A team of neuroscientists has discovered important new information in the search for an effective treatment for Alzheimer's disease, the debilitating neurological disorder that afflicts more than 5.3 million Americans and is the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States. Hey-Kyoung Lee, associate professor in the University of Maryland Department of Biology, and her research team have shown that they may be able to eliminate debilitating side effects caused by a promising Alzheimer's drug by stimulating the brain's nicotine receptors. Scientists believe that an ...

Researchers at the University of British Columbia are deploying an underwater robot to survey ice-covered ocean in Antarctica from October 17 through November 12. Scientists predict that the sea ice area around Antarctica will be reduced by more than 33 per cent by 2100, accelerating the collapse of ice shelves. Up to hundreds of metres thick, ice shelves are floating platforms of ice that cover almost half of Antarctica's coastline. The mission will study the effect of ice shelves on the mixing of sea water, and will provide critical data for the Antarctica 2010 Glacier ...

Legalizing marijuana in California will not dramatically reduce the drug revenues collected by Mexican drug trafficking organizations from sales to the United States, according to a new RAND Corporation study. The only scenario where legalization in California could substantially reduce the revenue of the drug trafficking organizations is if high-potency, California-produced marijuana is smuggled to other U.S. states at prices that are lower than those of current Mexican supplies, according to the study from the RAND Drug Policy Research Center. RAND is a nonprofit research ...

Since the late 1990s, deep brain stimulation (DBS) has proven to be a lifeline for some patients suffering from Parkinson's disease, a cruel neurological disorder that can cause lack of control over movement, poor balance and coordination, and rigidity, among other symptoms. The procedure is used only for patients whose symptoms cannot be adequately controlled with medications. A neurosurgeon uses magnetic resonance imaging or computed tomography to identify the exact target within the brain where abnormal electrical nerve signals generate the disease's tremors and ...

ST. PAUL, Minn. – New research suggests that walking at least six miles per week may protect brain size and in turn, preserve memory in old age, according to a study published in the October 13, 2010, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "Brain size shrinks in late adulthood, which can cause memory problems. Our results should encourage well-designed trials of physical exercise in older adults as a promising approach for preventing dementia and Alzheimer's disease," said study author Kirk I. Erickson, PhD, with the University ...

PHILADELPHIA (October 13, 2010) – Creamy. Gritty. Crunchy. Slimy. Oral texture perception is a major factor contributing to each person's food preferences. Now, a new study from the Monell Center reports that individuals' perception of starch texture is shaped by variability in the activity of an oral enzyme known as salivary amylase. "Differences in starch perception likely affect people's nutritional status by influencing their liking for and intake of starchy and starch-thickened foods," said study lead author Abigail Mandel, a nutritional scientist at Monell. Starch, ...

New research found that the pattern of heart dysfunction with sarin exposure in mice resembles that seen in humans. Sarin is a chemical warfare agent belonging to class of compounds called organophosphates — the basis for insecticides, herbicides and nerve agents. As an inhibitor of the nervous system enzyme acetylcholinesterase, sarin can cause convulsions, stoppage of breathing and death. Aiming to determine the delayed cardiac effects of sarin, researchers studied mice injected with sarin — at doses too low to produce visible symptoms — 10 weeks after the exposure. ...

It's not easy to wrangle fifth graders from noisy school hallways to get their blood pressure checked. But with an age-adjusted death rate due to heart disease substantially above the national average, West Virginia has a good reason to try. In CARDIAC (Coronary Artery Risk Detection In Appalachian Communities), researchers collected blood pressure data on more than 62,000 West Virginia fifth graders and found that 12,245, or 19.7 percent, fall into the 95th percentile or above for blood pressure readings, based on norms for height and gender. Those children are considered ...

Curveballs curve and fastballs go really fast, but new research suggests that no pitcher can make a curveball "break" or a fastball "rise." Led by Arthur Shapiro of American University and Zhong-Lin Lu of the University of Southern California, the researchers explain the illusion of the curveball's break in a publicly available study in the journal PLoS ONE (study available by request or post-embargo at http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0013296). The study comes a year after the same group won the prize for best illusion at the Vision Sciences annual meeting with ...

Oil recovery using carbon dioxide could lead to a North Sea oil bonanza worth £150 billion ($ 240 billion) – but only if the current infrastructure is enhanced now, according to a new study published today by a world-leading energy expert. A new calculation by Durham University of the net worth of the UK oil field shows that using carbon dioxide (CO2) to enhance the recovery from our existing North Sea oil fields could yield an extra three billion barrels of oil over the next 20 years. Three billion barrels of oil could power, heat and transport the UK for two years ...

Last January astronomers thought they had witnessed a fresh collision between two asteroids when images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope revealed a bizarre X-shaped object at the head of a comet-like trail of material. "When I saw the Hubble image I knew it was something special," says astronomer Jessica Agarwal, who works for the European Space Agency in the Netherlands. "The nucleus seemed almost detached from the dust cloud and there were intricate structures within the dust." After using Hubble to track the oddball body for five months, astronomers were ...

