Poor Phineas Gage. In 1848, the supervisor for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad in Vermont was using a 13-pound, 3-foot-7-inch rod to pack blasting powder into a rock when he triggered an explosion that drove the rod through his left cheek and out of the top of his head. As reported at the time, the rod was later found, "smeared with blood and brains." Miraculously, Gage lived, becoming the most famous case in the history of neuroscience — not only because he survived a horrific accident that led to the destruction of much of his left frontal lobe but also because ...

In the first study of its kind in Australasia, scientists have used 27 natural climate records to create the first large-scale temperature reconstruction for the region over the last 1000 years. The study was led by researchers at the University of Melbourne and used a range of natural indicators including tree rings, corals and ice cores to study Australasian temperatures over the past millennium and compared them to climate model simulations. Lead researcher, Dr Joelle Gergis from the University of Melbourne said the results show that there are no other warm periods ...

Mount Sinai School of Medicine researchers will present several landmark studies, including data on treatment trends in late-stage cancer, a promising multiple myeloma vaccine, and predictive models of soft tissue sarcomas, prostate and bladder cancer, at the 2012 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting June 1-5, 2012 in Chicago. Highlights of Mount Sinai research at ASCO: Age, Race, Lower Income, and Lack of Insurance Are Associated with Non-Treatment of Patients With Late-Stage Cancer (Abstract #6065, Monday, June 4, 2012, 1:15 PM-5:15 PM CT, S Hall A2) Mount ...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Navy pilots and other flight specialists soon will have a new "smart machine" installed in training simulators that learns from expert instructors to more efficiently train their students. Sandia National Laboratories' Automated Expert Modeling & Student Evaluation (AEMASE, pronounced "amaze") is being provided to the Navy as a component of flight simulators. Components are now being used to train Navy personnel to fly H-60 helicopters and a complete system will soon be delivered for training on the E-2C Hawkeye aircraft, said Robert G. Abbott, a Sandia ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Next Mother's Day, say it with an evolved model of logistical efficiency — a flower. A new discovery about how nature's icons of romance manage the distribution of sperm among female gametes with industrial precision helps explain why the delicate beauties have reproduced prolifically enough to dominate the earth. In pollination, hundreds of sperm-carrying pollen grains stick to the stigma suspended in the middle of a flower and quickly grow a tube down a long shaft called a style toward clusters of ovules, which hold two female sex ...

Highlight One type of open heart surgery is safer than the other—in terms of both health and survival—for chronic kidney disease patients. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in individuals with chronic kidney disease. Washington, DC (May 17, 2012) — One type of open heart surgery is likely safer than the other for chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). Open heart, or coronary artery bypass, surgery can be done two ways: on-pump or off-pump, ...

Highlights A minimally invasive procedure called renal denervation, which disrupts certain nerves in the kidneys, lowers blood pressure in patients with chronic kidney disease and hypertension. The procedure may help protect the kidneys and reduce heart risks in patients with chronic kidney disease. 60 million people globally have chronic kidney disease. Washington, DC (May 17, 2012) — Disrupting certain nerves in the kidneys can safely and effectively lower blood pressure in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) and hypertension, according to a study appearing ...

Mental distractions make pain easier to take, and those pain-relieving effects aren't just in your head, according to a report published online on May 17 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. The findings based on high-resolution spinal fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) as people experienced painful levels of heat show that mental distractions actually inhibit the response to incoming pain signals at the earliest stage of central pain processing. "The results demonstrate that this phenomenon is not just a psychological phenomenon, but an active neuronal ...

When it comes to weight gain, when you eat might be at least as important as what you eat. That's the conclusion of a study reported in the Cell Press journal Cell Metabolism published early online on May 17th. When mice on a high-fat diet are restricted to eating for eight hours per day, they eat just as much as those who can eat around the clock, yet they are protected against obesity and other metabolic ills, the new study shows. The discovery suggests that the health consequences of a poor diet might result in part from a mismatch between our body clocks and our ...

Research to be published in Science on May 18, 2012, sheds light on a hot-button political issue: the role and effectiveness of government regulation. Does it kill jobs or protect the public? The new study, co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Toffel, Professor David Levine of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and Boston University doctoral student Matthew Johnson, examines workplace safety inspections conducted by California's Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA). The authors carried out the first ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich.--- Across history and cultures, religion increases trust within groups but also may increase conflict with other groups, according to an article in a special issue of Science. "Moralizing gods, emerging over the last few millennia, have enabled large-scale cooperation and sociopolitical conquest even without war," says University of Michigan anthropologist Scott Atran, lead author of the article with Jeremy Ginges of the New School for Social Research. "Sacred values sustain intractable conflicts like those between the Israelis and the Palestinians ...

The strategy used by Google to decide which pages are relevant for a search query can also be used to determine which proteins in a patient's cancer are relevant for the disease progression. Researchers from Dresden University of Technology, Germany, have used a modified version of Google's PageRank algorithm to rank about 20,000 proteins by their genetic relevance to the progression of pancreatic cancer. In their study, published in PLoS Computational Biology, they found seven proteins that can help to assess how aggressive a patient's tumor is and guide the clinician ...

