News Articles

Soybean cookies sound pretty disgusting, right?   Soybeans and soybean oil were among the many approaches to healthier unhealthy food once it was discovered that saturated fats, which can be found in foods such as cream, cheese and butter, were bad for the heart. But soybean oil spoiled when heated so producers had to hydrogenate the oil to keep it stable, thus creating trans fats.   Guess what turned out to also be bad for you?   

Can playing "Call of Duty 2" improve your brain power?   University of Rochester researchers say that, and other action video games, train people to make the right decisions faster.   Video games help players develop a heightened sensitivity to what is going on around them and that improves a wide variety of general skills that can help with everyday activities like driving, reading small print, keeping track of friends in a crowd, and even navigating around town.   Bring on "Halo:Reach" then!

If you are a man aged 55 to 74 years with low baseline blood levels of prostate specific antigen (PSA), you don't need further screening, says a new study in Cancer.   Aggressive investigation was instead associated with a large increase in cumulative incidence and potential overtreatment for men from 1993 to 1999. Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed malignancy and the third leading cause of death from cancer in men in Western countries. While a man in the United State has about a one in six chance of being diagnosed with prostate cancer during his lifetime, his risk of dying from the disease is relatively low, about one in 36.

Artificial skin, dubbed "e-skin" by the researchers, is the first such material made out of inorganic single crystalline semiconductors. It's a pressure-sensitive electronic material made from semiconductor nanowires and this sort of touch-sensitive artificial skin would help overcome a key challenge in robotics: adapting the amount of force needed to hold and manipulate a wide range of objects.

Strange so-called Green Pea galaxies were first discovered in 2007 by citizen scientists and it has now been shown that these extraordinary and extremely compact star cities have low amounts of complex elements after being diluted by streams of gas and strong supernova winds.Green Pea galaxies were discovered by participants in Galaxy Zoo, which grew out of the need to provide more help to astronomers with a huge number of night sky images produced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

People can learn to control the activity of some brain regions when they get feedback signals provided by functional magnetic resonance brain imaging (fMRI), according to researchers who used fMRI during training sessions with three groups of healthy participants who were asked to assess visual emotional stimuli (negative or neutral pictures). They were interested in the signals generated by the insula, a brain region implicated in emotion regulation. While performing the test, the investigators provided the subjects with specific, unspecific, or no feedback about the extent of the activation of the insula.

An archaeological team has discovered the oldest Roman baths in Asia Minor - underneath existing Roman baths.  Location:  Sagalassos, Turkey, which was inhabited as a city until the 7th century AD, when it was destroyed by earthquakes. Prior to the Sagalassos discovery, the Capito Baths in Miletus, built during the reign of Emperor Claudius (41-54 AD), were the oldest known Roman bathing complex in Asia Minor.

In almost everything, size matters.  And usually, being bigger helps.   I don't know anyone who couldn't use a larger refrigerator but University of Bristol physicists have done the unthinkable and made the smallest refrigerator ever.

When nerve cells communicate with each other, they do so through electrical pulses.  Most everything in our bodies comes down to induction when you think about it.    Since the early days of neuroscience, the accepted idea was that nerve cells simply sum up tiny action potentials generated by the incoming pulses and emit an action potential themselves when a threshold is reached but Moritz Helias and Markus Diesmann from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (Japan) and Moritz Deger and Stefan Rotter from the Bernstein Center Freiburg (Germany) say they have figured out exactly what happens right before a nerve cell emits a pulse

Fish in a wind tunnel?   How else will you learn how they fly?It turns out flying fish can remain airborne for over 40 seconds and cover distances of up to a quarter mile hitting a top speed up to 40 miles an hours, says Haecheon Choi, a mechanical engineer from Seoul National University, Korea. Choi said a children's science book inspired him to look into the aerodynamics of flying fish, and a paper of his results appear in The Journal of Experimental Biology.  Choi and colleague Hyungmin Park posted similar results in a poster for the American Physical Society meeting in 2006.

22 scientists have published a study they say provides clear evidence about the effectiveness of Non-pharmacological Therapies in Alzheimer's disease and are calling on governments to make these useful treatments readily available.
 A cure for Alzheimer's is not in sight and available drugs have worthwhile but limited benefits the study says scientifically developed and rigorously tested Non-pharmacological Therapies can significantly improve the lives of people with dementia and their caregivers. 
They say he strongest evidence is for individualized intervention packages for family caregivers which can improve the well-being of caregivers and help delay admissions to care homes.

What happens to the laws of physics if a fundamental constant turns out to be not a constant after all?   The 'magic number' known as the fine-structure constant, called 'alpha' by physicists,  appears to vary throughout the universe, according to a team of astrophysicists.That means the laws of physics would vary throughout the universe also.The arXiv preprint describes how they determined that the fine-structure constant 'alpha' varies by measuring light from a quasar as it red-shifted due to universal expansion.