News Articles

Researchers have programmed an autonomous molecular "robot" made out of DNA to start, move, turn, and stop while following a DNA track.The development could ultimately lead to molecular systems that might one day be used for medical therapeutic devices and molecular-scale reconfigurable robots---robots made of many simple units that can reposition or even rebuild themselves to accomplish different tasks.Results of the research have been published in Nature.The traditional view of a robot is that it is "a machine that senses its environment, makes a decision, and then does something---it acts," said Erik Winfree, associate professor of computer science, computation and neural systems, and bioengineering at Caltech.

A team of Yale paleontologists have discovered a rich array of exceptionally preserved fossils of marine animals in Morocco that lived during the the early part of the Ordovician, between 480 million and 472 million years ago. The specimens are the oldest yet discovered soft-bodied fossils from a period marked by intense biodiversification. The findings, which appear in Nature, greatly expand scientists' understanding of the sea creatures and ecosystems that existed at a crucial point in evolutionary history, when most of the animal life on the planet was found in the oceans.

Judging by recent polls, you would think that the environment is not much of a concern to Americans. And You would also be wrong, say researchers from Standford University. When pollsters ask Americans to name the most important problem facing the country, the environment is rarely mentioned. But these results change drastically if pollsters replace "country" with "world" in the question, the researchers say. "For years, the wording used in traditional surveys has systematically underestimated the priority that the public has placed on global warming and the environment," said Jon Krosnick, a professor of communication and of political science at Stanford. "To fully understand public concern about these issues, traditional surveys should be asking a different question."

To avoid of the health risks associated with traditional cigarettes, attempts have been made to develop cigarettes that contain no tobacco and no nicotine. But a team of researchers writing in Cell Cycle has found that the supposedly safe cigarettes may be more carcinogenic because they actually induce more extensive DNA damage than tobacco products. Using laser scanning cytometry (LSC) technology to measure DNA damage response to the smoke from commercially available tobacco- and nicotine-free cigarettes, the research team expected to find the alternative products were less hazardous than regular tobacco cigarettes.

By analyzing tiny variations in the isotopic composition of silver in meteorites and Earth rocks, scientists are putting together a timetable of how our planet was assembled 4.5 billion years ago. The new study, published in Science, indicates that water and other key volatiles may have been present in at least some of Earth's original building blocks, rather than acquired later from comets, as some scientists have suggested.Compared to the Solar System as a whole, Earth is depleted in volatile elements, such as hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen, which likely never condensed on planets formed in the inner, hotter, part of the Solar System. Earth is also depleted in moderately volatile elements, such as silver.

MIT neuroscientists writing in the Journal of Neurophysiology have developed a new method to analyze brain imaging data – one that may paint a clearer picture of how our brain produces and understands language.Research with patients who developed specific language deficits (such as the inability to comprehend passive sentences) following brain injury suggest that different aspects of language may reside in different parts of the brain. But attempts to find these functionally specific regions of the brain with current neuroimaging technologies have been inconsistent and controversial.

A RAND corporation study examining the long-term economic consequences of childhood psychological disorders suggests the conditions diminish people's ability to work and earn as adults, costing $2.1 trillion over the lifetimes of all affected Americans.The findings, published in Social Science&Medicine, show that people who suffer from childhood conditions such as depression and substance abuse are less likely to be married, attain less education and see their income reduced by about 20 percent over their lifetimes.

A sinkhole in Saint-Jude, Quebec has just collapsed a house, killing a family of four inside, leading people to ask what they are, how they occur and obviously who is at risk.Sinkholes are depressions that occur when soil or bedrock has been removed and only air remains - commonly when the rock below the land surface is limestone,  carbonate rock or salt beds that have been naturally dissolved by ground water circulating through them and then the water dries up.

Archaeologists say they have disproved the fifty-year-old theory underpinning our understanding of how the famous stone statues were moved around Easter Island. Fieldwork led by researchers at University College London and The University of Manchester has shown the remote Pacific island's ancient road system was primarily ceremonial and not solely built for transportation of the figures.A complex network of roads up to 800-years-old crisscross the Island between the hat and statue quarries and the coastal areas. Laying alongside the roads are dozens of the statues - or moai.

As the effort continues to find new treatments for Alzheimer's Disease (AD), researchers have found that music may have a role to play. A study from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) has shown that patients with the disease are better able to remember new verbal information when it is provided in the context of music even when compared to healthy, older adults. Results of the study appear in Neuropsychologia.

Researches at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics have carried out the first fully three-dimensional computer simulations of a core collapse supernova over a timescale of hours after the initiation of the blast. The model will explain how initial asymmetries, which emerge deep in the dense core during the very early stages of the explosion, fold themselves into inhomogeneities observable during the supernova blast, researchers say.

Our daily lives are filled with changes that force us to abandon old behavioral strategies and develop new, more appropriate responses. While it is clear that new rules are often deduced through trial-and-error learning, the neural dynamics that underlie the change are not well understood.A study in Neuron has uncovered new information about the neural dynamics of developing new problem solving strategies. The research supports the idea of "a-ha" moments in the brain that are associated with sudden insight, the authors say.