The classic model of how brain cells communicate was put forth in 1943 by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, at the time the first digital computers were being envisaged, and the McCulloch-Pitts model suggested that brain cells communicate in a binary fashion, represented by a “1” for firing and a “0” for not firing, much as a modern computer functions.

While it is common to say that a mammalian brain functions like a computer, this is a somewhat faulty idea, in part because the observation from the Traub lab suggests that gap junctions cause “short circuiting” as part of the brain’s normal functions. A real computer could not function if it short circuited.

Researchers isolated bisdemethoxycurcumin, the active ingredient of curcuminoids – a natural substance found in turmeric root – that may help boost the immune system in clearing amyloid beta, a peptide that forms the plaques found in Alzheimer’s disease.

Using blood samples from Alzheimer’s disease patients, researchers found that bisdemethoxycurcumin boosted immune cells called macrophages to clear amyloid beta. In addition, researchers identified the immune genes associated with this activity.

The study provides more insight into the role of the immune system in Alzheimer’s disease and points to a new treatment approach. Researchers say that it may be possible to test a patient’s immune response with a blood sample in order to individualize treatment.

Your ability to listen to a phone message in one ear while a friend is talking into your other ear—and comprehend what both are saying—is an important communication skill that’s heavily influenced by your genes, say researchers of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), one of the National Institutes of Health.

The finding may help researchers better understand a broad and complex group of disorders—called auditory processing disorders (APDs)—in which individuals with otherwise normal hearing ability have trouble making sense of the sounds around them.

“Our auditory system doesn’t end with our ears,” says James F. Battey, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., director of the NIDCD. “It also includes the part of our brain that helps us interpret the sounds we hear.

Early man was on a constant quest for food. The demands of nourishment and conserving as much energy as possible may even have changed the course of evolution.

While no one has an authoritative answer, anthropologists have long theorized that early humans began walking on two legs as a way to reduce locomotor energy costs.

In the first study to fully examine this theory among humans and adult chimpanzees, researchers have found that human walking is around 75 percent less costly, in terms of energy and caloric expenditure, than quadrupedal and bipedal walking in chimpanzees.

In the 40 years that humans have been traveling into space, the suits they wear have changed very little. The bulky, gas-pressurized outfits give astronauts a bubble of protection, but their significant mass and the pressure itself severely limit mobility.

Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, wants to change that.

Newman is working on a sleek, advanced suit designed to allow superior mobility when humans eventually reach Mars or return to the moon.

Each time you press "save" on your computer you force atoms on magnets to align their polarity with the intruding magnetic field. Helping physicists understand why it happens and why it isn't a physics-induced train wreck more often is the goal of Joshua Deutsch and Andreas Berger and they say their research could advanced materials research.

Correcting even a single typo in an e-mail means changing dozens of bits of information. For each bit, a magnetic head grazes a tiny patch of your disk drive, forcing its polarity, or "spin," to align up or down--the magnetic equivalent of a one or a zero.

Who knew the cute koala bears were so promiscuous?

Professor Peter Timms from QUT's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation said chlamydia in koalas was a significant cause of infertility, urinary tract infections, and inflammation in the lining of the eye that often led to blindness.

"The numbers of koalas with chlamydia seems to be increasing," he said.

The first Australian trials of a vaccine developed by Queensland University of Technology that could save Australia's iconic koala from contracting chlamydia are planned to begin later this year.

"The trial is planned to begin before the end of the year and will test the vaccine's ability to induce a good immune response in the koala against chlamydia," he said.

Monkey viruses related to HIV may have swept across Africa more recently than previously thought, according to new research from The University of Arizona in Tucson.

A new family tree for African green monkeys shows that an HIV-like virus, simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, first infected those monkeys after the lineage split into four species. The new research reveals the split happened about 3 million years ago.

Previously, scientists thought SIV infected an ancestor of green monkeys before the lineage split, much longer ago.

On the eve of the 62nd anniversary of the world's first atomic explosion, the Trinity atomic bomb test, a CDC-led study team has reported new insights on the radiation released at the time of the test. Analyzing the doses that nearby residents received, the CDC team has made preliminary estimates of additional doses that the residents could have ingested in their bodies.

The test of a plutonium-based atomic device at the Trinity Site in southern New Mexico on July 16, 1945 was an undertaking unlike any that humankind had tried before. There was much uncertainty among the Los Alamos scientists, military personnel, and Manhattan Project officials assembled for the event as to whether the device would work and how, if it did work, it would affect the local environment.

Using innovative physics, researchers have proposed a system that may one day bring proton therapy, a state-of-the-art cancer treatment method currently available only at a handful of centers, to radiation treatment centers and cancer patients everywhere. Thomas R. Mackie, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and co-founder of the radiation therapy company TomoTherapy, will present this new design at next week's annual meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine in Minneapolis.

Compared to the x rays conventionally used in radiation therapy, protons are potentially more effective, as they can deposit more cell-killing energy in their tumor targets and less in surrounding healthy tissue.