PITTSBURGH—Computer graphic artists who produce computer-animated movies and games spend much time creating subtle movements such as expressions on faces, gesticulations on bodies and the draping of clothes. A new way of modeling these dynamic objects, developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Disney Research, Pittsburgh, and the LUMS School of Science and Engineering in Pakistan, could greatly simplify this editing process. Graphics software usually represents dynamic objects, such as an expressive face, as a sequence of shapes, with each shape composed ...

PITTSBURGH -- Conventional motion capture for film and game production involves multiple cameras and actors festooned with markers. A new technique developed by Disney Research, Pittsburgh, has demonstrated how three-dimensional motion capture can be accomplished with a single camera and without aid of markers. The technique, developed in collaboration with Brown University, not only captures the 3D poses of actors, as is done with traditional motion capture systems, but derives "biped controllers" — programs that incorporate the underlying physics of the motion. Bipedal ...

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Telling the truth when tempted to lie can significantly improve a person's mental and physical health, according to a "Science of Honesty" study presented at the American Psychological Association's 120th Annual Convention. "Recent evidence indicates that Americans average about 11 lies per week. We wanted to find out if living more honestly can actually cause better health," said lead author Anita E. Kelly, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame. "We found that the participants could purposefully and dramatically reduce their everyday ...

ORLANDO, Fla. – Traditional in-person bullying is far more common than cyberbullying among today's youth and should be the primary focus of prevention programs, according to research findings presented at the American Psychological Association's 120th Annual Convention. "Claims by the media and researchers that cyberbullying has increased dramatically and is now the big school bullying problem are largely exaggerated," said psychologist Dan Olweus, PhD, of the University of Bergen, Norway. "There is very little scientific support to show that cyberbullying has increased ...

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Voters' racial attitudes, both conscious and unconscious, may be a significant factor in this year's U.S. presidential election, particularly since whites tend to prefer people of their own race, according to research presented at the 120th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association. "People may not even be aware that they have certain racial attitudes and that could be why, even with an African-American president in the White House for nearly four years, race continues to play a role in electoral politics," Anthony G. Greenwald, PhD, ...

Nanoscale science and technology has seen exciting advances recently in drug delivery, electronics, energy and environmental applications. According to international scientific conventions, nanomaterials are those whose at least one dimension is less than or equal to 10-9 m. At the same time, there is a great possibility for nanomaterials to enter ecosystems at the points of use or disposal, which could lead to negative environmental implications. Our recent paper, "Dendrimer-fullerenol soft-condensed nanoassembly" published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry C, showed ...

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Grateful teens are more likely than their less grateful peers to be happy, less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol and less likely to have behavior problems at school, according to research presented at the American Psychological Association's 120th Annual Convention. "Gratitude played an important role in many areas of positive mental health of the teens in our study," said lead author Giacomo Bono, PhD, psychology professor at California State University. "Increases in gratitude over a four-year period were significantly related to improvements in life ...

ONCOLOGY Understanding colon cancer metastasis and invasion | Back to top Chemokines are signals in the body that act as beacons, calling out to migrating cells, such as white blood cells, guiding them to where they are needed. One chemokine in particular, Chemokine 25 (CCL25), binds to Chemokine Receptor 9 (CCR9), forming a signaling pathway that is important in the small intestine and colon, where it regulates immune response and decreases cell death. Drs. Steven Lipkin, Xiling Shen, and colleagues at Cornell University have discovered that the CCL25-CCR9 pathway also ...

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive disease wherein the cells of the central nervous system (CNS) involved in movement and coordination are destroyed. Although the mechanism of ALS is not completely understood, inflammation is believed to play a role in the disease process. A recent study by Howard Weiner and colleagues at Harvard Medical School and Tufts School of Medicine investigated the role of inflammation in a mouse model of ALS. Weiner and colleagues found that the recruitment of activated immune cells known as monocytes into the spinal cord correlated ...

Just as users of Google Earth can zoom in from space to a view of their own backyard, researchers can now navigate biological tissues from a whole embryo down to its subcellular structures thanks to recent advances in electron microscopy and image processing, as described in The Journal of Cell Biology (JCB). An upgrade to the JCB DataViewer (http://jcb-dataviewer.rupress.org), JCB's browser-based image presentation tool, now also makes these data publicly accessible for exploration and discovery. Since the early days of cell biology, electron microscopy has revealed ...

BOSTON, MA—Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) are the first to discover that changes in monocytes (a type of white blood cell) are a biomarker for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease. This finding also brings the medical community a step closer toward a new treatment for the debilitating neurological disease that affects approximately 30,000 Americans. The study will be published online in The Journal of Clinical Investigation on August 6, 2012. In pre-clinical studies involving mice with an ALS gene mutation, the researchers ...

The genetics research group led by Professor Hannes Lohi, based at the University of Helsinki and the Folkhälsan Research Center, has, in collaboration with Adjunct Professor Kirsi Sainio's research group, discovered the cause of a life-threatening skeletal disorder affecting Brazilian Terriers. The disease is caused by a mutation in the GUSB gene. Malfunction of the GUSB gene has previously been linked to a severe skeletal disorder in humans, called type VII mucopolysaccharidosis (MPS VII). The gene discovery is yet another example of a shared disease heritage between ...

