Researchers at the University of Guanajuato (UGTO), in middle Mexico, developed an extraction column which recovers metals companies use in their production processes; and thus avoid environmental pollution and lessen economic losses.

Using the principles of liquid-liquid technology, researchers have developed an extraction column which recovers metals companies use in their production processes and avoids both environmental pollution and lessen economic losses.

The technology is already at laboratory prototype stage and the creators are in the process of obtaining a patent. 


Credit: University of Guanajuato/Investigación y Desarrollo  

Neutrophils are a type of white blood cell and are summoned to fight infections or injury in any tissue or organ in the body, regardless of cellular and biochemical composition.

How do neutrophils, the body's all terrain vehicles, move in these confined spaces? 

A team from Brown University's School of Engineering and the Department of Surgery in the Warren Alpert Medical School collaborated find out. Their technique involved two hydrogel sacks sandwiched together with a minuscule space in between. Neutrophils could be placed in that space, mimicking the confinement they experience within tissue. Time-lapse cameras measure how fast the cells move, and traction force microscopes determine the forces the cells exert on the surrounding gel.

How people behave in a social network is somewhat mysterious, in the same way we can predict a presidential election with unprecedented accuracy but we can't predict how one person among the six percent of America that chooses a president will vote.

Decision-making often involves a confluence of opinions, decisions and behaviors of individuals influenced by their online networks, the same way they used to be shaped by their real-life networks.

A recent project set out to apply some math to help find some answers.

Ripple across social networks. Image credit: Laurel Papworth. Creative Commons

In some cases, seniors begin to show memory decline and cloudy judgment and researchers have correlated that to lost and altered connections between neurons in the brain.

A new study finds that riluzole, currently on the market as a treatment for Lou Gehrig's Disease (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - ALS) may help prevent these changes. The team found they could stop normal, age-related memory loss in rats by treating them with riluzole. This treatment, they found, prompted changes known to improve connections, and as a result, communication, between certain neurons within the brain's hippocampus.

Modern human skeletons, with our lightly-built form, evolved only relatively recently, after the start of the Holocene about 12,000 years ago and even more recently in some human populations, according to a study that used high-resolution imaging of bone joints from modern humans and chimpanzees as well as from fossils of extinct human species.

For millions of years, extinct human predecessors had high bone density. A higher decrease in the density of lower limbs than in that of the upper limbs suggests that the transformation may be linked to humans' shift from a foraging lifestyle to a sedentary agricultural one.

No one in business can figure out what an 'SEO expert' is - in most cases it is simply the person who knows the password to the Facebook account. A new study finds that it may be better to have less popular people rather than marketing experts talking about your fundraising efforts, because people with fewer friends on Facebook raise more money for charity than those with lots of connections. 

Professor Kimberley Scharf, economist at the University of Warwick, analyzed data from JustGiving.com and found a negative correlation between the size of a group and the amount of money given by each donor - with the average contribution by each person dropping by two pence for every extra connection someone had on Facebook.