Milan, Italy, 31 January 2010 – Wouldn't life be easy if everything happened as we anticipated? In reality, our brains are able to adapt to the unexpected using an inbuilt network that makes predictions about the world and monitors how those predictions turn out. An area at the front of the brain, called the orbitofrontal cortex, plays a central role and studies have shown that patients with damage to this area confuse memories with reality and continue to anticipate events that are no longer likely to happen. The brain's ability to react adaptively, becomes crucial for ...

From the highest mountaintop comes a new research report in the FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org) that gets to the bottom of what happens to the hearts of people when exposed to low-levels of oxygen, such as those on Mount Everest or in the intensive care unit of a hospital. In the study, researchers monitored subjects who spent time at the Mount Everest Base Camp and found that the low-level oxygen conditions at the base came caused changes in heart function resembling what is seen in conditions that severely restrict the amount of oxygen to the heart, such as cystic ...

Bats tend to have a bad reputation. They sleep all day, party at night, and are commonly thought to be riddled with rabies. A study by University of Calgary researchers has confirmed that bats are not as disease-ridden as the stigma suggests. "The notion that bats have high rates of rabies is not true," says Brandon Klug, a graduate student at the University of Calgary and the lead author of a paper published in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases. "Those of us that work with bats have always known the rates are low; and now we have evidence that bats aren't disease-ridden ...

Tel Aviv — The new environmentally-friendly concept of municipal "bike-sharing" is taking over European cities like Paris, and American cities like New York are also looking into the idea. It allows a subscriber to "borrow" a bike from one of hundreds of locations in the city, use it, and return it to another location at the end of the journey. It's good for commuters and for running short errands. While the idea is gaining speed and subscribers at the 400 locations around the world where it has been implemented, there have been growing pains — partly because the projects ...

The ability of some forms of plankton and bacteria to build an extra natural layer of nanoparticle-like armour has inspired chemists at the University of Warwick to devise a startlingly simple way to give drug bearing polymer vesicles (microscopic polymer based sacs of liquid) their own armoured protection. The Warwick researchers have been able to decorate these hollow structures with a variety of nanoparticles opening a new strategy in the design of vehicles for drug release, for example by giving the vesicle "stealth" capabilities which can avoid the body's defences ...

Milan, Italy, 31 January 2010 – Most people who survive a stroke recover some degree of their motor, sensory and cognitive functions over the following months and years. This recovery is commonly believed to reflect a reorganisation of the central nervous system that occurs after brain damage. Now a new study, published in the February 2011 issue of Elsevier's Cortex, sheds further light on the recovery process through its effect on language skills. For almost all right-handed people and for about 60% of left-handers, damage to the left side of the brain causes a condition ...

The endothelium is the inner lining of our blood vessels and normal functions of endothelial cells include enabling coagulation, platelet adhesion and immune function. Endothelial dysfunction is associated with reduced anticoagulant properties and the inability of arteries and arterioles to dilate fully. The gradual decrease in endothelial function over time is a key factor in the development of diseases associated with ageing, especially cardiovascular disease (CVD). Many epidemiologic studies suggest protection against CVD from moderate intake of alcoholic beverages, ...

The recalled Sprint Fidelis implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) leads (Medtronic) failed more often in younger patients, women, and individuals with hereditary heart disease, according to a multicenter study published online Jan. 17 in Circulation. The researchers found that lead failure was not associated with death or serious injuries. However, about half of the patients whose leads fractured experienced painful inappropriate shocks, according to lead author Robert G. Hauser, MD, of the Minneapolis Heart Institute® at Abbott Northwestern Hospital. In a previous ...

Cancer researchers have discovered an important protein, produced naturally inside cells, that appears to suppress the growth of prostate cancer cells in the laboratory. The findings, published tomorrow in the journal Cancer Research, offer promising leads for research towards new treatments. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men in the UK, with 37,500 men diagnosed with the disease every year. Many prostate cancers are slow growing, but in some cases the cancer is aggressive and spreads to other parts of the body, such as the bone. These cases are much ...

Boys predominantly pass on flu to other boys and girls to girls, according to a new study of how swine flu spread in a primary school during the 2009 pandemic, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The results also suggest that flu transmission is most intensive between children of the same class, but that sitting next to an infected person does not significantly increase a child's risk of catching flu. The data will help researchers to model how epidemics spread and how interventions such as school closures can help contain an ...

New Haven, Conn.—Triceratops and Torosaurus have long been considered the kings of the horned dinosaurs. But a new discovery traces the giants' family tree further back in time, when a newly discovered species appears to have reigned long before its more well-known descendants, making it the earliest known member of its family. The new species, called Titanoceratops after the Greek myth of the Titans, rivaled Triceratops in size, with an estimated weight of nearly 15,000 pounds and a massive eight-foot-long skull. Titanoceratops, which lived in the American southwest ...

Scientists have discovered why orchids are one of the most successful groups of flowering plants - it is all down to their relationships with the bees that pollinate them and the fungi that nourish them. The study, published tomorrow in the American Naturalist, is the culmination of a ten-year research project in South Africa involving researchers from Imperial College London, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and other international institutions. The orchid family is one of the largest groups of flowering plants, with over 22,000 species worldwide. Today's research suggests ...

