Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new method that can accurately predict the behavior of players in online role-playing games. The tool could be used by the game industry to develop new game content, or to help steer players to the parts of a game they will enjoy most. "We are able to predict what a player in a game will do based on his or her previous behavior, with up to 80 percent accuracy," says Brent Harrison, a Ph.D. student at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research. The research team developed the data-driven predictive ...

Jerusalem, June 13, 2011 – Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers have conducted an initial survey of what appears to be an important, ancient water source in a cave that was been discovered during excavation work for a new train station being constructed at the entrance to Jerusalem. The work was done by members of the Cave Research Unit of the university, headed by Prof. Amos Frumkin of the Department of Geography. The cave was exposed near the base of a deep service shaft that was dug for the train tunnel leading into the new station, located opposite the main ...

Evidence of beer making in Mediterranean France, as far back as the 5th century BC, has been unearthed by Laurent Bouby from the CNRS - Centre de Bio-Archeologie et d'Ecology in Montepellier, France, and colleagues. Their analyses at the Roquepertuse excavation site in Provence reveal the presence of poorly preserved barley grains suggesting germination, as well as equipment and other remains of deliberate malting in the home. Taken together, these findings suggest that, as well as regular wine making, the French had an early passion for beer brewing. The work has just ...

Swim centre personnel and lifeguards have higher stamina and carry out cardiopulmonary resuscitation more effectively than personnel in the emergency healthcare services, even though they have undergone extreme exertion. Their life-saving efforts may be crucial while waiting for an ambulance. This is the conclusion of research carried out at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Swim centre personnel and lifeguards are trained in, and regularly practice, rescue from water and cardiopulmonary resuscitation, CPR. A study has been carried out with the aid of the Swedish ...

WASHINGTON -- Freedom and personal autonomy are more important to people's well-being than money, according to a meta-analysis of data from 63 countries published by the American Psychological Association. While a great deal of research has been devoted to the predictors of happiness and life satisfaction around the world, researchers at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand wanted to know one thing: What is more important for well-being, providing people with money or providing them with choices and autonomy? "Our findings provide new insights into well-being ...

ITHACA, N.Y. — Cornell researchers have identified regions of a fish brain that reveal the basic circuitry for how humans and other vertebrates generate sound used for social communication. In a study of midshipman fish, published online today (June 14) in Nature Communications, the researchers identified two distinct groups of neurons that independently control the duration and the frequency of sounds used for calling. While human speech and bird songs are far more complex than the grunts and hoots produced by some fish, the study provides a very basic wiring diagram ...

PHILADELPHIA — Eating a low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet may reduce the risk of cancer and slow the growth of tumors already present, according to a study published in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. The study was conducted in mice, but the scientists involved agree that the strong biological findings are definitive enough that an effect in humans can be considered. "This shows that something as simple as a change in diet can have an impact on cancer risk," said lead researcher Gerald Krystal, Ph.D., a distinguished scientist ...

Every year, Nordicom at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden takes a barometer reading of media use in Sweden. Media Barometer data were first collected in 1979. These are some of the findings of the 2010 survey. Among 15- to 24-year-olds eight in ten use social media the average day, 15 per cent more than in 2009. An even sharper increase - from 32 to 49 per cent - is noted among 25- to 44-year-olds. The time people in these younger ages devote to the media overall has rested at about 6.5 hours a day over the past few years, but within these hours media habits have ...

New Rochelle, NY, June 14, 2011—E. coli bacteria exposed to three common antibiotics were more likely to develop antibiotic resistance following low-level antibiotic exposure than after exposure to high concentrations that would kill the bacteria or inhibit their growth, according to a timely article in Microbial Drug Resistance, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. The article is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/mdr E. coli bacteria in food and water supplies have been responsible for disease outbreaks and deaths around the world in ...

Non-invasive tests for liver fibrosis, such as liver stiffness measurement or the FibroTest, can predict survival of patients with chronic hepatitis C, according to a new study in Gastroenterology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute. "Liver stiffness measurement and/or the FibroTest could replace liver biopsy for the evaluation of hepatitis C, regardless of the stage of the disease," said Victor de Lédinghen, MD, PhD, of the Centre d' Investigation de la Fibrose Hépatique and lead author of this study. "Thus, these tools ...

The Gulf of Mexico's hypoxic zone is predicted to be the largest ever recorded, due to extreme flooding of the Mississippi River this spring, according to an annual forecast by a team of NOAA-supported scientists from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, Louisiana State University and the University of Michigan. The forecast is based on Mississippi River nutrient inputs compiled annually by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Scientists are predicting the area could measure between 8,500 and 9,421 square miles, or an area roughly the size of New Hampshire. If ...

A new study by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center has shown that, for the first time, Wnt signaling, already known to control many biological processes, between hair follicles and melanocyte stem cells can dictate hair pigmentation. The study was published in the June 11, 2011 issue of the journal Cell. The research was led by Mayumi Ito, PhD, assistant professor in the Ronald O. Pereleman Department of Dermatology at NYU Langone. "We have known for decades that hair follicle stem cells and pigment-producing melanocycte cells collaborate to produce colored hair, ...

