News Articles

Bees see the world almost five times faster than humans, giving them the fastest color vision of all animals, according to new research appearing in the Journal of Neuroscience.The ability to see at high speed is common in fast-flying insects; allowing them to escape predators and catch their mates mid-air. However, until now it wasn't known whether the bees' full colour vision was able to keep up with their high speed flight. This research sheds new light on the matter; suggesting that although slower, it is also much faster than human vision.

Indiana and Rutgers researchers have modified Playstation 3 video game systems to help teenagers with cerebral palsy improve their hand functions. In a pilot trial with three participants, the system improved the teens' abilities to perform a range of daily personal and household activities.The modified system combined the gaming console with a Fifth Dimension Technologies 5 Ultra sensing glove, a flat-panel television, mouse, keyboard and digital subscriber line modem for Internet communication. Researchers reprogrammed the Playstation console using the open-source Linux operating system and developed games written in Java3D.

The ability to remember a briefly presented scene depends on a number of factors, such as its saliency, novelty, degree of threat, or behavioral relevance to a task. Generally, attention is thought to be key, in that people can only remember part of a visual scene when paying attention to it at any given moment. University of Washington researchers, however, say that memory for visual scenes may not depend on attention level or what a scene contains, but when the scene is presented. Their study, they say, shows how visual scenes are encoded into memory at behaviorally relevant points in time.The results are published in PLoS Biology.

Though people tend to give journalists a hard time for reporting overly negative news, the media is a little too optimistic when it comes to cancer research, experts say. A study in the Archives of Internal Medicine reports that newspaper and magazine coverage of cancer research is more likely to discuss aggressive treatment and survival, than treatment failure, adverse events or death, and unlikely to mention end-of-life palliative or hospice care.

New Thermal images of Jupiter's Great Red Spot show swirls of warmer air and cooler regions never seen before, enabling scientists to make the first detailed interior weather map of the giant storm system linking its temperature, winds, pressure and composition with its color.“This is the first time we can say that there’s an intimate link between environmental conditions — temperature, winds, pressure and composition — and the actual color of the Great Red Spot,” says Leigh Fletcher, lead author of the study in Icarus that documents the research results.

Global meat production has tripled in the past three decades and could double its present level by 2050, according to a new report on the livestock industry by an international team of scientists and policy experts led by Standford University. If not addressed, the impact of this 'livestock revolution' is likely to have significant consequences for human health, the environment and the global economy.

CO2 emissions not only have a global impact but a local one as well. As a result of so-called carbon dioxide 'domes,' the greenhouse gas is harming city dwellers' health much more than rural residents', says a new study in Environmental Science and Technology.The results, the author says, highlight a serious oversight in current cap-and-trade proposals, which make no distinction based on a pollutant's point of origin and provide scientific support for efforts to cut emissions locally.

A history of alcohol abuse is unlikely to cause long-term memory impairment in men and women, but smoking just might in women, a new study has found.The findings are based on assessments of 115 men and 169 women with an average age of 43. Overall, 45 percent of men and 37 percent of women met the criteria for lifetime alcohol abuse, and 13 percent and nearly 4 percent, respectively, had a lifetime history of alcohol dependence. One quarter of women and 18 percent of men had a history of tobacco dependence. The study appears in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs

Children in England see much more smoking in movies compared to their counterparts in the US and are more likely to pick up the habit as a result, finds research published in Tobacco Control.The UK film classification system, which rates more films as suitable for young people than its US counterpart, is to blame, say the authors.The research team assessed the number of on-screen smoking/tobacco occurrences in 572 top grossing films in the UK, which included 546 screened in the US plus 26 high earning films released only in the UK.

In a new article in Nature Reviews Endocrinology, scientists from the University of Liverpool argue that anti-obesity drugs fail to provide lasting health benefits because they tackle the biological consequences of obesity, not the important psychological causes of overconsumption.Anti-obesity drug developers focus primarily on weight loss as their end goal, and do not take into consideration the motivational and behavioral factors that most commonly cause obesity. Obesity typically results from eating too much food combined with too sedentary a lifestyle. However, obese people may also have a complicated psychological relationship with food that makes it difficult for them to control their appetite sufficiently to manage their weight.

Palaeontologists have discovered evidence of how an extinct shark attacked its prey, reconstructing a killing that took place 4 million years ago.Such fossil evidence of behavior is incredibly rare, but by careful, forensic-style analysis of bite marks on an otherwise well-preserved dolphin skeleton, the research team say they have reconstructed the events that led to the death of the dolphin, and likely determined the identity of the killer: a 4 m shark called Cosmopolitodus hastalis.The evidence, published in Palaeontology, comes from the fossilized skeleton of a 2.8 m long dolphin (Astadelphis gastaldii) discovered in the Piedmont region of northern Italy.

Questionable lending helped sink the U.S. economy, but also provided a lifeline that kept countless firms afloat and averted an even deeper recession, according to research by University of Illinois finance professor Murillo Campello. The research was cited by President Obama in a report on the state of the economy, so you know it must be correct.The survey of corporate executives found that many small and mid-sized firms survived the economic storm by tapping easy, low-cost lines of credit locked in ahead of the downturn, during an era of loose lending that also included sub-prime home mortgages. "These lines of credit were so liquid and so accessible that it made this recession far less acute than it would have been otherwise," he said.