Study of dialysis patients yields surprising findings
Despite what able-bodied healthy people might think, people with severe illnesses and disabilities don’t wallow in misery and self-pity all the time. In fact, a new study finds, such patients on the whole may be just as happy as those without major medical conditions. The finding adds to the growing body of evidence that ill and disabled people adapt to their condition and show a resilience of spirit that many healthy people ca
Researchers call for routine mouse allergy testing for inner-city children with asthma
The amount of mouse allergen found in the air in many inner-city homes could be high enough to trigger asthma symptoms in the children who live there, say researchers at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. Their study, published in the February issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, found more than a quarter of inner-city homes sampled had airborne allergen levels already kno
Although most parents, educators, and researchers believe that children can’t learn specific words until well into their second year, children younger than 1 year can, in fact, learn certain words for things that are not a regular part of their daily lives, according to new research being published in the January/February 2005 issue of the journal, Child Development.
The findings, based on research by Graham Schafer, D.Phil., of the University of Reading in Reading in the Uni
A new species of black coral has been discovered off southern California, including around the Channel Islands, by Milton Love, University of California, Santa Barbara marine researcher, and Mary Yoklavich of NOAA Fisheries. The discovery came during dives by the researchers in “Delta,” the submersible.
The new species, found at depths of approximately 300 to 725 feet, is reported this week in the online scientific journal Zootaxa by taxonomist Dennis Opresko of Oak Ridge National
Alan List, M.D., leader of the Hematologic Malignancies Program at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute, recently conducted a phase I/II trial of the experimental drug Revlimid showing promise as an innovative way to treat patients with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a form of pre-leukemia. Given in pill form, Revlimid simultaneously blocks the growth of new blood vessels that nourish tumors (anti-angiogenesis) and stimulates the immune system to fight cancer cells. The study
Forget a box of chocolates and a dozen roses. When it comes to attracting a mate, the male sagebrush cricket brings a special nuptial gift to his partner. During copulation, these insect Romeos offer their Juliets a peculiar food gift: females chew off the ends of the males’ fleshy hind wings and ingest fluid that is seeping from the wounds they inflict.
However, once males have endured this “love bite,” their chances of finding another partner are slim because they lack the energy to
Millions of people at risk of becoming blind could one day be helped by an Oak Ridge National Laboratory technology originally intended to understand semiconductor defects.
The project takes advantage of the Department of Energy lab’s proprietary content-based image retrieval technology, which is a method for sorting and finding visually similar images in large databases. Manufacturers of semiconductors have found this technology highly effective for rapidly scanning hundr
Researchers at New York University have determined the location in the brain where involuntary attention enhances visual processing. The researchers, from NYU’s Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science, found that attending to, or selectively processing information from a given location without directing our eyes to that location, enhances performance in visual tasks as well as the neural activity underlying the processing of ensuing images. The results are published in the lat
The adult male zebra finch knows only one scratchy tune learned in its youth, which it performs repeatedly and intensely when females are listening. But occasionally, the finch might improvise, experimenting with a slower, more sultry variation or emphasizing different notes.
Neurobiologists studying the finch now say the improvisation arises from a component of a crucial learning circuit in a section of the forebrain that seems to generate the trial and error necessary to master s
Steve Yanoviak tosses ants from very high places: tropical forest canopy trees. In the 10 February, 2005 issue of the journal, Nature, Yanoviak, ant biologist, Mike Kaspari, and biomechanics expert, Robert Dudley, publish an amazing observation: canopy ant workers (Cephalotes atratus L) jettisoned from branches 30 m above the ground, glide backwards to the trunk of the same tree with incredible accuracy. This is the first published account of directed gliding in wingless insects.
Potential for replacing damaged tissue
The first evidence of cardiac progenitor cells – rare, specialized stem cells located in the newborn heart of rats, mice and humans – has been shown by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine. The cells are capable of differentiation into fully mature heart tissue. Called isl1+ cells, these cardiac progenitor cells are stem cells that have been programmed to form heart muscle during fetal growth. Unti
Expanded HIV screening can increase patient life span, prevent the spread of the disease, and is cost effective, researchers at Yale, Harvard and the Massachusetts General Hospital report in the February 10 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
The study’s findings are part of a two-paper series in NEJM on the value of expanded HIV screening in the United States. The Yale/Harvard study used different data and methods than another study by VA, Duke and Stanford r
Researchers in California, Israel, and Germany have compared three distantly related species – baker’s yeast, a worm, and the fruit fly – and reported that protein “wiring” connections in one species are often conserved in all three. This first-of-its-kind analysis of three higher level organisms published in the February 8 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences supports both the concept of a basic wiring diagram for all eukaryotic cells, and the idea that more selective pha
A major difficulty in developing automated language translation is that you need a system with a fairly extensive vocabulary from which it can learn, before any degree of reliability or accuracy is possible. The LC-STAR project developed just such a vocabulary.
“First, we created large lexica for several language databases,” explains project coordinator Ute Ziegenhain of Siemens in Germany. “Secondly, we developed a demonstrator that could automatically translate speech to speec
Two top research teams at the University of Southampton have this week secured a funding boost worth over £11 million between them. The two research groups, working in NanoPhotonics and Photonics, were among six groups nationwide to receive long-term funding support under the Portfolio Partnerships initiative launched by Lord Sainsbury.
Southampton is the only university to receive two of the new batch of Portfolio Partnerships, securing over half the £22 million funding awarded
A new study of climate in the Northern Hemisphere for the past 2000 years shows that natural climate change may be larger than generally thought. This is displayed in results from scientists at the Stockholm University, made in cooperation with Russian scientists, which are published in Nature on 10 Feb 2005.
The most widespread picture of climate variability in the last millennium suggests that only small changes occurred before the year 1900, and then a pronounced warming set in
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