Using funding provided under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, the U.S. Department of Energy's Savannah River National Laboratory has launched a demonstration project near one of the Savannah River Site's former production reactor sites to clean up chemically contaminated groundwater, naturally. A portion of the subsurface at the Site's P Area has become contaminated with chlorinated volatile organic compounds that are essentially like dry-cleaning fluid. SRNL and Clemson University have patented a consortium of microbes that have an appetite for that kind ...

INDIANAPOLIS – A School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis biophysicist has developed a new method to identify communication pathways connecting distant regions within proteins. With this tool, Andrew J. Rader, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics, has identified a mechanism for cooperative behavior within an entire molecule, a finding that suggests that in the future it may be possible to design drugs that target anywhere along the length of a molecule's communication pathway rather than only in a single location as they do today. The discovery ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Genetic research is showing that healthy steelhead runs in Pacific Northwest streams can depend heavily on the productivity of their stay-at-home counterparts, rainbow trout. Steelhead and rainbow trout look different, grow differently, and one heads off to sea while the other never leaves home. But the life histories and reproductive health of wild trout and steelhead are tightly linked and interdependent, more so than has been appreciated, a new Oregon State University study concludes. The research could raise new challenges for fishery managers ...

Numerous nanomaterials are currently at the focus of public attention. In particular silver nanoparticles are being investigated in detail, both by scientists as well as by the regulatory authorities. The assumption behind this interest is that they are dealing with a completely new substance. However, Empa researchers Bernd Nowack and Harald Krug, together with Murray Heights of the company HeiQ have shown in a paper recently published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology that nanosilver is by no means the discovery of the 21st century. Silver particles with ...

Offering the morning after pill free over the counter has not reduced the number of teenage pregnancies and may be associated with a rise in sexually-transmitted diseases (STIs), according to a report by experts at The University of Nottingham. Professors David Paton and Sourafel Girma used local health authority data to study the impact that the introduction of Government-backed schemes to offer emergency birth control at pharmacies and without prescription have had on conception rates and the diagnosis of STIs among under-18s. Their findings show that, on average, ...

Geneva, 31 January 2011. CERN today announced that the LHC will run through to the end of 2012 with a short technical stop at the end of 2011. The beam energy for 2011 will be 3.5 TeV. This decision, taken by CERN management following the annual planning workshop held in Chamonix last week and a report delivered today by the laboratory's machine advisory committee, gives the LHC's experiments a good chance of finding new physics in the next two years, before the LHC goes into a long shutdown to prepare for higher energy running starting 2014. "If LHC continues to improve ...

Chestnut Hill, Mass. (1/31/2011) – Red Bull's red and gold logo can "give you wings" – for better or worse – even if consumers don't know it, according to a new study by two Boston College professors, who found the brand's edgy marketing efforts have sold a heavy dose of attitude to consumers. Researchers put subjects at the controls of a car racing video game, supplying each with functionally identical racecars, but each car decorated with a different brand logo and color scheme. Players put in control of the Red Bull car displayed the characteristics often attributed ...

The more we learn about biology, the closer we get to being able to treat disease – and the more complicated our understanding of disease itself becomes. A new research finding showing a strong relationship between complex microbial ecologies in human intestines and the common but serious medical condition known as fatty liver illustrates this paradox. From past genomic studies, we have learned that a mind-boggling multitude of different kinds of benign bacteria inhabit our intestines and that these populations can vary almost infinitely from one human being to the ...

Boston, MA—Scientists have found that free radicals (unstable molecules that cause the death of cells as the body ages) may also cause the damage in the eyes of patients with Fuchs Endothelial Corneal Dystrophy (FECD), a hereditary disease that is one of the most common reasons for corneal transplants worldwide. The finding, published in the November 2010 American Journal of Pathology, holds promise for early and preventative treatments for this disease, which impacts nearly four percent of the population over age 60. "Our discovery is significant, because it gives ...

Berkeley – In a demonstration of "reverse-ecology," biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown that one can determine an organism's adaptive traits by looking first at its genome and checking for variations across a population. The study, to be published the week of Jan. 31 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers a powerful new tool in evolutionary genetics research, one that could be used to help monitor the effects of climate change and habitat destruction. The researchers scanned the genes of 48 different strains ...

The scientists have now carried out the first full run of experiments that smash protons together at almost the speed of light. When these sub-atomic particles collide at the heart of the CMS detector, the resultant energies and densities are similar to those that were present in the first instants of the Universe, immediately after the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago. The unique conditions created by these collisions can lead to the production of new particles that would have existed in those early instants and have since disappeared. The researchers say they are ...

New Haven, Conn.—A team of Yale University scientists has synthesized for the first time a chemical compound called lomaiviticin aglycon, leading to the development of a new class of molecules that appear to target and destroy cancer stem cells. Chemists worldwide have been interested in lomaiviticin's potential anticancer properties since its discovery in 2001. But so far, they have been unable to obtain significant quantities of the compound, which is produced by a rare marine bacterium that cannot be easily coaxed into creating the molecule. For the past decade, different ...

Researchers at National Jewish Health have discovered a signaling pathway that is crucial to the devastating effects of acute lung injury (ALI). The data, obtained from cells, animals and ALI patients, suggest several potential therapeutic targets. Experimental blockade of one of the targets significantly reduced flooding of the lungs that is the hallmark of ALI. "Acute lung injury is a devastating disease, with 40 percent mortality and no beneficial therapies," said first author James Finigan, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine at National Jewish Health. "Our study ...