News Articles

An international team has found evidence of substantial overlap for genetic risk factors shared between bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and schizophrenia and less overlap between those conditions and autism and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
The root causes of psychiatric illnesses are not known. Instead, for the past 125 years, clinicians have based diagnosis on a collection of symptoms observed in patients, something medical science has long left behind - and so the race has been on to find biological links.

Here's a development that could have significant implications for electrochemistry, biochemistry, electrical engineering and many other fields: a Nature Materials paper is about computer simulations which find that the electrical conductivity of many materials increases with a strong electrical field in a universal way. 
Electrical conductivity is a measure of how strongly a given material conducts the flow of electric current and is generally understood in terms of Ohm's law, which states that the conductivity is independent of the magnitude of an applied electric field, i.e. the voltage per meter. This law is widely obeyed in weak applied fields, which means that most material samples can be ascribed a definite electrical resistance, measured in Ohms.

What group has above average interest in systems and scores below average in empathy?If you answered autistic people, you are correct. If you answered girls with anorexia, also correct.Girls with anorexia nervosa show a mild echo of the characteristics of autism, suggests new research. At first glance, anorexia and autism seem very different, but they both share certain features, such as rigid attitudes and behaviours, a tendency to be very self-focussed, and a fascination with detail. Both conditions also share similar alterations in structure and function of brain regions involved in social perception.

A young child buried in the medieval town of Ribe in Denmark 800 years ago had an unpleasant life even before that - because the child had been given a large dose of mercury in an attempt to cure a severe, ongoing illness. 
A new methodology developed by chemist Kaare Lund Rasmussen from University of Southern Denmark and colleagues can reveal an unprecedented amount of details about the time even shortly before a person's death. Mercury is of particular interest for the archaeologists as many cultures in different part of the world have been in contact with the rare (and toxic) element.

There is a phenomenon in speech called coarticulation, in which certain sounds are produced differently depending on the sounds that come before or after them.
For example, though the letter n is usually pronounced with the tongue pressed near the middle of the mouth's roof (as in the word "ten") but it's pronounced with the tongue forward when it's followed by a –th, as in tenth).
A decade ago, researchers discovered that coarticulation extends to a different kind of communication - American Sign Language. Knowing that hand movements could be affected according to where they fit in during sign language, researchers wondered if there was a similar effect on hands when they were used to produce sound, such as playing the piano. 

Surveys show that people have less empathy for battered human adults than they do dogs, according to a paper at the American Sociological Association.
Jack Levin  and Arnold Arluke, sociology professors at Northeastern University, used the opinions of 240 men and women, most of whom were white and between the ages of 18-25 (college students), at a large northeastern university (guess which one) who randomly received one of four fictional news articles about; the beating of a one-year-old child, an adult in his thirties, a puppy, or a 6-year-old dog. The stories were identical except for the victim's identify. After reading their story, respondents were asked to rate their feelings of empathy towards the victim.

Cocaine use may cause profound metabolic changes which can result in dramatic weight gain during recovery, a distressing phenomenon that can lead to relapse - the reason is because chronic cocaine use may reduce the body's ability to store fat, the authors of a new paper suggest.
It is widely believed that cocaine suppresses the appetite and that the problematic weight gain during rehabilitation was a result of patients substituting food for drugs. 

Inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington disease involve disease-causing genetic mutations that damage or remove a protein that has an essential role in the body. This protein defect is the root cause of the disease symptoms.
But for congenital muscular dystrophies (CMDs), the sequence of the protein that is central to normal function is typically unaffected. Instead, the defects lie in processing proteins—ones that are responsible for modifying the central protein by adding sugar chains (glycans). Either loss of the glycans or disruption of their structure is sufficient to cause muscle disease.

If you want to understand Earth's evolution, start with how heat is conducted in the deep lower mantle 400 to 1,800 miles below the surface.
Researchers recently did. They were able to simulate the pressure conditions in this region to measure thermal conductivity using a new measurement technique developed by the collaborators and implemented by the Carnegie team on the mantle material magnesium oxide (MgO). They found that heat transfer is lower than other predictions, with total heat flow across the Earth of about 10.4 terawatts, which is about 60 % of the power used today by civilization. They also found that conductivity has less dependence on pressure conditions than predicted. The research is published in the August 9, online Scientific Reports.

For children and immune-compromised adults in developing countries, diarrheal disease induced by rotavirus can be life threatening.
Rotavirus is the leading cause of diarrhea in infants and young children worldwide, causing more than 114 million episodes of diarrhea annually in children under the age of 5, 80% of which occur in developing countries. More than 600,000 children die annually from rotavirus (RV) infection
Current rotaviral vaccines are highly effective in the Western world, but are not as effective in developing countries. Additionally, these vaccines are not appropriate for use outside of a very narrow age window or in immune compromised individuals. 

An investigational malaria vaccine developed by scientists at Sanaria Inc. and known as PfSPZ Vaccine has been found to be safe, to generate an immune system response, and to offer protection against malaria infection in healthy adults, according to the results of an early-stage clinical trial.
Malaria is transmitted to humans by the bite of an infected mosquito. After the bite occurs, infectious malaria parasites in the immature, sporozoite stage of their life cycle first travel to the liver, where they multiply, and then spread through the bloodstream, at which time symptoms develop.
The PfSPZ Vaccine is composed of live but weakened sporozoites of the species Plasmodium falciparum, the most deadly of the malaria-causing parasites.

Researchers have used an atomic clock as a quantum simulator, mimicking the behavior of a different, more complex quantum system, joining a growing list of physical systems that can be used for modeling and perhaps eventually explaining the quantum mechanical behavior of exotic materials such as high-temperature superconductors, which conduct electricity without resistance.
All but the smallest, most trivial quantum systems are too complicated to simulate on classical computers, hence the interest in quantum simulators. Sharing some of the features of experimental quantum computers—a hot research topic—quantum simulators are "special purpose" devices designed to provide insight into specific challenging problems.