A gene may protect people against variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
People who lack a gene involved in immune responses may be three times more likely to suffer from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), a new study suggests1. The result, if borne out in larger studies, could point researchers toward therapies for the incurable brain disease.
vCJD is thought to occur when people are exposed to misshapen prion proteins from cows with bovine spongiform encephalopathy – B
You would be forgiven for underestimating the intelligence of sheep, considering that their daily activities revolve around grazing. But research reported in the current issue of Nature indicates that, in fact, sheep possess more smarts than previously thought.
Keith Kendrick and colleagues at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, England, investigated the sheep’s ability to distinguish and remember faces of both other sheep and humans. Presenting 20 sheep with pictures of 25 pairs of sheep
Ultra-minaturized electrical components could shrink supercomputers.
Researchers in the Netherlands and the United States have constructed simple computer circuits with electrical components many times smaller than those on commercial silicon chips 1 , 2 . These ultra-minaturized logic circuits hold out the prospect of hand-held computers as powerful as today’s state-of-the-art supercomputers.
Cees Dekker and co-workers at the Delft University
It’s an enduring enigma in paleoanthropology: when and where did modern human behavior arise? The fossil record suggests that anatomically modern humans appeared in Africa sometime between 150,000 and 100,000 years ago. Yet the earliest convincing indications of behavioral modernity in our species, archaeologists have argued, date to tens of thousands of years later and have turned up in Europe, not Africa. With that in mind, some theorists posited that modern behavior blossomed late and rather sudd
Our brains use angular measurements to decide how far away objects are.
Even if trigonometry wasn’t your strong suit in school, your brain uses it constantly. You judge distance by measuring the angle between the ground and your line of sight to an object, a new study shows. The finding could improve the design of robots and artificial vision systems 1 .
Volunteers who looked through prisms that increased this angle thought objects were closer than they reall
New catalyst means greener paper is not pulp fiction.
Pollution from paper production could be cut, say US chemists, with a new way of refining wood pulp 1 . But the process must go through the mill before it can convert industry.
During paper production, gluey wood component lignin is stripped out to leave stringy cellulose. The harsh chemicals used create environmental pollutants, such as toxic and long-lasting chlorinated compounds.
A new chemical
International research team cracks a hard physics problem. Strongly interacting systems play an important role in quantum physics and quantum chemistry. Stochastic methods such as Monte Carlo simulations are a…
Looking like a glittering cosmic geode, a trio of dazzling stars blaze from the hollowed-out cavity of a reflection nebula in this new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The…
Research examines the nature of explosive events in the magnetosphere. Southwest Research Institute is investigating an unusual event in the Earth’s magnetotail, the elongated portion of the planet’s magnetosphere trailing…
Significant attempts 20 years ago… The study focused on the protein peptide deformylase (PDF). Involved in protein maturation processes in cells, PDF is essential for the survival of bacteria. However,…
HIPS researchers discover new family of bacteria with high pharmaceutical potential. Most antibiotics used in human medicine originate from natural products derived from bacteria and other microbes. Novel microorganisms are…
A new paper published in Nature Nanotechnology outlines a way to create dozens of new “colors” to multiplex single-molecule measurements. Researchers often study biomolecules such as proteins or amino acids…
The material could be made as a thin coating to analyze air quality in industrial or home settings over time. Most systems used to detect toxic gases in industrial or…
Good vibrations… What if your earbuds could do everything your smartphone can do already, except better? What sounds a bit like science fiction may actually not be so far off….
The new technique can modify the nanostructure of bulk and 2D crystals without a cleanroom or expensive etching equipment. In a new paper published on May 1 in the journal…
From skill sets to an overall concept. At the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA2024) in Yokohama, Japan, geriatronics researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) will present…
First neuromorphic vision and control of a flying drone. A team of researchers at Delft University of Technology has developed a drone that flies autonomously using neuromorphic image processing and…
Humboldt Professor Dieter Schmalstieg does research at the University of Stuttgart. Dieter Schmalstieg, Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Visual Computing at the University of Stuttgart, has been awarded the Humboldt…