Higher levels of cell chatter boost amyloid beta in the brain regions that Alzheimer's hits first, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report. Amyloid beta is the main ingredient of the plaque lesions that are a hallmark of Alzheimer's. These brain regions belong to a network that is more active when the brain is at rest. The discovery that cells in these regions communicate with each other more often than cells in other parts of the brain may help explain why these areas are frequently among the first to develop plaques, according to ...

A team of scientists has combined embryological observations, genetic sequencing, and supercomputing to determine that a group of small disk-shaped animals that were once thought to represent a new class of animals are actually starfish that have lost the large star-shaped, adult body from their life cycle. In a paper for the journal Systematic Biology (sysbio.oxfordjournals.org), Daniel Janies, Ph.D., a computational biologist in the department of Biomedical Informatics at The Ohio State University (OSU), leveraged computer systems at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) ...

Atlanta countertops manufacturer Craftmark Solid Surfaces is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2011. Craftmark is a premier countertops provider, supplying quality solid surface countertops, quartz countertops, and granite countertops with a wide selection of colors and styles. Craftmark Solid Surfaces was established in April of 1991, beginning as a small fabrication shop. At the time, Craftmark worked out of a 3,000 square foot building where the company fabricated solid surface kitchen countertops, including Corian, Swan stone, Gibraltar, and Craftmark's own trademarked ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- By all counts, the 54-year-old man who collapsed on a recent winter night in rural Minnesota would likely have died. He'd suffered a heart attack, and even though he was given continuous CPR and a series of shocks with a defibrillator, the man was without a pulse for 96 minutes. But this particular instance of cardiac arrest (http://www.mayoclinic.org/heart-attack/), reported first in Mayo Clinic Proceedings (http://www.mayoclinicproceedings.com) online, turned out to be highly unusual: "The patient made a complete recovery following prolonged pulselessness," ...

Scientists at Johns Hopkins have shown in laboratory experiments in mice that blocking the action of a signaling protein deep inside the heart's muscle cells blunts the most serious ill effects of high blood pressure on the heart. These include heart muscle enlargement, scar tissue formation and loss of blood vessel growth. Specifically, the Johns Hopkins team found that their intervention halted transforming growth factor beta (TGF-beta) secretion at a precise location called cell receptor type 2 in cardiac muscle cells. Blocking its action in this cell type forestalled ...

A data memory can hardly be any smaller: researchers working with Gerhard Rempe at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching have stored quantum information in a single atom. The researchers wrote the quantum state of single photons, i.e. particles of light, into a rubidium atom and read it out again after a certain storage time. This technique can be used in principle to design powerful quantum computers and to network them with each other across large distances. Quantum computers will one day be able to cope with computational tasks in no time where current ...

Networking, advertising, and marketing shouldn't have to cost an arm and a leg. In fact, with Magnets.com it's completely free. As a leading producer of custom, high quality promotional refrigerator magnets, starting today until June 15, 2011 all orders for business card magnets will be shipped with 100 free paper business cards. Best yet, there are no minimums to qualify, fine print, or strings attached. Custom designed for free and produced using the highest quality papers and printing, this value-add is sure to save the company's 50,000+ worldwide customers upwards ...

A new study finds important differences in math curricula across U.S. states and school districts. The findings, published in the May issue of the American Journal of Education, suggest that many students across the country are placed at a disadvantage by less demanding curricula. Researchers from Michigan State University and the University of Oklahoma used data from the 1999 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which included 13 school districts and nine states in the U.S., as well as nearly 40 other nations. "Overall, U.S. students are ...

Manhood is a "precarious" status—difficult to earn and easy to lose. And when it's threatened, men see aggression as a good way to hold onto it. These are the conclusions of a new article by University of South Florida psychologists Jennifer K. Bosson and Joseph A. Vandello. The paper is published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Gender is social," says, Bosson. "Men know this. They are powerfully concerned about how they appear in other people's eyes." And the more concerned they are, the more they ...

A study of how University of Washington graduate students integrated an Amazon Kindle DX into their course reading provides the first long-term investigation of e-readers in higher education. While some of the study's findings were expected – students want improved support for taking notes, checking references and viewing figures – the authors also found that allowing people to switch between reading styles, and providing the reader with physical cues, are two challenges that e-readers will need to address in cracking the college market. The UW last year was one of seven ...

Tactova Inc. has today announced the launch of their new Sudoku-based logic puzzle app for iPhone named RollDoku. The app, now available on the App Store, promises to be the best Sudoku app ever and features 10,000 preloaded puzzles, each with over 1200 different possible solutions. With it's unique game play, and an intuitive, responsive interface, users will find it hard to put down. Speaking on the occasion, Dave Whitehead, spokesman for Tactova Inc. said, "Sudoku is one of the most well known and popular logic games today. RollDoku is a unique new concept that ...

DENVER, CO – Doctors have long sought a way to directly measure the brain's temperature without inserting a probe through the skull. Now researchers have developed a way to get the brain's precise temperature with a device the diameter of a poker-chip that rests on a patient's head, according to findings presented May 1 at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Denver. "This is the first time that anyone has presented data on the brain temperature of a human obtained non-invasively," said principal researcher Dr, Thomas Bass, a neonatologist at Children's ...

