Bioengineers at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, taking Plato’s concept of reality and illusion into the world of robots, have uncovered some of the algorithms of learning, the “primitives” the brain uses to comprehend the world. In particular, they have described the mathematical shapes used to control movements of the arms. The primitives demonstrate why […]
American astronauts and mission control personnel who participated in missions to the Mir space station tended to be less happy and less satisfied with their working conditions than their Russian counterparts, according to a study conducted by University of California, San Francisco researchers at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center (SFVAMC). For US crewmembers, […]
Scientists have discovered 18 planet-like objects, drifting free of any central star, in a region of the Orion constellation. If the young, cool bodies are in fact planets, these free floaters may pose a considerable challenge to current theories about how planets form. Spanish, American, and German researchers report their find in the 6 October […]
Garlic might not make breath smell like springtime in the Alps, but it can help protect against stomach and colorectal cancer, according to a new study. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study shows that people who consume raw or cooked garlic regularly face about half the risk of stomach cancer and two-thirds […]
The threat of large earthquakes striking the New Madrid seismic zone remains all too real for people in St. Louis, Memphis and other parts of the central United States – despite recent reports to the contrary. That is the conclusion of a new study by geophysicists Shelley J. Kenner and Paul Segall published in the […]
Researchers at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center, Chicago, and Lausanne, Switzerland, have successfully used gene therapy to reverse the anatomical, cellular changes that occur in the brains of primates with Parkinson’s disease. The researchers also report success in preventing the disease from progressing and reversing functional deficits or symptoms associated with the disease in monkeys displaying […]
A research team from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has shown that the majority of HIV-infected individuals who begin antiviral therapy during the earliest stages of their infection eventually can stop taking drugs and keep the virus under control with their immune systems alone. In the study reported in the Sept 28 issue of Nature, a […]
Listen up expectant dads: All those hours spent talking to your unborn child via your partner’s burgeoning belly don’t go unnoticed. New research from Queen’s Faculty of Health Science proves that at 30 weeks the fetus is indeed able to hear and just might be listening to your muffled words of love. Dr. Barbara Kisilevsky […]
Vaccines designed to trigger an immune response to a small HIV protein called Tat could be a promising way to fend off the virus, intriguing new data suggest. According to a report in this week’s journal Nature, “killer” T cells targeted to the Tat protein can effectively contain simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), the monkey version […]
Ice cores drilled through a glacier more than four miles up in the Himalayan Mountains have yielded a highly detailed record of the last 1,000 years of earth’s climate in the high Tibetan Plateau. Based on an analysis of the ice, both the last decade and the last 50 years were the warmest in 1,000 […]