The first galaxies formed before the Universe was less than one billion years old and were much smaller than the giant systems — including the Milky Way — that we see today. So somehow the average galaxy size has increased as the Universe has evolved. Galaxies often collide and then merge to form larger systems and this process is certainly an important growth mechanism. However, an additional, gentler way has been proposed. A European team of astronomers has used ESO's Very Large Telescope to test this very different idea — that young galaxies can also grow by sucking ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Intense, passionate feelings of love can provide amazingly effective pain relief, similar to painkillers or such illicit drugs as cocaine, according to a new Stanford University School of Medicine study. "When people are in this passionate, all-consuming phase of love, there are significant alterations in their mood that are impacting their experience of pain," said Sean Mackey, MD, PhD, chief of the Division of Pain Management, associate professor of anesthesia and senior author of the study, which will be published online Oct. 13 in PLoS ONE. "We're ...

The desire for a quick-fix for obesity fuels a lucrative market in so-called natural remedies. But a study of medical records in Hong Kong revealed 66 cases where people were suspected to have been poisoned by a "natural" slimming therapy. In eight cases the people became severely ill, and in one case the person died. The study is published today in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. The researchers looked at the ingredients in the 81 slimming products that these people had taken. They found 12 different agents that fell into five categories: undeclared weight-loss ...

WHAT: Two studies appearing in the October 14, 2010 New England Journal of Medicine and funded by the National Institutes of Health helped influence the World Health Organization (WHO) to change its guidelines this year for the treatment of HIV infection in certain women and children. The recently updated guidelines affect HIV-infected women who receive a single dose of the antiretroviral drug nevirapine to prevent HIV transmission to their babies, and infants who receive a single dose of nevirapine to prevent acquiring the virus from their HIV-infected mothers but nevertheless ...

Titusville, NJ, October 13, 2010 – According to a new survey sponsored by Janssen®, Division of Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc, 94 percent of psychiatric nurses feel very or extremely involved in providing care for people with mental illness. Although some psychiatric nurses believe that their specialty is as difficult as or more difficult than oncology nursing, or emergency nursing, one-third would prefer to be more involved in patient care than they are now. The survey also revealed that psychiatric nurses believe their work affects patient care, with more ...

There may be a fundamental link between aspects of an individual's personality and their capacity to exercise or generate energy, recent research suggests. Humans are not the only animals that choose to exercise and – as with people - individuals within the same species differ in their levels of activity, says Dr Peter Biro, a senior lecturer in the UNSW Evolution and Ecology Research Centre, in a review article in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, with colleague Judy Stamps of the University of California, Davis. Dr Biro is an Australian Research Council Future ...

An Australian team of scientists has uncovered a quality control mechanism that must take place for our immune system to subsequently effectively destroy harmful viruses and bacteria. The findings were published today in the prestigious international journal Nature. The team solved a 15-year puzzle by working out the structure and function of a protein called pre T alpha that is essential in guiding the correct expression of various receptors expressed by T lymphocytes, white blood cells of the immune system. These receptors, known as T cell receptors, recognise ...

Jerusalem, Oct. 13, 2010 – Unlike humans, honey bees, when thrown into highly time-altered new societal roles, are able to alter their biological rhythms with alacrity, enabling them to make a successful "quick switch" in their daily routines, according to research carried out at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. With people, on the other hand, disturbances to their biological clocks by drastic changes in their daily schedules are known to cause problems -- for example for shift workers and for new parents of crying, fitful babies. Disturbance of the biological clock ...

Those who do a lot of driving know how tiring long car trips and night driving can be. And a simple fraction of a second can decide the difference between life and death. According to the German Road Safety Council e.V. (DVR), one in four highway traffic fatalities is the result of momentary driver drowsiness. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT in Ilmenau, Germany, have developed an assistant system that tracks a driver's eye movements and issues a warning before the driver has an opportunity to nod off to sleep. The special feature ...

Within the framework of this research project, "Acoplamiento y Agarre de Satélites mediante Sistemas Robóticos basado en Visión (Docking and Capture of Satellites through computer vision) (ASIROV)", the scientists have developed algorithms and strategies to dock and capture a disabled satellite through the use of a space vehicle, called a "chaser", which autonomously carries out this function. "In this way", explained the head of this research study, Mohamed Abderrahim, who is from the UC3M Department of Automated Systems Engineering, "we attempt to carry out all ...

DES MOINES, IOWA (14 October 2010)—Crop specialists in Kenya and Uganda have laid the groundwork for confined field trials to commence later this year for new varieties of maize genetically modified to survive recurrent droughts that threaten over 300 million Africans for whom maize is life, according to a speech given today by the head of the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) at the World Food Prize Symposium. Scientists working with AATF believe it's important to explore the potential of biotechnology to maintain and increase food production in Africa, ...

Learning from competitors is a critically important form of learning for animals and humans. A new study has used brain imaging to reveal how people and animals learn from failure and success. The team from Bristol University led by Dr Paul Howard-Jones, Senior Lecturer in Education in the Graduate School of Education and Dr Rafal Bogacz, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science, scanned the brains of players as they battled against an artificial opponent in a computer game. In the game, each player took turns with the computer to select one of four ...

BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL, October 13, 2010 — A new study conducted by a researcher at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) for Jerusalem's Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel reports that Israeli's have a higher life expectancy on average than Americans and residents of other OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries. According to the most recent data, from 2005, the average American life expectancy is now 78 years; for Israeli Jews, approximately 81 years and Israeli Arabs, 79 years. Japan has the highest life expectancy of OECD ...

University of Granada researchers have developed a new computer technique that allows to "train" computers to interpret the visual contents of a video or picture. This advance will allow to classify automatically pictures basing on whether individuals or specific objects are present in such images. Videos can also be classified according to specific poses. At present, computer search and classification of images is made basing on the name of the file, folder or on features as date or size, but the visual information contained was never used for classification purposes. ...