News Articles

Computers are commonly used as tools to design and manipulate three-dimensional objects but soon they may provide people with a way to sense the texture of those objects or feel how they fit together, says the creator of a haptic, or touch-based, interface at Carnegie Mellon University.
Most haptic interfaces rely on motors and mechanical linkages to provide some sense of touch or force feedback but the device developed by Ralph Hollis, research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, uses magnetic levitation and a single moving part to give users a highly realistic experience. Users can perceive textures, feel hard contacts and notice even slight changes in position while using an interface that responds rapidly to movements.

Happiness in life is as much down to having the right genetic mix as it is to personal circumstances according to a recent study.
Psychologists at the University of Edinburgh working with researchers at Queensland Institute for Medical Research in Australia found that happiness is partly determined by personality traits and that both personality and happiness are largely hereditary.

The exchange of genetic material between two closely related strains of the influenza A virus may have caused the 1947 and 1951 human flu epidemics, according to biologists.
The findings could help explain why some strains cause major pandemics and others lead to seasonal epidemics. Until now, it was believed that while reassortment – when human influenza viruses swap genes with influenza viruses that infect birds – causes severe pandemics, such as the ‘Spanish’ flu of 1918, the ‘Asian’ flu of 1957, and the ‘Hong Kong’ flu of 1968, while viral mutation leads to regular influenza epidemics.
But it has been a mystery why there are sometimes very severe epidemics – like the ones in 1947 and 1951 – that look and act like pandemics, even though no human-bird viral reassortment event occurred.

Biologists at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University have examined the complete genomes of viruses that infect the bacteria E. coli, P. aeruginosa and L. lactis and have found that many of these viral genomes exhibit codon bias, the tendency to preferentially encode a protein with a particular spelling.
Researchers analyzed patterns of codon usage across 74 bacteriophages using the concept of a "genome landscape," a method of visualizing long-range patterns in a genome sequence.
Their findings extend the translational theory of codon bias to the viral kingdom, demonstrating that the viral genome is selected to obey the preferences of its host.

A dietary supplement called NutraStem, also known as NT-020, is a proprietary formulation of blueberry, green tea, vitamin D3 and carnosine extracts - a combination of nutritional ingredients thought to be potent in protecting against brain damage.
“Stroke is the third leading cause of death and the leading cause for disability in the U.S. with two of every 1,000 adults experiencing their firsts stroke in any given year,” said Cesar V. Borlongan, PhD, of the Medical College of Georgia, lead author of a study that tested NT-020 post stroke effects in animal models. “We explored how increasing the nutritive diet through NT-020 supplementation might render a therapeutically potent neurogenesis following stroke.”

Penn engineers have developed a model that shows while metals tend to be stronger at nanoscale volumes, their strengths saturate at around 10-50 nanometers diameter, at which point they also become more sensitive to temperature and strain rate.
Using this model, they have found that, while metals tend to be stronger at nanoscale volumes, their strengths saturate at around 10-50 nanometers diameter, at which point they also become more sensitive to temperature and strain rate.

Researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory have developed a powerful sensor that can detect airborne pathogens such as anthrax and smallpox in less than three minutes.
The new device, called PANTHER (for PAthogen Notification for THreatening Environmental Releases), represents a "significant advance" over any other sensor, said James Harper of Lincoln Lab's Biosensor and Molecular Technologies Group. Current sensors take at least 20 minutes to detect harmful bacteria or viruses in the air, but the PANTHER sensors can do detection and identification in less than 3 minutes.

In the west, we call valuable ceramic place settings 'china' because high-quality ceramic wares were imported from the east. They were the best and had the highest value.
Not really so, at least in Israel, according to research at the University of Haifa.
According to Dr. Edna Stern, in contrast to the notion that ceramic wares were imported to Acre and surrounding ports as luxury items, the findings of her study revealed exactly the opposite.

Testosterone appears to protect people against eating disorders, providing further evidence that biological factors – and not just social influences – are linked to anorexia and bulimia, according to new research findings at Michigan State University.
An ongoing, six-year study of 538 sets of twins in Michigan indicates that females who were in the womb with male twins have lower risk for eating disorder symptoms than females who were in the womb with female twins. Previous animal research has shown that females in the womb with males are exposed to higher levels of testosterone.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota studying bacteria capable of generating electricity have discovered that riboflavin (commonly known as vitamin B-2) is responsible for much of the energy produced by these organisms.
The bacteria, Shewanella, are commonly found in water and soil and are of interest because they can convert simple organic compounds (such as lactic acid) into electricity, according to Daniel Bond and Jeffrey Gralnick, of the University of Minnesota's BioTechnology Institute and department of microbiology, who led the research effort.
"This is very exciting because it solves a fundamental biological puzzle," Bond said. "Scientists have known for years that Shewanella produce electricity. Now we know how they do it."

Two research teams led by Dr. Michael Verkhovsky and Prof. Mårten Wikström of the Institute of Biotechnology of the University of Helsinki have for the first time succeeded in monitoring electron transfer by Complex I in real time. In the future, this work might, for example, have medical relevance, because most of the maternally inherited so-called mitochondrial diseases are caused by dysfunction of Complex I.
This achievement required developing and building of a special device by which the enzyme-catalysed electron transfer could be captured at different time points by stopping the reaction at liquid nitrogen temperatures, on a microsecond (one millionth of a second) time scale. The electrons are very small elementary particles, which is why their transfer is very fast. This work is published this week in the prestigious journal of the American National Academy of Sciences (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.). The results give certain hints of the function of Complex I at the molecular level.

Researchers writing in the March issue of Archives of General Psychiatry have discovered evidence linking variation in a particular gene with anxiety-related traits.
The team describes finding that particular versions of the RGS2 protein, which affects the activity of important neurotransmitter receptors, were more common in both children and adults assessed as being inhibited or introverted and also were associated with increased activity of brain regions involved in emotional processing.
“We found that variations in this gene were associated with shy, inhibited behavior in children, introverted personality in adults and the reactivity of brain regions involved in processing fear and anxiety,” says Jordan Smoller, MD, ScD, of the MGH Department of Psychiatry, the report’s lead author. “Each of these traits appears to be a risk factor for social anxiety disorder, the most common type of anxiety disorder in the U.S.”