There is growing evidence that, beyond what was previously believed, the adult human brain is remarkably malleable and capable of new feats -- even in the last decades of life. In fact, new experiences can trigger major physical changes in the brain within just a few days, and certain conditions can accelerate this physical, chemical and functional remodeling of the brain. "We used to think that the brain was completely formed by development and its basic structure didn't change much in adults, but as research went on we discovered that wasn't true, at least in the ...

Summer is a peak season for many sports, and with that comes sport-related injuries. Among those injuries is shoulder joint dislocation. According to a literature review in the August 2012 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, most incidences of shoulder joint instability are the result of traumatic contact injuries like force or falling on an outstretched arm; a direct blow to the shoulder area; forceful throwing, lifting or hitting; or contact with another player. By the Numbers In 45 percent of shoulder joint instability injuries, ...

When it comes to sperm meeting eggs in sexual reproduction, conventional wisdom holds that the fastest swimming sperm are most likely to succeed in their quest to fertilize eggs. That wisdom was turned upside down in a new study of sperm competition in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), which found that slower and/or longer sperm outcompete their faster rivals. The study, recently published online in Current Biology and forthcoming in print on Sept. 25, was done by a team of scientists led by corresponding author Stefan Lüpold, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department ...

MADISON — Hundreds of millions of daily posts on the social networking service Twitter are providing a new window into bullying — a tough nut to crack for researchers. "Kids are pretty savvy about keeping bullying outside of adult supervision, and bullying victims are very reluctant to tell adults about it happening to them for a host of reasons," says Amy Bellmore, a University of Wisconsin–Madison educational psychology professor. "They don't want to look like a tattletale, or they think an adult might not do anything about it." Yet typical bullying research methods ...

Park Ridge, Ill. (August 1, 2012) – New research from Cornell University indicates that pregnant women who increase choline intake in the third trimester of pregnancy may reduce the risk of the baby developing metabolic and chronic stress-related diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes later in life.(i) The results, published in the latest edition of the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, suggest that choline, a nutrient found in high quantities in eggs, may help protect against the effects of a mother's stress during pregnancy. ...

Neighbors' lawn signs, public opinion polls and even a conversation in the next restaurant booth can affect how people vote in an election. But it all depends on how far away the election is. In a new research article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, scientists Alison Ledgerwood and Shannon Callahan of the University of California, Davis conducted two different studies examining the relationship between abstract thinking and group norms people's support for different policies. In the first study, they asked ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — It's relatively easy to collect massive amounts of data on microbes. But the files are so large that it takes days to simply transmit them to other researchers and months to analyze once they are received. Researchers at Michigan State University have developed a new computational technique, featured in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that relieves the logjam that these "big data" issues create. Microbial communities living in soil or the ocean are quite complicated. Their genomic data is easy enough to ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - If the drought forces producers to feed a larger portion of distillers dried grains with solubles, cattle can maintain gains and improve meat quality if the animals are weaned early, a Purdue University scientist has shown. The finding, reported at the American Society of Animal Science Midwest Meetings in Des Moines, Iowa, could allow some producers to save on rising feed costs in the face of this year's drought. Distillers dried grains with solubles, or DDGS, are the leftovers from corn ethanol production. DDGS generally cost about 10 percent ...

When it comes to intelligence, what factors distinguish the brains of the exceptionally smart from those of average humans? As science has long suspected, overall brain size matters somewhat, accounting for about 6.7 percent of individual variation in intelligence. More recent research has pinpointed the brain's lateral prefrontal cortex, a region just behind the temple, as a critical hub for high-level mental processing, with activity levels there predicting another 5 percent of variation in individual intelligence. Now, new research from Washington University in St. ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Infants innately relieve stress by crying, turning their heads or maintaining eye contact. Adults manage emotional tension using problem-solving or by seeking support. A new study by a University of Missouri human development expert describes how adolescents' developing personalities and coping habits affect their behaviors toward others. "We're each born with some personality tendencies; for example, we see that babies are fussy or calm," said Gustavo Carlo, the Millsap Professor of Diversity in the MU Department of Human Development and Family Studies. ...

A team of researchers has developed a cheap, rechargeable and eco-friendly battery that could be used to store energy at solar power plants for a rainy day. Led by Sri Narayan, professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the team developed an air-breathing battery that uses the chemical energy generated by the oxidation of iron plates that are exposed to the oxygen in the air – a process similar to rusting. "Iron is cheap and air is free," Narayan said. "It's the future." Details about the battery will be published July 20 in the ...

New York, NY and Oxford, UK, August 1, 2012 – The body has a built-in system known as autophagy, or 'self-eating,' that controls how cells live or die. Deregulation of autophagy is linked to the development of human diseases, including neural degeneration and cancer. In a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Oxford discovered a critical molecular switch that regulates autophagy. They also studied the links between autophagy and a cellular process called senescence ...

Archaeological sites that currently take years to map will be completed in minutes if tests underway in Peru of a new system being developed at Vanderbilt University go well. The Aurora Flight Sciences unmanned aerial vehicle will be integrated into a larger system that combines the flying device that can fit into a backpack with a software system that can discern an optimal flight pattern and transform the resulting data into three-dimensional maps. The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Vanderbilt archaeologist Steven Wernke and engineering professor ...

