News Articles

Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Haifa say they have shown that areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys during language tasks, and that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing these tasks.
Researchers have long believed that girls have superior language abilities to boys but no one has clearly provided a biological basis that may account for their differences.
“Our findings – which suggest that language processing is more sensory in boys and more abstract in girls -- could have major implications for teaching children and even provide support for advocates of single sex classrooms,” said Douglas D. Burman, research associate in Northwestern’s Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders.

The discovery of three-billion-year-old zircon microcrystals in northern Ontario by an international research team is providing a new record of the processes that form continents and their natural resources, including gold and diamonds.
Measuring no more than the width of a human hair, the 200-million-year growth span of these ancient microcrystals is longer than any previously discovered.

A problem which has defeated mathematicians for almost 140 years has been solved by a researcher at Imperial College London.
Professor Darren Crowdy, Chair in Applied Mathematics, has made the breakthrough in an area of mathematics known as conformal mapping, a key theoretical tool used by mathematicians, engineers and scientists to translate information from a complicated shape to a simpler circular shape so that it is easier to analyze.
This theoretical tool has a long history and has uses in a large number of fields including modelling airflow patterns over intricate wing shapes in aeronautics.

Throughout the world, amateurs, experts and the media agree that prolonged jogging raises people's spirits. And many believe that the body’s own opioids, so called endorphins, are the cause of this. But in fact this has never been proved until now.
Researchers at the Technische Universität München and the University of Bonn succeeded to demonstrate the existence of an ‘endorphin driven runner’s high’. In an imaging study they were able to show, for the first time, increased release of endorphins in certain areas of the athletes' brains during a two-hour jogging session.

Widespread damage to plants from a sudden freeze that occurred across the Eastern United States from 5 April to 9 April 2007 was made worse because it had been preceded by two weeks of unusual warmth, according to an analysis published in BioScience.
The authors of the report, Lianhong Gu and his colleagues at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and collaborators at NASA, the University of Missouri, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found that the freeze killed new leaves, shoots, flowers, and fruit of natural vegetation, caused crown dieback of trees, and led to severe damage to crops in an area encompassing Nebraska, Maryland, South Carolina, and Texas. Subsequent drought limited regrowth.

Although still relatively unknown to the general public, an archaeological method called a regional settlement pattern survey is being practiced at several locations around the world.
Rather than focusing on city centers and their easilt serviceable sites, it involves walking systematically over a large landscape to find traces of archaeological sites on the surface of the ground. This field procedure can yield a holistic, integrated view of how settlement has shifted in a region over the course of history.
For the past 13 years, archaeologists from The Field Museum and Shandong University have used this method to develop a multifarious overview of an important but understudied region along the northeastern coast of The People’s Republic of China.

Two cell proteins that relax the gut and help accommodate a big meal have been identified by UCL (University College London) scientists. The proteins could offer a future drug target against weight gain, by preventing the stomach from expanding.
In a Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics paper, Dr Brian King and Dr Andrea Townsend-Nicholson explored the molecular basis of relaxations of the gut. In the study, the authors identified two protein receptors – P2Y1 and P2Y11 – involved in fast and slow relaxations of the gut. These proteins were identified in the guinea pig, but are also present in the human gut, and thus offer the potential as a future target for drug treatment.

The "female sex hormone" estradiol is present in both men and women, and is generated from testosterone in men by the protein aromatase.
Estradiol plays various roles in addition to its gender-specific ones, including having effects on the hearing (auditory) system. In a new study, Barbara Canlon and colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, investigated the role of estradiol-binding proteins, known as estrogen receptors, in response to auditory damage by examining hearing loss recovery in mice with deficiencies in various estrogen receptors.

Coronary heart disease, of which a major contributing factor is high cholesterol, is set to become the biggest killer disease worldwide by 2010. There are several types of cholesterol, some of which are good for you and some of which are bad. Existing over-the-counter tests do not distinguish between good and bad cholesterol so the results don't give a full picture of the patient's health. For accurate diagnosis, current tests rely on a doctor taking a blood sample from the patient and sending it to a laboratory for analysis ­ the results can take days.
The availability of immediate, accurate tests for high cholesterol at your local doctor is now a step closer. L3 Technology has secured a second round investment of £1.75 million, enabling the company to commercialize its patented technology that will provide rapid point of care cholesterol testing with laboratory accuracy.

Ski tourism raises stress levels among capercaillie and could harm the birds’ fitness and ability to breed successfully, write ecologists in the Journal of Applied Ecology. They warn that forests should be kept free from tourism if they are inhabited by capercaillie - a species whose numbers are declining markedly across central Europe.
The study by ecologists from Switzerland, Germany and Austria used a new technique to assess the impact of ski tourism on capercaillie. Working in the Southern Black Forest in Germany, they collected the birds’ droppings before and after the start of the ski season, and analysed them for levels of the breakdown products of the stress hormone corticosterone.

Adult stem cells may provide an explanation for the cause of a Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome (HGPS), a rare disease that causes premature aging in children, according to researchers at the National Cancer Institute. These findings, the first to indicate a biological basis for the clinical features of HGPS, also known as progeria, may also provide new insights into the biological mechanisms of normal aging.
“Studies like this of the biology of HGPS hold the potential to benefit children suffering this terrible illness and enlighten us as to the medical changes we all experience as we grow older.” said NCI Director John E. Niederhuber, M.D. “As our population ages, we have an increasing need for greater understanding of the biology of aging and age-related illness, such as cancer.”

An international team has achieved, by means of a controlled chemical process, that atoms of gold, silver and copper - intrinsically non-magnetic (not attracted to a magnet) - become magnetic.
According to the research, the magnetism appears reduce the dimensions of the material to nanometric dimensions and surround it with previously selected organic molecules. The magnetism of these nanoparticles is a permanent one (like iron) which, even at ambient temperature, is quite significant.
This amazing behavior has been obtained not just with gold (a phenomenon which had already been put forward as experimentally possible) but, in this research, nanoparticles of silver and copper (the atoms of which are intrinsically non-magnetic) with a size of 2 nm (0.000002 mm) have also been shown to be magnetic at ambient temperature.