Move over, touchpad screens: New research funded in part by the National Institutes of Health shows that it is possible to manipulate complex visual images on a computer screen using only the mind. The study, published in Nature, found that when research subjects had their brains connected to a computer displaying two merged images, they could force the computer to display one of the images and discard the other. The signals transmitted from each subject's brain to the computer were derived from just a handful of brain cells. "The subjects were able to use their thoughts ...

Why do some of the one million people who sustain head injuries annually in United States experience a mysterious second wave of brain damage days after the initial injury — just when they appear to be recovering? Limited clinical trials using an innovative new device to monitor brain chemistry on a second-by-second basis are underway to answer that life-and-death question, according to an article in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine. Brain injury is the leading cause of death and disability worldwide. C&EN Senior Editor ...

Scientists are calling for more research on the possibility that some supposedly healthful plant-based antioxidants — including those renowned for their apparent ability to prevent cancer — may actually aggravate or even cause cancer in some individuals. Their recommendation follows a study in which two such antioxidants — quercetin and ferulic acid — appeared to aggravate kidney cancer in severely diabetic laboratory rats. The study appears in ACS' bi-weekly Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Kuan-Chou Chen, Robert Peng, and colleagues note that vegetables, ...

Extending its 26-year tradition of innovative quantum voltage standards, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have begun shipping a new 10-volt standard to users around the world. The programmable system measures both direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC) voltages. NIST AC/DC 10-volt standard chip. The new 10-volt system* builds on a number of previous NIST inventions, from the initial 1-volt standard in 1984 through the 2006 unveiling of the world's first precision instrument for directly measuring AC voltages.** Because ...

Better psychological and spiritual support, improved planning of care and stronger relationships with physicians are necessary to improve end-of-life care in Canada, according to a study by a Queen's University professor. "High quality end-of-life care should be the right of every Canadian," says professor of Medicine and Epidemiology Daren Heyland, who is also a researcher at Kingston General Hospital. "But it's not always happening. We know from international studies that Canada ranks ninth in the world in terms of quality of care provided at the end of life." The study, ...

Taking the first steps of what would be a major historical advance in the science of measurement, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is participating in a worldwide effort to recommend major revisions to the International System of Units (SI), the modern metric system that is the basis of global measurements in commerce, science and other aspects of everyday life. The new SI, which would be based on seven constants of nature, would enable researchers around the world to express the results of measurements at new levels of consistency and accuracy. The ...

Cockroaches can skitter through a crowded under-the-sink cabinet, eluding capture or worse, making the insects a model for rescue robots that would creep through the debris of disaster in search of survivors. But learning how they use all six legs at the same time to walk, run and turn has been a difficult and time-consuming task. Until now. Using a pair of high-speed cameras and a custom computer program, researchers at Case Western Reserve University are able to simultaneously extract three-dimensional movement of a cockroach's 26 leg joints. They report their findings ...

Texas A&M University is one of 10 international partners involved in the global conservation study and subsequent scientific paper, "The Impact of Conservation on the Status of the World's Vertebrates," that is scheduled to be published in Science, the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Thomas E. Lacher, Jr., Texas A&M University's wildlife and fisheries sciences department head at College Station, Texas and a coauthor, said the report reviews the current status of thousands of species in light of the 2010 target of the Convention ...

Two micro-satellites originally launched into Earth's orbit in 2007 by NASA have been redirected by University of California, Berkeley, scientists toward new orbits around the moon, extending study of the earth and moon's interaction with the solar wind. The second of the two probes settled into a temporary "Lagrange-point" orbit on Friday, Oct. 22, inaugurating science operations for a new mission dubbed ARTEMIS – Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence, and Electrodynamics of the Moon's Interaction with the Sun. Lagrange points are places where the gravity of Earth ...

Researchers at North Carolina State University have found that the overproduction of a key protein in stem cells causes those stem cells to form cancerous tumors. Their work may lead to new treatments for a variety of cancers. Dr. Jon Horowitz, associate professor of molecular biomedical sciences, and a team of NC State researchers looked at the protein SP2, which regulates the activity of other genes. They knew that elevated amounts of SP2 had been observed in human prostate-cancer patients, and that these levels only increased as the tumors became more dangerous. They ...

DURHAM, N.C. – A doubling of abnormally wet or dry summer weather in the southeastern United States in recent decades has come from an intensification of the summertime North Atlantic Subtropical High (NASH), or "Bermuda High." And that intensification appears to be coming from global warming, according to a new analysis by a Duke University-led team of climate scientists. The NASH is an area of high pressure that forms each summer near Bermuda, where its powerful surface center helps steer Atlantic hurricanes and plays a major role in shaping weather in the eastern ...

Pediatric researchers at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia describe a successful program in which nurses helped mothers attain high rates of breast-feeding in very sick babies--newborns with complex birth defects requiring surgery and intensive care. Many of these highly vulnerable newborns immediately experience a paradoxical situation. Their mother's milk helps to fend off infection and provides easily digestible, nutritious ingredients that can reduce the infant's stay in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). But because the babies are often in critical condition, ...

