Once likened to a confusing tower of Babel, speaking more than one language can actually bolster brain function by serving as a mental gymnasium, according to researchers. Recent research indicates that bilingual speakers can outperform monolinguals--people who speak only one language--in certain mental abilities, such as editing out irrelevant information and focusing on important information, said Judith Kroll, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Penn State. These skills make bilinguals better at prioritizing tasks and working on multiple projects at one time. "We ...

BOSTON—A team of research biologists headed by Thomas H. Kunz, professor of biology and director of the Center of Ecology and Conservation Biology at Boston University, will conduct a symposium on the emerging scientific discipline of aeroecology at this year's American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting. Aeroecology is a new discipline whose unifying concept is a focus on the aerosphere and the myriad organisms that inhabit and depend on this aerial environment for their existence. The symposium is scheduled from 3:00-4:30 PM, Saturday, February ...

A shift in the global research landscape will reposition the United States as a major partner, but not the dominant leader, in science and technology research in the coming decade, according to a Penn State researcher. However, the U.S. could benefit from this research shift if it adopts a policy of knowledge sharing with the growing global community of researchers. "What is emerging is a global science system in which the U.S. will be one player among many," said Caroline Wagner, associate professor of international affairs, who presented her findings today (Feb. 18) ...

Fierce debate over teaching evolution in public schools has raged across the United States since the epic courtroom battle between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow during the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial (State of Tennessee v. John Scopes). Science education researchers are now turning their attention to the Islamic world to determine whether teaching of evolution in schools spawns similar social controversy and what that means for the future of scientific thought across the globe. Jason Wiles, assistant professor of biology in Syracuse University's College of ...

A central challenge facing the planet is how to preserve forests while providing enough food to feed the world's population. It's really a "bad news/good news" story, says Eric Lambin, professor of environmental Earth system science and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford; and professor of geography at the University of Louvain. The bad news: The world might run out of productive agricultural land by 2050, thanks to rising global demand for food, biofuels, and forest products, along with land degradation and urbanization. The good news: ...

Researchers need to use all available resources in an integrated approach to put agriculture on a path to solve the world's food problems while reducing pollution, according to a Penn State biologist. Changes in national and international regulations will be necessary to achieve this goal. "Using resources more efficiently is what it will take to put agriculture on a path to feed the expected future population of nine billion people," said Nina Fedoroff, Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and Willaman Professor of Life Sciences, Penn State. "We especially need to do a better ...

Novel green chemical technologies will play a key role helping society move towards the elimination of waste while offering a wider range of products from biorefineries, according to a University of York scientist. Professor James Clark, Director of the University's Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence, will tell a symposium at the Annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that the use of low environmental impact green chemical technologies will help ensure that products are genuinely and verifiably green and sustainable. He says ...

In her search to understand one of the most basic human senses – touch – Mitra Hartmann turns to what is becoming one of the best studied model systems in neuroscience: the whiskers of a rat. In her research, Hartmann, associate professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, uses the rat whisker system as a model to understand how the brain seamlessly integrates the sense of touch with movement. Hartmann will discuss her research in a daylong seminar "Body and Machine" ...

Sonja Kotz leads the Minerva research group "Neurocognition of Rhythm in Communication" at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. She will present evidence from neuroimaging on the impact of cognitive functions on bilingual processing at the AAAS symposium "Crossing Borders in Language Science: What Bilinguals Tell Us About Mind and Brain". Rhythm, as the recurrent patterning of events in time, underlies most human behavior such as speech, music, and body movements. Sonja Kotz investigates how temporal patterns in di!erent languages ...

One of the goals of the European Research Council, ERC, is to bring the world's leading researchers to work in Europe. American Juleen Zierath is one of those who have received funds from the ERC. She found the best environment for her research at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. It's more usual that scientists leave Europe to work in the US. But Juleen Zierath, Professor of Clinical Integrative Physiology at Karolinska Institutet, has travelled in the opposite direction. An American who was educated in the US, she travelled to Sweden to carry out research. She is one ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — When obsessive-compulsive disorder is of crippling severity and drugs and behavior therapy can't help, there has been for just over a year a thread — or rather a wire — of hope. By inserting a thin electrode deep into the brain, doctors can precisely deliver an electrical current to a cord of the brain's wiring and soften the severity of the symptoms. "Deep brain stimulation" therapy for OCD won Food and Drug Administration approval in 2009 for extreme cases under its humanitarian device exemption. On Feb. 18 at the annual meeting ...

The United States' preoccupation with national security, including counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cyber security, is also a concern of higher education, according to Graham Spanier, president of Penn State University. Spanier, who chairs the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board (NSHEAB), addressed attendees today (Feb. 18) at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., stressing that higher education is part of the national security solution. "The National Security Higher Education Advisory ...

