News Articles

Psychologists say they have compelling evidence that older adults can eliminate forgetfulness and perform as well as younger adults on memory tests. 
They used a distraction learning strategy to help older adults overcome age-related forgetting and say it boosted their performance to that of younger adults. Distraction learning sounds like an oxymoron but some claims are that older brains are adept at processing irrelevant and relevant information in the environment, without conscious effort, to aid memory performance.  It's intriguing enough it will likely be on Dr. Oz next month.

The Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is more accurately known as herpesvirus 4 (HHV-4), one of 8 viruses in the herpes family and one of the most common viruses in humans, affecting more than 90 percent of the population worldwide and over 95% of adults in America - so common it is almost hard to attribute it to anything. 
The Epstein-Barr viruswas first discovered in the early 1960s. Infections in early childhood usually have no symptoms, but it remains for life and also people infected during adolescence or young adulthood may develop mononucleosis. It has been associated with Hodgkin's lymphoma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and nasopharyngeal carcinoma. 

An international group of scientists has discovered a new class of molecular compounds capable of killing the influenza virus. 
You learned this from your parents; too much even of a good thing can be a killer and that same idea has led to manipulating an enzyme that is key to how influenza replicates and spreads. The  newly discovered compounds interrupt the enzyme neuraminidase's facilitation of influenza's spread.

Last month, physicists predicted the formation of accretion disks and relativistic jets that warp and bend more than previously thought, shaped both by the extreme gravity of black holes and by powerful magnetic forces generated by their spin. 
Black holes, absences at the center of both galaxies and science fiction, shape the growth and death of stars around them through both their powerful gravitational pull and explosive ejections of energy - a pull so strong close to a black hole that even light cannot escape from within, hence the difficulty in observing them directly. 

Sociologists have found that student loans provide more help to women than they do for men in encouraging graduation from college but, on average, taking out loans makes graduation more likely for all students.
Yet the debt eventually  has diminishing returns and becomes less effective at boosting chances of graduation -  about $2,000 lower for men than for women. Part of the reason may be because the job prospects for male college dropouts are better for men than women.

Unlike comets, asteroids don't have a trail - with some exceptions.
Spanish researchers observed using the Gran Telescopio Canarias and discovered that something happened around July 1st, 2011 that caused a trail to appear on P/2012 F5 (Gibbs) - perhaps an internal rupture or a collision with another asteroid.

In many animals, the brain is located in a specific structure like the head, along with sensory organs and often together with the mouth.
However, there are distantly related animals which have a nervous system but no brain, like sea anemones and corals.
In a new paper, the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis was used to find out if one of the ends of the sea anemone corresponds to the head of higher animals. To do this the researchers studied the function of genes that control head development in higher animals during the embryonic development of the starlet sea anemone. 

Schizophrenia may affect up to 1 percent of the population, it is diagnosed primarily in the teenage or early adult years, and is associated with problems in mental ability and memory.
People who have a greater familial genetic link to schizophrenia are more likely to see a fall in IQ as they age, even if they do not develop the condition, according to psychologists in a new paper. 
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have not found genetic causes for schizophrenia but familial instances are considered a risk factor. The psychologists used genetic analysis matched with IQ test results to reach their conclusion on how thinking skills change with age. 

A lifelong diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids can inhibit growth of breast cancer tumors by 30 percent, according to new research published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, which they say is the first to provide unequivocal evidence that omega-3s reduce cancer risk.
Breast cancer remains the most common form of cancer in women worldwide and is the second leading cause of female cancer deaths. Advocates have long believed diet may significantly help in preventing cancer but epidemiological and experimental studies to back up such claims have been lacking, and human studies have been inconsistent.

Gravity works, it is a dominant force in physics, but at the very large and very small scales it holds a lot of mysteries left to be solved.  Foe example, when it comes to stars in young star clusters the dynamics in these crowded environments cannot be simply explained by the pull of gravity.
After analyzing Hubble Space Telescope images of star cluster NGC 1818 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, researchers at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA) at Peking University in Beijing found more binary star systems toward the periphery of cluster than in the center, the opposite of what they expected. The distribution of binaries is thought to result from complex interactions among stars within young clusters.

In the UK, pharmaceutical innovation seems to be dying. The supply of new medicines has conspicuously dwindled in recent decades but that is not due to innovation issues, it is because regulations have caused the costs of drug development to soar, along with the time it takes to bring a new drug to market: from 3 years in 1960 to 12 in 2000. 
The UK is historically the second largest source of new drug development, generating more than 10% of all new medicines around the globe. The US has historically been the runaway leader though output looks bleak in America as well, for similar reasons.

The hypothesis that tomato fruits from organic farming and greater stressing conditions associated with organic farming leads to more nutritional compounds, such as phenolics and vitamin C, recently got tested.