 40 percent) suggests that it plays an important role in cellular processes, says Wonhwa Cho, professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago ...

Scientists from Aalto University, Finland, have succeeded in organising virus particles, protein cages and nanoparticles into crystalline materials. These nanomaterials studied by the Finnish research group are important for applications in sensing, optics, electronics and drug delivery. Layer structures, or superlattices, of crystalline nanoparticles have been extensively studied in recent years. The research develops hierarchically structured nanomaterials with tuneable optical, magnetic, electronic and catalytic properties. Such biohybrid superlattices of nanoparticles ...

Community solidarity and support have remarkable benefits for people coping with traumatic mass shootings, according to an American-Finnish research study recently published by the University of Turku. James Hawdon and John Ryan, both professors of sociology at Virginia Tech, with Finnish researchers Atte Oksanen and Pekka Räsänen, investigated the responses of four communities that suffered from similar tragedies in the United States and Finland. People in all four communities expressed their need for belonging after the shootings, and this solidarity appeared to ...

After a cautious and rigorous analysis of national malpractice claims, Johns Hopkins patient safety researchers estimate that a surgeon in the United States leaves a foreign object such as a sponge or a towel inside a patient's body after an operation 39 times a week, performs the wrong procedure on a patient 20 times a week and operates on the wrong body site 20 times a week. The researchers, reporting online in the journal Surgery, say they estimate that 80,000 of these so-called "never events" occurred in American hospitals between 1990 and 2010 — and believe their ...

More than a century after it was first identified, Harvard scientists are shedding new light on a little-understood neural feedback mechanism that may play a key role in how the olfactory system works in the brain. As described in a December 19 paper in Neuron by Venkatesh Murthy, Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, researchers have, for the first time, described how that feedback mechanism works by identifying where the signals go, and which type of neurons receive them. Three scientists from the Murthy lab were involved in the work: Foivos Markopoulos, Dan ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Fibromyalgia is a complex illness to diagnose and to treat. There is not yet a diagnostic test to establish that someone has it, there is no cure and many fibromyalgia symptoms -- pain, fatigue, problems sleeping and memory and mood issues -- can overlap with or get mistaken for other conditions. A new Mayo Clinic study suggests that many people who have fibromyalgia, especially men, are going undiagnosed. The findings appear in the online edition of the journal Arthritis Care & Research. More research is needed, particularly on why men who reported ...

Genomic technology has revolutionized gene discovery and disease understanding in autism, according to an article published in the December 20 issue of the journal Neuron. The paper highlights the impact of a genomic technology called high-throughput sequencing (HTS) in discovering numerous new genes that are associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). "These new discoveries using HTS confirm that the genetic origins of autism are far more complex than previously believed," said Joseph D. Buxbaum, PhD, Director of the Seaver Autism Center at the Icahn School of ...