A pilot study in adolescents and adults has found that an investigational drug shows promise as the first potential medical treatment for children with the severest type of congenital hyperinsulinism, a rare but potentially devastating disease in which gene mutations cause insulin levels to become dangerously high. "There is currently no effective medicine for children with the most common and most severe form of hyperinsulinism," said study leader Diva D. De Leon, M.D., a pediatric endocrinologist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "Our new research shows that ...

NASA's Aqua satellite spotted some very cold, high, thunderstorms around the center of a tropical low pressure area in the Atlantic Ocean today, indicating that the system is getting stronger and more organized. The low pressure area, designated as "System 99L" was located about 850 miles east of the southern Windward Islands, near 10.7 North latitude and 46.9 West longitude. It was moving west between 15 and 20 mph. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over System 99L on August 1 at 0405 UTC (12:05 a.m. EDT) and the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured an ...

Montreal, August 1, 2012 – Caffeine, which is widely consumed around the world in coffee, tea and soft drinks, may help control movement in people suffering from Parkinson's. This is the finding of a study conducted at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI MUHC) that was recently published in Neurology®, the official journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study opens the door to new treatment options for Parkinson's disease that affects approximately 100 000 Canadians. "This is one of the first studies to show the benefits of caffeine ...

Scientists at the Smithsonian and their colleagues have discovered a new mechanism of animal mating plug production. In the giant wood spider Nephila pilipes, a highly sexually dimorphic and polygamous species, many small males compete with one other for access to a few huge females. During copulation these males are known to sever their own genitals in an attempt to plug the female, thereby gaining paternity advantage by preventing other males from mating with her. Until recently however, nothing has been known about the origin and function of additional and very solid ...

NASA's Terra satellite captured two tropical cyclones on visible imagery today, August 1 as they head for landfall. Typhoon Saola is approaching Taiwan and Typhoon Damrey approaching southern Japan, are both headed for landfall in China. Saola is forecast to landfall south of Shanghai on August 3, while Damrey is forecast to make landfall north of Shanghai on August 2. NASA satellites have been tracking the twin tropical troublemakers, providing forecasters at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center with visible, infrared and microwave imagery. The Moderate Resolution Imaging ...

A study by a University of Iowa economist finds that many car race fans do, indeed, watch NASCAR races because they want to see car wrecks, but more of them have been tuning in to see who actually wins the race since the circuit adopted its Chase for the Cup championship series in 2004. John Solow, a professor of economics in the Tippie College of Business, and co-author Peter Von Allmen of Skidmore College, looked at 135 NASCAR races between 2001 and 2009. They used a formula that measured the impact on each race's television ratings by incorporating a dozen statistics, ...

Image-processing software is a hot commodity: Just look at Instagram, a company built around image processing that Facebook is trying to buy for a billion dollars. Image processing is also going mobile, as more and more people are sending cellphone photos directly to the Web, without transferring them to a computer first. At the same time, digital-photo files are getting so big that, without a lot of clever software engineering, processing them would take a painfully long time on a desktop computer, let alone a cellphone. Unfortunately, the tricks that engineers use to ...

Cincinnati, OH, August 2, 2012 – In 2010, 59% of the U.S. population used internet searches for health information, and parents searching for information regarding their children were among the top users. In 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published recommendations for infant sleep safety to reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), suffocation, strangulation, and other accidental sleep-related deaths. However, according to a study scheduled for publication in The Journal of Pediatrics, Google internet searches related to infant sleep safety ...

Rochester, MN, August 2, 2012 – Many health care systems across the US have declined to participate in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' (CMMS) Accountable Care Organization (ACO) program, developed under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), to improve efficiency and quality of health care delivery. In a groundbreaking collection of commentaries in the current issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, representatives of six leading health care organizations write about the challenges of reducing health care costs while improving health care quality. ...

Proteins do not need to be surrounded by water to carry out their vital biological functions, according to scientists from the Institut de Biologie Structurale (IBS) in Grenoble, the University of Bristol, the Australian National University, the Institut Laue Langevin and the Jülich Centre for Neutron Science. In a new paper, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the team used a state-of-the-art neutron scattering technique to demonstrate that when myoglobin, an oxygen-binding protein found in the muscle tissue of vertebrates, is enclosed in a sheath ...

A chemical sensing system developed by engineers at the University of Connecticut is believed to be the first of its kind capable of detecting vapors from buried landmines and other explosive devices with the naked eye rather than advanced scientific instrumentation. The research was first reported in the May 11, 2012 online edition of Advanced Functional Materials. The key to the system is a fluorescent nanofiberous film that can detect ultra-trace levels of explosive vapors and buried explosives when applied to an area where explosives are suspected. A chemical reaction ...

LeadMaster Australia Pty Ltd ("LeadMaster") today announced its participation in the Outback Air Race 2012 in support of the Royal Flying Doctor Service ("RFDS", http://www.flyingdoctor.org.au). RFDS provides emergency aero-medical and primary healthcare across Australia. It operates a fleet of 61 aircraft from 21 bases across Australia and flies the equivalent of 25 round trips to the moon each year. The doctors and flight nurses are responsible for the care of nearly 270,000 patients every year. RFDS is a not for profit charitable organisation ...