### Weill Cornell Medical College Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University's medical school located in New York City, is committed to excellence in research, teaching, patient care and the advancement of the art and science of medicine, locally, nationally and globally. Physicians and scientists of Weill Cornell Medical College are engaged in cutting-edge research from bench to bedside, aimed at unlocking mysteries of the human body in health and sickness and toward developing new treatments and prevention strategies. In its commitment to global health and ...

In two back-to-back reports published online on 17 May in Cell, researchers have sequenced the genomes of 21 breast cancers and analysed the mutations that emerged during the tumours' development. The individual results are described below. Led by researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the team created a catalogue of all the mutations in the genomes of the 21 cancer genomes and identified the mutational processes that lead to breast cancer. They found that these mutations accumulate in breast cells over many years, initially rather slowly, but picking up ...

Researchers at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute have confirmed the long-held conjecture that studying the genes we share with other animals is a viable means of extrapolating information about human biology. The study, published in the open access journal PLoS Computational Biology, shows how bioinformatics makes it possible to test the conjecture. Scientists have long looked to model species – mice, for example – to understand human biology. This is at the root of what is called the 'ortholog conjecture': the idea ...

Imagine reading an entire book, but then realizing that your glasses did not allow you to distinguish "g" from "q." What details did you miss? Geneticists faced a similar problem with the recent discovery of a "sixth nucleotide" in the DNA alphabet. Two modifications of cytosine, one of the four bases that make up DNA, look almost the same but mean different things. But scientists lacked a way of reading DNA, letter by letter, and detecting precisely where these modifications are found in particular tissues or cell types. Now, a team of scientists from the University ...

VIDEO: This is an interview with Dr. Panda. Click here for more information. LA JOLLA, CA----It turns out that when we eat may be as important as what we eat. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have found that regular eating times and extending the daily fasting period may override the adverse health effects of a high-fat diet and prevent obesity, diabetes and liver disease in mice. In a paper published May 17 in Cell Metabolism, scientists from Salk's ...

Researchers at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute have confirmed the long-held belief that studying the genes we share with other animals is useful. The study, published today in the open access journal PLoS Computational Biology, shows how bioinformatics makes it possible to test the fundamental principles on which life science is built. Studying genes helps life science researchers understand how our bodies work and how diseases progress. Scientists have long looked to model species – mice, for example – to understand ...

Technology is helping communication companies merge telephone, television and Internet services, but a push to deregulate may leave some customers on the wrong side of the digital divide during this convergence, according to a Penn State telecommunications researcher. "Moving away from copper lines is an example of abandoning obsolete technology and embracing technology that is faster, better, cheaper and more convenient," said Rob Frieden, Pioneers Chair in Cable Television and professor of telecommunications and law. "But the risk is that we may be creating a digital ...

MADISON – An international team of researchers has discovered how adding trace amounts of water can tremendously speed up chemical reactions—such as hydrogenation and hydrogenolysis—in which hydrogen is one of the reactants, or starting materials. Led by Manos Mavrikakis, the Paul A. Elfers professor of chemical and biological engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Flemming Besenbacher, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, the team published its findings in the May 18 issue of the journal Science. Hydrogenation ...

For pregnant women, including those who are overweight and obese, following a healthy calorie controlled diet during pregnancy is safe and can reduce the risk of serious complications such as pre-eclampsia, diabetes and premature birth, finds a study published on bmj.com today. In the UK, more than half the women of reproductive age are overweight or obese, and across Europe and the US, up to 40% of women gain more than the recommended weight in pregnancy. Excessive weight gain during pregnancy is associated with a number of serious health problems. Pregnancy is thought ...

The recent excesses of Wall Street may be big news but behind the headlines there's another story: When it comes to men and women stockbrokers, someone is taking home a bigger paycheck. New research shows that women stockbrokers sometimes earn as much as 20 percent less than their male counterparts. "Stockbrokers are among the highest paid workers, yet they have the greatest gender inequality among all sales worker jobs," says Prof. Janice Fanning Madden, who conducted the research. Her paper "Performance-Support Bias and the Gender Pay Gap Among Stockbrokers," will ...

Dr. Joseph Kizior, Brookfield orthodontist, is pleased to offer an easy to use online appointment request form as a part of his practice's comprehensive website. The appointment request form is just one of the features on the Western Springs orthodontist's website designed to make dealing with Dr. Kizior's practice easy for patients. To schedule an appointment, patients simply have to navigate to the appointment request form on Dr. Kizior's website. Once there, patients can request the date and time that they wish to come in for an appointment and the practice's scheduling ...

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One-letter switches in the DNA code occur much more frequently in human genomes than anticipated, but are often only found in one or a few individuals. The abundance of rare variations across the human genome is consistent with the population explosion of the past few thousand years, medical geneticists and evolutionary biologists report in the May 17 advanced online edition of Science. "This is a dramatic example of how recent human history has profoundly shaped patterns of genetic variation," said Joshua Akey, University of Washington associate professor of genome ...