Education is often heralded as an engine for peace and prosperity, but in the fifty-year civil war that has gripped Sudan, schools have played an important role in deepening the country's divisions. That's the conclusion of Anders Breidlid, a professor of international education and development at Oslo University College. His research on education in Sudan is published in the November issue of Comparative Education Review. Since taking power in northern Sudan in 1989, the Arab-dominated National Congress Party (NCP) "targeted the Ministry of Education to conduct their ...

People love to speculate about differences between the sexes, and neuroscience has brought a new technology to this pastime. Brain imaging studies are published at a great rate, and some report sex differences in brain structure or patterns of neural activity. But we should be skeptical about reports of brain differences between the sexes, writes psychological scientist Cordelia Fine in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The results from these studies may not necessarily withstand the tests of larger sample ...

Should global warming cause sea levels to rise as predicted in coming decades, thousands of archaeological sites in coastal areas around the world will be lost to erosion. With no hope of saving all of these sites, archaeologists Torben Rick from the Smithsonian Institution, Leslie Reeder of Southern Methodist University, and Jon Erlandson of the University of Oregon have issued a call to action for scientists to assess the sites most at risk. Writing in the Journal of Coastal Conservation and using California's Santa Barbara Channel as a case study, the researchers illustrate ...

Boston, MA – A comprehensive review of national opinion polls, including newly released data, shows that those who say they intend to vote for a Democratic congressional candidate in 2010 and those who say they intend to vote for a Republican in their district hold starkly different views of what they want the future of health reform legislation to be, mirroring the divide between Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress on this issue. Nearly three-fourths (73%) of registered voters who say they intend to vote for a Democratic candidate favor the health care legislation ...

Medical schools and clinics could boost the number of primary care physicians in medically underserved areas by selecting and encouraging students from these communities, who often exhibit a strong sense of responsibility for and identification with the people there, according to a new study by UCLA researchers and colleagues published in the current issue of the American Journal of Public Health. Training these students in underserved settings during medical school and their residencies could also increase the likelihood they would continue serving those populations, ...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Researchers at Mayo Clinic in Florida have found that a molecule long believed to be a beneficial tumor suppressor — and thus a potential cancer drug target — appears to act as an oncogene in some lethal brain tumors. The protein, epithelial cadherin (E-cadherin), is known for its ability to keep cancer cells glued together, preventing them from breaking away and metastasizing. But, based on their findings, published online in PLoS ONE, the scientists suggest E-cadherin can also function as an oncogene in some cancers. An oncogene helps push cancer ...

Proteins are molecular machines that transport substances, catalyze chemical reactions, pump ions, and identify signaling substances. They are chains of amino acids and the individual amino acid sequence is known for many of them. However, the functions a protein can carry out inside the cell are determined by the three-dimensional spatial structure of the protein. Establishing this so-called tertiary structure presents a great challenge to scientists. There is, thus, a lot of catching up to be done in structure analysis. To push progress, the National Institute of General ...

In a research paper published online Saturday in the Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans, a publication of the American Geological Union (AGU), scientists reported the southern Baffin Bay off West Greenland has continued warming since wintertime ocean temperatures were last effectively measured there in the early 2000s. Temperatures in the study were collected by narwhals, medium-sized toothed Arctic whales, during NOAA-sponsored missions in 2006 and 2007. The animals were tagged with sensors that recorded ocean depths and temperatures during feeding dives from the ...

Liberals may owe their political outlook partly to their genetic make-up, according to new research from the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University. Ideology is affected not just by social factors, but also by a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4. The study's authors say this is the first research to identify a specific gene that predisposes people to certain political views. Appearing in the latest edition of The Journal of Politics published by Cambridge University Press, the research focused on 2,000 subjects from The National Longitudinal Study ...

RICHLAND, Wash. -- A new study of an exotic, infectious virus that has caused three recent outbreaks in the United States reveals clues to how the virus might damage lungs during infection. The findings also suggest possible new ways to treat lung diseases in humans. Not only does the infection from monkeypox virus increase production of proteins involved in inflammation, but it decreases production of proteins that keep lung tissue intact and lubricated. The findings appear in an upcoming issue of Molecular & Cellular Proteomics. "Going into this study, we thought ...

Oakland, Calif.(October 28, 2010) — Increasing urine BPA (Bisphenol-A) level was significantly associated with decreased sperm concentration, decreased total sperm count, decreased sperm vitality and decreased sperm motility, according to a Kaiser Permanente study appearing in the journal of Fertility and Sterility. The five-year study recruited 514 workers in factories in China and compared workers who had high urine BPA levels with those with low urine BPA. Men with higher urine BPA levels had 2-4 times the risk of having poor semen quality, including low sperm concentration, ...

Cincinnati, OH, October 28, 2010 -- The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that parents limit combined screen time from television, DVDs, computers, and video games to 2 hours per day for preschool-age children. In a study soon to be published in The Journal of Pediatrics, researchers found that many children are exposed to screen time both at home and while at child care, with 66% exceeding the recommended daily amount. According to Dr. Pooja Tandon, "A majority of children under the age of 5 years in the United States spend almost 40 hours a week with ...

Many men – whose fertility may be at risk from cancer treatment – are not being offered the chance to store their sperm according to new research published today in the Annals of Oncology (Thursday). Guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) state that any men or adolescent boys who are receiving treatment that may leave them infertile should be offered the opportunity to store their sperm. But in a study funded by Cancer Research UK, researchers at the University of Warwick and University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS ...