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Researchers in Great Britain and the United States have imaged the first high definition imprints that dolphin sounds make in water.   They consider it a real breakthrough in deciphering dolphin language.Certain sounds made by dolphins have long been suspected to represent language but the complexity of the sounds has made their analysis difficult. Previous techniques, using the spectrograph, display cetacean (dolphins, whales and porpoises) sounds only as graphs of frequency and amplitude.

Religious people have more self-control than non-religious counterparts, says a study by University of Miami professor of Psychology Michael McCullough and he says this is why religious people may be better at pursuing and achieving long-term goals and also might help explain why religious people tend to have lower rates of substance abuse, better school achievement, less delinquency, better health behaviors, less depression, and longer lives.

Using tiny gold particles and infrared light, researchers have developed a drug-delivery system that allows multiple drugs to be released in a controlled fashion.  Such a system could one day be used to provide more control when battling diseases commonly treated with more than one drug, according to the researchers.Delivery devices already exist that can release two drugs, but the timing of the release must be built into the device — it cannot be controlled from outside the body. The new system is controlled externally and theoretically could deliver up to three or four drugs. The new technique takes advantage of the fact that when gold nanoparticles are exposed to infrared light, they melt and release drug payloads attached to their surfaces. 

While in some cases a child with ADHD cannot function without medication, there is growing concern about the health risks and side effects associated with the common ADHD medications, including mood swings, insomnia, tics, slowed growth and heart problems. In 2006 the FDA required manufacturers to place warning labels on ADHD medications, listing the potential serious health risks. These high risks and growing concerns are fueling parents' search for alternatives that may be safer for their kids.The Transcendental Meditation technique may be an effective and safe non-pharmaceutical aid for treating ADHD, according to a study published in Current Issues in Education.

Lockheed Martin rolled out a conventional takeoff and landing (CTOL) variant of the F-35 Lightning II fighter, called F-35AF-1, which joins three weight-optimized F-35B short takeoff/vertical landing variants currently undergoing testing. The aircraft are structurally identical to the F-35s that will be delivered to armed services beginning in 2010.The first F-35A, known as AA-1, has completed 69 flights, and has a production-representative external shape and internal systems. Unlike AF-1 and the other F-35 test aircraft, AA-1's internal structure was designed before a 2004 weight-savings program resulted in structural revisions to all three F-35 variants.

Researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center have discovered that a molecule implicated in leukemia and lung cancer is also important in muscle repair and in a muscle cancer that strikes mainly children. The study shows that immature muscle cells require the molecule, called miR-29, to become mature, and that the molecule is nearly missing in cells from rhabdomyosarcoma, a cancer caused by the proliferation of immature muscle cells. Cells from human rhabdomyosarcoma tumors showed levels of the molecule that were 10 percent or less of those in normal muscle cells. Artificially raising the level of the molecule in the cancer cells cut their growth by half and caused them to begin maturing, slowing down tumor growth.

America is slightly schizophrenic when it comes to weight.   If you open a newspaper you can simultaneously read that the five skinny women left must need counselling and society is to blame for that but anorexia is genetic even though that gene seems to only be present in middle-class white girls, all while we are the fattest country in the world.  It can be confusing to people outside the US and anyone with a clue.There is some practical advice that has resulted from 70 years of weight studies; people who consume fewer calories than they burn lose weight 100% of the time.

If you put 'genomics' on the end of a word, you can gain instant credibility, so it makes sense that someone would come up with 'nutrigenomics' and say they can make a diet that corresponds to your genetic profile.It's tough to know what they mean by 'genetic profile' though obviously some people have a different metabolism than other so they can eat more.   A customized diet consisting of 'eat fewer calories' wouldn't seem to require genomics.   But 'nutrigenomics', they say, is something better because it aims to identify the genetic factors that influence the body's response to diet and studies how the bioactive constituents of food affect gene expression.

In a recently conducted study, a multidisciplinary French-American research team reported that Neanderthal extinction was principally a result of competition with Cro-Magnon populations, rather than the consequences of climate change. 

Peering at structures only atoms across, researchers writing in Cell have identified the clockwork that drives a powerful virus nanomotor.   Bonus:  Because of the motor's strength - to scale, it is twice that of an automobile - the new findings could also inspire engineers designing sophisticated nanomachines.But back on viruses, because a number of virus types may possess a similar motor, including the virus that causes herpes, the results may also assist pharmaceutical companies developing methods to sabotage virus machinery.

Image Fortress today announced that it has launched the International Space Archives, an online digital library, organizing the vast collections of still and video imagery produced by the manned and unmanned space programs of the world.Over the past fifty years, the space programs in the United States and other countries have amassed extensive volumes of still and motion picture photography that has been largely inaccessible to the public. The International Space Archives has been designed to make this incredible collection of imagery available to a worldwide audience.

Facial expressions of emotion are hardwired into our genes, according to a study published today in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The research suggests that facial expressions of emotion are innate rather than a product of cultural learning. The study is the first of its kind to demonstrate that sighted and blind individuals use the same facial expressions, producing the same facial muscle movements in response to specific emotional stimuli. The study also provides new insight into how humans manage emotional displays according to social context, suggesting that the ability to regulate emotional expressions is not learned through observation.