Hackensack, NJ (Feb 18, 2011) – James C. Wittig, M.D., chief of the division of skin and sarcoma cancer at the John Theurer Cancer Center at Hackensack University Medical Center will present eleven different educational videos on innovative approaches to orthopedic oncology at the upcoming American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons Conference. Dr. Wittig is known for inventing some of the most-used best practices in limb-sparing surgery. In 2009, he and his colleagues began filming their surgeries so that other surgeons across the globe could use their radically innovative ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Asthma diagnosis and management vary dramatically around the world, said David Van Sickle, an honorary associate fellow at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, during a presentation today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Asthma affects an estimated 8 percent of Americans, and about 300 million people around the world, but varying practices in diagnosis and treatment have global implications in understanding a widespread, chronic condition, says Van Sickle, who applies ...

Infants raised in households where Spanish and Catalan are spoken can discriminate between English and French just by watching people speak, even though they have never been exposed to these new languages before, according to University of British Columbia psychologist Janet Werker. Presented today at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, Werker's latest findings provide further evidence that exposure to two native languages contributes to the development of perceptual sensitivity that extends beyond their mother ...

Predatory fish such as cod, tuna, and groupers have declined by two-thirds over the past 100 years, while small forage fish such as sardine, anchovy and capelin have more than doubled over the same period, according to University of British Columbia researchers. Led by Prof. Villy Christensen of UBC's Fisheries Centre, a team of scientists used more than 200 marine ecosystem models from around the world and extracted more than 68,000 estimates of fish biomass from 1880 to 2007. They presented the findings today at the American Association for the Advancement of Science ...

When people on airplanes ask Alan Newell what he works on, he tells them "flower arrangements." He could also say "fingerprints" or "sand ripples" or "how plants grow." "Most patterns you see, including the ones on sand dunes or fish or tigers or leopards or in the laboratory – even the defects in the patterns – have many universal features," said Newell, a Regents' Professor of Mathematics at the University of Arizona. "All these different systems exhibit strikingly similar features when it comes to the patterns they form," he said. "Patterns arise in systems when ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Introductory college science classes need to improve their coverage of issues related to sustainability, a noted chemistry educator told the American Association for the Advancement of Science today. "Across the nation, we have a problem," said Catherine Middlecamp, a distinguished faculty associate in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "We are using a 20th-century curriculum, and this is the 21st century." Students, Middlecamp says, want a curriculum that will prepare them for upcoming challenges related to climate change, pollution ...

Cost-effectiveness analysis should play a bigger role in the American health care system, argued a University of Chicago researcher Friday at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "The effects of science and technology on health care costs depend on the policy context in which those technologies are developed and applied," said David Meltzer, Associate Professor of Medicine, in his presentation, "Policies to Mobile Technology and Science for Health Care Cost Control." Meltzer, who also holds a PhD in economics, pointed out ...

Adelaide researchers have taken a step closer to the development of a universal flu vaccine, with results of a recent study showing that a vaccine delivered by a simple nasal spray could provide protection against influenza. University of Adelaide researcher Dr Darren Miller and colleagues have successfully trialled a synthetic universal flu vaccine in mice. The results have appeared this month in a paper in the Journal of General Virology. "Current flu vaccines rely on health authorities being able to predict what the forthcoming viral strain is going to be, and reformulating ...

TUCSON, Ariz. (February 18, 2011) -- A University of Arizona College of Engineering researcher and his team who are developing intelligent robots for planetary exploration will be featured in a segment of an upcoming episode of the science program "WaveLengths." The robots will be featured on the episode premiering Thursday night, February 24 at 8:30 p.m. MST on public television KUAT Channel 6. "WaveLengths" is a quarterly science program hosted by BIO5 Institute Member Dr. Vicki Chandler. The exploration robots are part of a tier-scalable, reconnaissance system prototype ...

A study by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) has carried out the first Spanish study into the emotional differences between the sexes and generations in terms of forgiveness. According to the study, parents forgive more than children, while women are better at forgiving than men. "This study has great application for teaching values, because it shows us what reasons people have for forgiving men and women, and the popular conception of forgiveness", Maite Garaigordobil, co-author of the study and a senior professor at the Psychology Faculty of the UPV, tells ...

Patients who undergo elective orthopedic surgeries at high-volume, regional hospitals have better surgical outcomes and experience fewer complications than those who undergo those surgeries at local hospitals, according to research being presented by Hospital for Special Surgery investigators at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS). These "regionalizers"—patients who travel to a regional, high-volume hospital—also tend to be younger, white, male and have private insurance, according to the research from Hospital for Special Surgery ...

Knee replacement surgery takes far more time to conduct in overweight and obese patients than in normal weight patients, according to recent research at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. The study will be presented at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons annual meeting, held Feb. 15-19 in San Diego, Calif. The study has implications for hospital staff scheduling surgeries, operating room utilization and personnel staffing, and also raises the question of whether knee replacements should be reimbursed based on time. "When we schedule surgery, the body mass ...

For years, doctors have used platelet rich plasma (PRP) to promote healing in various surgeries, but a recent study demonstrates that a type of PRP did not improve healing after rotator cuff repair. The study, conducted by Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) investigators, will be presented at the upcoming American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM) 2011 Specialty Day meeting, held Feb. 19 in San Diego, Calif., following the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. "I would not recommend platelet-rich fibrin matrix [PRFM] as we used it ...