News Articles

End-stage renal disease, or chronic kidney failure, affects more than 500,000 people per year in the United States alone and is only fully treated with a kidney transplant. Yet there were only 17,000 donated kidneys for transplants last year and the number of patients on the transplant waiting list currently exceeds 85,000, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network. 

Do social networks which features many distant connections, or "long ties," produce large-scale changes most quickly, as social media lore claims?    No, says a new study by Damon Centola,  assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.  Instead, individuals are more likely to acquire new health practices while living in networks with dense clusters of connections — that is, when in close contact with people they already know well. 

If you're a print magazine, or in marketing consumer goods, you care about packaging.
The general science magazine "New Scientist" approached neuroscience marketing firm NeuroFocus to test three different cover designs for an August issue of the magazine.
Applying their EEG-based full brain measurements of test subjects' subconscious responses to the three covers, NeuroFocus identified one as clearly superior in terms of its overall neurological effectiveness, saying it scored exceptionally well in emotional engagement, one of their primary metrics, the others being attention and memory retention. 
This neuromarketing research was the first time that the publishing industry used EEG technology to determine the appeal of cover designs. 

Fish oil has been used as an anti-inflammatory (and a lot of other things) but scientists haven't been sure how the omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil work in that capacity but a new report in Cell shows how omega-3 fatty acids both shut down inflammation and reverse diabetes in obese mice.   The report says omega-3s alleviate inflammation by acting on a receptor (GPR120) found in fat tissue and on inflammatory immune cells called macrophages, studies in mice show.GPR120 is a G protein-coupled receptor (GPCRs), a group involved in many important cell functions and that includes the targets of many drugs. Other researchers had recently shown that five orphan GPCRs, GPR120 included, respond to free fatty acids.

McGill chemists using a technique known as photoacoustic infrared spectroscopy say they can  identify the composition of pigments used in art decades or even centuries old. Pigments give artist's materials color and they emit sounds when light is shone on them, and Fourier-transform photoacoustic infrared spectroscopy is based on Alexander Graham Bell's 1880 discovery that showed solids could emit sounds when exposed to sunlight, infrared radiation or ultraviolet radiation. More recent advances in mathematics and computers have enabled chemists to apply the phenomenon to various materials.

A new system  published in The Visual Computer uses sensors and wireless devices to measure three physiological parameters in real time, heart rate, respiration, and the galvanic (electric) skin response, processes that data using software, and is then used to control the behavior of a virtual character who is sitting in a waiting room.The heart rate was reflected in the movement of the character's feet, respiration in the rising of the chest (exaggerated movements so that it can be noticed) and the galvanic skin response in the more or less reddish color of the face.

A "cat state" is a curiosity of the quantum world, where particles can exist in "superpositions" of two opposite properties simultaneously. Cat state is a reference to German physicist Erwin Schrödinger's famed 1935 theoretical notion of a cat that is both alive and dead simultaneously.Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created "quantum cats" made of photons, particles of light, boosting prospects for manipulating light in new ways to enhance precision measurements as well as computing and communications based on quantum physics.

Want to make people healthier?  Put more goof stuff in beer.  And don't count out the smarts of ancient people in fun ways to stay healthy.While antibiotics officially date to the discovery of penicillin in 1928, a chemical analysis of the bones of ancient Nubians (today's Sudan) shows that they were regularly consuming tetracycline, most likely in their beer, 1,700 years ago.

Personalized energy systems, where instead of huge nuclear plants (or worse, even larger windmills or solar farms) powering air conditioning for homes or gas stations fueling cars, individuals can produce power themselves, edged a little closer as scientists reported discovery of a new nickel borate catalyst that could boost efficiency of fuel cells up to 20,000 percent. The system would consist of rooftop solar energy panels that produce electricity for heating, cooking, lighting, and to charge the batteries on the homeowners' electric cars during. Any surplus electricity would go to an 'electrolyzer, a device that breaks down ordinary water into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen. Both would be stored in tanks.

String theory was originally developed to try and describe the fundamental particles and forces that make up our universe.  Over the last 25 years, string theory has become some physicists' contender for a 'theory of everything', reconciling particle physics with cosmology - a puzzle that tormented Einstein for the last 30 years of his life.

The InterAcademy Council Board, composed of presidents of 15 academies of science and equivalent organizations(1) representing Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, pulled no punches in assessing the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) performance during the latter part of the decade.Despite overwhelming evidence for climate change, the IPCC issued “substantive findings” based on little proof and needs to rework its process, the independent review said.   The UN had requested the IAC review.   That's a long way down from the heady days of a 2007 Nobel Peace prize for the IPCC.   

It's counter-intuitive that hurting oneself could make a person feel better but, based on the assumption that no one truly wants to hurt themselves without a benefit, researchers have taken reports from people who compulsively harm themselves and sought a way where cutting or burning could provide relief from emotional distress. Individuals with borderline personality disorder experience intense emotions and often show a deficiency of emotion regulation skills. This group also displays high prevalence rates of self-injurious behavior, which they claim helps them to reduce negative emotional states.