The technology used to replace lost teeth with titanium dental implants could be improved. By studying the surface structure of dental implants not only at micro level but also at nano level, researchers at the University of Gothenburg; Sweden, have come up with a method that could shorten the healing time for patients. "Increasing the active surface at nano level and changing the conductivity of the implant allows us to affect the body's own biomechanics and speed up the healing of the implant," says Johanna Löberg at the University of Gothenburg's Department of Chemistry. ...

MONTREAL, June 14, 2011 – Patients posting their opinions about doctors on online ratings websites are much less likely to discuss physicians with low perceived quality and are more prone than offline populations to exaggerate their opinions, according to a paper being presented at a healthcare conference sponsored by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®). "Patients need high quality information about the most consequential service that they consume: healthcare," said Ritu Agarwal, professor of information systems and director ...

The brain is constantly changing as it perceives the outside world, processing and learning about everything it encounters. In a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, scientists find a surprising connection between two types of perception: If you're looking at a group of objects and getting a general sense of them, it's difficult for your brain to learn relationships between the objects. It's not known how these two ways of perceiving are related, says Nicholas Turk-Browne, ...

A unique example of some of the lowest surface brightness galaxies in the universe have been found by an international team of astronomers lead by the Niels Bohr Institute. The galaxy has lower amounts of heavier elements than other known galaxies of this type. The discovery means that small low surface brightness galaxies may have more in common with the first galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang than previously thought. The results have been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. As the name implies, the galaxies are faint and therefore ...

Researchers have developed a new method of eliciting and analyzing opinions from a large group of experts and laypeople to aid complex decision-making, adapting online and social media technologies to lower the cost of such activities while expanding the types of people who can be queried. The system, called ExpertLens, incorporates elements of such well-known approaches as the Delphi method, the Nominal Group Technique and crowdsourcing that are used to collect opinions about problems or to create forecasts. The online system and the associated methodology have performed ...

Fear burns memories into our brain, and new research by University of California, Berkeley, neuroscientists explains how. Scientists have long known that fear and other highly emotional experiences lead to incredibly strong memories. In a study appearing online today (Tuesday, June 14) in advance of publication in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, UC Berkeley's Daniela Kaufer and colleagues report a new way for emotions to affect memory: The brain's emotional center, the amygdala, induces the hippocampus, a relay hub for memory, to generate new neurons. In a fearful ...

CHICAGO – Twice a month a jam session takes place on the third floor of Northwestern Memorial's Prentice Women's Hospital. A diverse group of men and women, ranging in age and ethnicity, gather in a circle with instruments in hand and sing together. This is no ordinary jam band; all its members have Parkinson's disease. They are participating in Creative Arts for Parkinson's, a music and drama therapy program offered through Northwestern's Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders Center. Creative Arts for Parkinson's is lead by specially trained music and drama therapists ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N. C., -- June 14, 2011 – Over the past decade, much progress has been made regarding the understanding and promise of personalized medicine. Scientists are just beginning to consider the impact of gene-diet interactions in different populations in regards to disease prevention and treatment. The latest research from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the laboratories of Floyd H. "Ski" Chilton, Ph.D., professor of physiology and pharmacology and director of the Center for Botanical Lipids and Inflammatory Disease Prevention, and Rasika Mathias, Sc.D, ...

Soil chemistry plays an important role in the composition of surface waters. In areas with limited human activities, properties of catchment soils directly relate to the exported nutrients to surface waters. Phosphate sorption research is common in agricultural and forest soils, but data from alpine areas are limited. Scientists from the Biology Centre of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Repbublic, from the Centre for Advanced Studies of Blanes, and from the Forest Sciences Center of Catalonia, have conducted research of the impact European alpine soils have on numerous ...

Birds with high levels of stress hormones have the highest mating success and offer better parental care to their brood, according to new biology research at Queen's University. "Having high levels of glucocorticoid or stress hormone is often thought to indicate an individual in poor condition who has a low level of mating success. However, our research indicates that tree swallows with the highest levels of stress hormone have the highest reproductive success," says Frances Bonier (Biology) who investigates the way animals cope with challenges in their environment. The ...

NEW YORK – Mental health screening has been demonstrated to successfully connect African-American middle school students from a predominantly low-income area with school-based mental health services, according to results of a new study led by the TeenScreen National Center for Mental Health Checkups at Columbia University. The study was published in a recent online early edition of the Community Mental Health Journal. Previous research has demonstrated substantial disparities in access to specialized mental health services between African-American and white youth; data ...

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - When University of Maryland psychologist Andrea Chronis-Tuscano testified before a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) hearing last March, it changed her mind about possible risks of artificial food coloring for children, and drove her to look more closely at the products in her own pantry that she feeds her kids. Chronis-Tuscano walked in to the meeting certain that NO convincing scientific evidence supports the idea that food coloring additives cause Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD - nor that strict diets eliminating dyes effectively ...

VIDEO: A time-lapse video of an amorphous silicon surface. The lumps are clusters of about five atoms of silicon. The "hopping " motion of the lumps shows that a-Si is a glass.... Click here for more information. CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Using high-resolution imaging technology, University of Illinois researchers have answered a question that had confounded semiconductor researchers: Is amorphous silicon a glass? The answer? Yes – until hydrogen is added. Led by ...