An international research team, led from the University of Leeds, has found that a common anti-angina drug could help protect the heart against carbon monoxide poisoning. Animal studies have shown that the anti-angina drug ranolazine can significantly reduce the number of deaths from arrhythmias – irregular or abnormally paced heartbeats – that have been triggered by carbon monoxide. The findings could have important implications for the development of a protective treatment for adults and children who have been exposed to toxic levels of the gas. "When patients are ...

New research lends hope that a phenomenon called quantum discord could be harnessed to bring quantum technologies within easier reach than expected. The work, by an international team, is published 5 August in Nature Physics. Up until a few years ago, researchers thought that realising quantum technologies would mean harnessing the most difficult-to-tame properties of the quantum world. For example, 'entanglement', the phenomenon referred to by Einstein as spooky-action-at-a-distance, was thought to be a resource required to run a quantum computer. This presents a challenge. ...

Despite a huge amount of research effort, the molecular mechanisms that underlie the transition from a "normal" cell to a cancerous cell are only poorly understood. After the discovery of the first cancer-causing genes or oncogenes and the finding that they are mutated forms of normal cellular genes, it was widely believed that a single mutation was enough to cause cancer. Subsequent research, however, has revealed that most cancers only develop as a result of several mutations. A bewildering variety of combinations of mutations have been shown to have the potential ...

The team of Professor Keon Jae Lee from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, KAIST has developed a high performance flexible all-solid-state battery, an essential energy source for flexible displays (see paper in Nano Letters: "Bendable Inorganic Thin-Film Battery for Fully Flexible Electronic Systems"). The technological advance of thin and light flexible display has encouraged the development of flexible batteries with a high power density and thermal stability. Although rechargeable lithium-ion batteries (LIB) have been regarded as a strong candidate ...

New research suggests the more friends we have on Facebook, the less likely we are to share information about charitable causes. Economist Professor Kimberley Scharf, from the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) at the University of Warwick, claims when we have larger online social networks, we rely on other people to pass on information about opportunities to give. This phenomenon is called 'free riding'. Professor Scharf also suggests we may even rely on others to donate. She will present her research paper 'Private Provision of Public Goods ...

A fundamental characteristic of quantum physics is the fact that two or more particles can exhibit correlations stronger than classically allowed. This unique characteristic applies particularly to quantum entanglement: as soon as the quantum state of a particle is measured the state of its entangled partner changes accordingly, regardless of how far apart the two entangled particles might be. This feature allows for the remote quantum state preparation, which is an essential ingredient for applications in quantum communication, quantum cryptography, and quantum computation. The ...

A UNC-led team of scientists describes the function of a previously uncharacterized protein that dramatically influences inflammation. A majority of the NLR family of proteins function as activators of inflammation. However, scientists at UNC report that a newly identified NLR protein, NLRC3, was able to inhibit a major inflammatory pathway that is controlled by a protein called NF-Kappa B. NF-Kappa B activation has been long associated with inflammation and cancer promotion. Their article appears in the August 5,2012 online publication of the journal Nature Immunology. ...

VIDEO: This visualization shows a flat map of the Earth with summertime temperature anomalies for the Northern Hemisphere. This analysis compares observed seasonal mean temperatures (June-July-August) to the seasonal mean temperatures... Click here for more information. A new statistical analysis by NASA scientists has found that Earth's land areas have become much more likely to experience an extreme summer heat wave than they were in the middle of the 20th century. The research ...

News outlets need to be held to account for their coverage of the English riots, a new report has argued. Media and the Riots: A Call for Action, published today on the first anniversary of the riots, is the first report to examine the impact of the mainstream print and broadcast media's reporting on the communities most affected. The report, written by Dr Leah Bassel of the University of Leicester's Department of Sociology, reflects the views of those who attended the Media and the Riots conference held by the Citizen Journalism Educational Trust and citizen journalism ...

Philadelphia, PA, August 6, 2012 – Vaginal delivery for early preterm fetuses presenting head first, or vertex presentation, had a high rate of success with no difference in neonatal mortality compared to cesarean delivery, a new study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology reports. For breech births, however, the failure rate of vaginal delivery was high and planned cesarean delivery was associated with significantly lower neonatal mortality. "Selecting a route of delivery at less than 32 weeks' gestation is a difficult clinical decision given ...

Patterns in nature are in everything from ocean currents to a flower's petal. Scientists are taking a new look at Earth patterns, studying the biodiversity of yard plants in the U.S. and that of desert mammals in Israel, studying where flowers and bees live on the Tibetan plateau and how willow trees in America's Midwest make use of water. They're finding that ecology, the study of relationships between living organisms and their environment, and phylogenetics, research on evolutionary relationships among groups of organisms, are inextricably intertwined. Results ...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 6, 2012—Inspired by the erratic behavior of photons zooming around and bouncing off objects and walls inside a room, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin, and Rice University combined these bouncing photons with advanced optics to enable them to "see" what's hidden around the corner. This technique, described in a paper published today in the Optical Society's (OSA (http://www.osa.org)) open-access journal Optics Express (http://www.opticsinfobase.org/oe), may one day prove invaluable ...

Two proteins that act in opposing directions – one that promotes cancer and one that suppresses cancer — regulate the same set of genes in prostate cancer, Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center researchers have found. The findings, reported recently in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, point toward potential drug targets and prognostic markers for prostate cancer. "We are trying to understand the molecular genetics of prostate cancer: what are the genes that are altered in human prostate cancer, and very importantly, how do they lead to cancer when they are changed?" ...