News Articles

One way to clean up hazardous heavy metals like arsenic, lead and mercury in contaminated materials could be to use waste from the processing and canning of onions (Allium cepa L.) and garlic (Allium sativum L.)
Biotechnologists Rahul Negi, Gouri Satpathy, Yogesh Tyagi and Rajinder Gupta of the GGS Indraprastha University in Delhi studied the influence of acidity or alkalinity, contact time, temperature and concentration of the different materials present to optimize conditions for making a biological heavy metal filter for industrial-scale decontamination.

 A report based on in vitro tests comparing the digestion of fresh human breast milk and nine different infant formulas found that free fatty acids created during the digestion of infant formula cause cellular death that may contribute to necrotizing enterocolitis, a severe intestinal condition that is often fatal and occurs most commonly in premature infants.

Facial transplantation has ushered in a new era of craniofacial surgery but already surgeons are pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved. 
Most candidates for facial transplant have loss of soft tissues only, like skin, muscle, blood vessels, and nerves.  Although still a rare and relatively new procedure, facial transplantation now offers a reconstructive option for patients with severe facial deficits and so doctors are creating a roadmap for work on patients with extensive facial defects, including loss of the normal bone and soft tissue landmarks. 'Reverse craniofacial planning' approach can restore normal facial relationships.

Experimental evidence by psychologists concludes that the negative effects of playing violent video games can accumulate over time.
The psychologists found that people who played a violent video game for three consecutive days showed increases in aggressive behavior and hostile expectations each day they played. Those who played nonviolent games showed no meaningful changes in aggression or hostile expectations over that period.
Other experimental efforts have shown that a single session of playing a violent video game increased short-term aggression but this is the first to show longer-term effects, according to Brad Bushman, co-author of the study and professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University.

Just because you can buy something doesn't mean it works. You can buy a home gym, for example, but it won't make you thin. However, there are some things you can buy that won't work even if you actually try to achieve a result.
You buy devices that control pests using ultrasonic frequencies - they are purported to work for mosquitoes, cockroaches, ants and now there are new versions targeting bed bugs, since those were in the news a lot.
A new paper reports the results of tests of four commercially available electronic pest repellent devices designed to repel insect and mammalian pests by using sound. 

In the constellation Taurus, astronomers have found the youngest still-forming solar system yet seen - an infant star called  L1527 IRS, surrounded by a swirling disk of dust and gas 450 light-years from Earth.
The star only has about one-fifth the mass of the Sun, but will likely pull in material from its surroundings and eventually match the Sun's mass. The disk surrounding the young star contains at least enough mass to make seven Jupiters, the largest planet in our Solar System.

Smoke from Arctic wildfires have been drifting over the Greenland ice sheet, tarnishing the ice with soot and making it more likely to melt under the sun, according to satellite observations.
NASA's Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) satellite captured smoke from Arctic fires billowing out over Greenland during the summer of 2012. Researchers have long been concerned with how the Greenland landscape is losing its sparkly reflective quality as temperatures rise. The surface is darkening as ice melts away, and, since dark surfaces are less reflective than light ones, the surface captures more heat, which leads to stronger and more prolonged melting.

Rather than just a single sense of location, the brain has a number of "modules" dedicated to self-location. Each module contains its own internal GPS-like mapping system that keeps track of movement, and has other characteristics that also distinguishes one from another.
How many different sense of location?  It's unclear.  At least four and perhaps as many as 10, according to  new research from the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.  They say this is also the first time that researchers have been able to show that a part of the brain that does not directly respond to sensory input, called the association cortex, is organized into modules. The research was conducted using rats. 

New cells develop in the heart but how these cardiac cells are born and how frequently they are generated remains unclear. New research from Brigham and Women's Hospital used a novel method to identify these new heart cells and describe their origins - a Multi-isotope Imaging Mass Spectrometry (MIMS) imaging system that demonstrates cell division in the adult mammalian heart. 

The universe has always had some trace of heavy elements, such as carbon and oxygen, for as far back as astronomers could 'see'. These elements, originally churned from the explosion of massive stars, formed the building blocks for planetary bodies and eventually for life on Earth.
No more, say researchers who  analyzed light from the most distant known quasar, ULASJ112010641, a galactic nucleus more than 13 billion light-years from Earth, and found matter with no discernible trace of heavy elements. 

Cycling is safer than driving for young British males ages 17 to 20 - driving brings an almost five times greater risk per hour of an accident than cyclists of the same age.

If your pockets are empty and you have no money for roast beast this Christmas, there may still be hope. You could try remembering a better dinner and trick your brain into feeling full. That's episodic memory.
The memory of having eaten a large meal can make people feel less hungry hours after the meal, according to a paper by experimental psychologists at University of Bristol.