Rice originated in China, a team of genome researchers has concluded in a study tracing back thousands of years of evolutionary history through large-scale gene re-sequencing. Their findings, which appear in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), indicate that domesticated rice may have first appeared as far back as approximately 9,000 years ago in the Yangtze Valley of China. Previous research suggested domesticated rice may have two points of origin—India as well as China. The study was conducted by researchers from New York ...

A new protein, called aquaporin-4, is making waves and found to play a key role in brain inflammation, or encephalitis. This discovery is important as the first to identify a role for this protein in inflammation, opening doors for the development of new drugs that treat brain inflammation and other conditions at the cellular level rather than just treating the symptoms. This discovery was published in the May 2011 issue of The FASEB Journal (http://www.faseb.org). "Our study establishes a novel role for a water channel, aquaporin-4, in neuroinflammation, as well as a ...

TEMPE, Ariz. – The public favors equal custody for children of divorce, according to findings in a pair of studies by Arizona State University researchers that will appear in the May 2011 journal Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. The authors cited polls and ballot initiatives that showed there was great public support for equal custody. But the new research goes further by showing that in a series of hypothetical cases those surveyed had a strong preference for dividing the child's time equally between mother and father, and that was so even when there were high levels ...

Scientists have discovered that drugs used to treat HIV may also one day become lifesaving drugs targeted at parasitic diseases such as leishmaniasis and malaria. According to new research published in The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), scientists have identified the target of action for some anti-HIV drugs with known abilities to kill serious pathogenic parasites. While scientists have long known that these HIV drugs can kill parasites, exactly how they work was previously unknown. Researchers discovered that a particular protein called Ddi 1 from Leishmania ...

In the largest study of it kind to establish a link between sleep and diabetes, researchers found that people with diabetes who sleep poorly have higher insulin resistance, and a harder time controlling the disease. The findings, published in the June issue of Diabetes Care, suggest that poor sleep may contribute to worse outcomes in people with diabetes. "Poor sleep quality in people with diabetes was associated with worse control of their blood glucose levels," said Kristen Knutson, PhD, assistant professor of medicine and lead author of the study. "People who have ...

BOSTON—A joint study by academics in Switzerland, Germany and at Boston University sheds new light on the formation of financial bubbles and crashes. Wild fluctuations in stock prices caused by bubbles bursting have had a dramatic impact on the world economy and the personal fortunes of millions of us in the last few years. The study "Switching processes in financial markets" will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 10 and reveals a general empirical law quantifying market behavior near bubbles and crashes—these are either price ...

People who look at the past through rose-tinted glasses are happier than those who focus on negative past experiences and regrets, according to a new study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. The study helps explain why personality has such a strong influence on a person's happiness. The findings suggest that persons with certain personality traits are happier than others because of the way they think about their past, present and future. The study examined how peoples' ratings on the "Big Five" personality traits relates to their approach ...

Ft. Worth's premier salvage yard, All Import Auto Parts, recently added new Aftermarket parts for domestic and import cars to their growing inventory. Now not only can customers shop their huge inventory of premium used auto parts but also brand new parts as well. This represents a new avenue for All Import as they continually try to expand their offerings to meet the needs of their customers. Since 1989 All Import has met the needs of Ft. Worth import car owners by selling used auto parts at great discounts. Now not only are they offering used replacement parts for ...

In 2009, the United States was gripped by concern for a new winter threat: the H1N1 strain of influenza. According to research conducted through that winter, pregnant women were right to be concerned. A pair of research papers published in the recent issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology show that women who contracted H1N1 were more likely to give birth to lower birth weight babies as compared with women who had "influenza-like illness." The papers were compiled through the work of a team of researchers, including Brenna Anderson, MD, MSc, and Dwight ...

(Boston) – Researchers from Boston University's Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM) have demonstrated that induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) can differentiate into definitive endoderm cells, in vitro, with similar functional potential when compared to embryonic stem cells (ESCs), despite minor molecular differences between the two cell types. These findings are particularly important given growing controversy in the scientific literature about whether subtle differences between iPSCs and ESCs should dampen enthusiasm for iPSCs to serve as an alternative source ...

MAY/JUNE PBZ TIPSHEET Giant Hummingbirds: Running a little hot, but not on empty What keeps an asexual fish species from taking over? Small sea birds: Holding heat, rather than cranking up the furnace For the complete table of contents for the May/June issue, go to journals.uchicago.edu/pbz. Giant Hummingbirds: Running a little hot, but not on empty Scientists have long thought that the giant hummingbird (Patagona gigas) was just about as big as a hummingbird could get. They're nearly twice the size of the next largest species, and it was assumed that ...

People who wash their hands with contaminated soap from bulk-soap-refillable dispensers can increase the number of disease-causing microbes on their hands and may play a role in transmission of bacteria in public settings according to research published in the May issue of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. "Hand washing with soap and water is a universally accepted practice for reducing the transmission of potentially pathogenic microorganisms. However, liquid soap can become contaminated with bacteria and poses a recognized health risk in health care ...

Exposure to secondhand smoke, such as a person can get by riding in an enclosed car while someone else smokes, has a direct, measurable impact on the brain—and the effect is similar to what happens in the brain of the person doing the smoking. In fact, exposure to this secondhand smoke evokes cravings among smokers, according to a study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health. The study, published today in Archives of General Psychiatry, used positron emission tomography (PET) to demonstrate that one hour of secondhand ...