News Articles

Leopards have but tigers have stripes.  Why the difference?   British Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling, author of "The Jungle Book" and other stories, suggested the difference was because the leopard moved to an environment "full of trees and bushes and stripy, speckly, patchy-blatchy shadows".   Was he right or was that a just-so story?Experimental psychologists (nee behavioral ecologists(!)) from the University of Bristol wanted to know and they investigated the flank markings of 35 species of wild cats to understand what drives the evolution of such variation. They captured detailed differences in the visual appearance of the cats by linking them to a mathematical model of pattern development.

Energy storage optimization takes a great deal of wisdom, such as the proper trade-offs between energy density or power density.   Batteries, which store energy by separating chemicals and are better for delivering lots of energy, while capacitors, which store energy by separating electrical charges, are better for delivering lots of power (energy per time).  Life would be simpler if both were always available without high cost.   At the AVS 57th International Symposium&Exhibition in Albuquerque, MIT reported on efforts to store energy in thin carbon nanotubes by adding fuel along the length of the tube - chemical energy, which can later be turned into electricity by heating one end of the nanotubes.

Is alcoholism genetic as well as behavioral?  Studies have suggested it in the past and scientists at Brookhaven National Lab say they have the first experimental evidence of it.Their study compared the brain's response to long-term alcohol drinking in two genetic variants of mice. One strain lacked the gene for a specific brain receptor dopamine D2, which responds to dopamine, the brain's "feel good" chemical, to produce feelings of pleasure and reward. The other strain was genetically normal. In the dopamine-receptor-deficient mice (but not the genetically normal strain), long-term alcohol drinking resulted in significant biochemical changes in areas of the brain well know to be involved in alcoholism and addiction.

Researchers say they have discovered a gene variant that may protect against alcoholism.   The variant, in a gene called CYP2E1, is associated with a person's response to alcohol. For the 10 to 20 percent of people that possess this variant, those first few drinks leave them feeling more inebriated than the rest of the human population, who harbor a different version of the gene.

A systematic review says there is a link between information provided to physicians by pharmaceutical companies and higher prescription frequency but what does that mean?   Are companies with new drugs marketing them more or are they better than previous drugs and thus get prescribed more?  The authors analyze and describe the findings of 58 studies examining the relationship between exposure of physicians to information from pharmaceutical companies and subsequent prescribing behavior.   All but one of the studies suggested that (a) no association was detected or(b) exposure to pharmaceutical company information was associated with lower prescribing quality. 

Medical evidence is based on what is considered the strongest possible foundation, the placebo-controlled trial but a new paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine calls into question this foundation upon which much of medicine rests, by showing that there is no standard behind the standard – that is, there is no standard for the placebo.The thinking behind relying on placebo-controlled trials is that to be sure a treatment is effective, it needs to compare people whose only difference is whether or not they are taking the drug. Both groups must think they are on the drug to protect against effects of factors like expectation. Study participants are allocated "randomly" to the drug or a "placebo" – a pill that might be mistaken for the active drug but is inert.

It's a known aspect of the human condition that people tend to diminish the negative impact of something they do while recognizing the negative impact of things they don't do as common sense.   In Hollywood, director Rob Reiner thinks cigarettes should be censored from movies but has no problem with teenage sex in films.    Some blame junk food advertising for obesity but may think violence on TV has no impact.A new study in the the Oxford Journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience says that violent films, TV programs and video games desensitize teenagers to violence and blunts their emotional responses to aggression.    Do you believe it?  Probably not if you like violent video games.

Stem cell therapies hold promise as a cure for diseases but not without some risk, since faulty regulation of stem cells leads to a huge range of human diseases.   Even before birth, mistakes made by the stem cells are a major cause of congenital defects and cancer can also be caused by the body losing control of stem cell function. Guiding stem cells along the correct pathways and reversing their mistakes is one target of cancer research and scientists from Tufts University say they have identified a novel and readily modifiable signal by which an organism can control the behavior of stem cell offspring. 

Cells and tissues grow, develop and interact in a 3-D world, why not study them that way?  The methods of culturing and studying human cells have traditionally been carried out on flat impermeable surfaces and those techniques have obviously produced a steady stream of critical insight into cell behavior and the mechanisms of infection and disease,  but those cell cultures have limitations inreproducing the tissue environment in vivo.Researcher Cheryl Nickerson and her team at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University highlight an innovative approach for studying cells in 3-D in order to better understand disease onset and progression, particularly the responses of host cells to infectious pathogens. 

Sure, high energy physics costs billions these days (and watch out for birds - and lightning) but table-top experiments with tuned lasers and sensitive detectors can also continue to achieve the precision necessary for exploring the basic laws of physics at the heart of relativity and quantum mechanics.

During the recession, a number of people have begun to value work less (unless finances force them to value work much, much more) -  time away from family, less leisure time and fewer self-improvement activities have begun to get noticed.In other words, the human condition that causes us to devalue something until we no longer have it is in full force.   A new study also indicated that recession-related stress tends to manifest differently in men and women.Wayne Hochwarter, the Jim Moran Professor of Business Administration in the Florida State University College of Business, and research associates Tyler Everett and Stuart Tapley, decided to find out how attitudes toward work had changed during recent times.

If you like to read science studies you are most likely to get them through one of two avenues; the long-standing business model has been that a print journal gets the study and does the work formatting it and lends their 'goodwill' to it with marketing - in return, they hold copyright and subscribers pay to read it.   A more recent approach has been companies that instead charge the scientists to publish the study but reading it is free - open access versus toll access, proponents claim, though in a practical sense someone is either paying to read or someone is paying to publish.