News Articles

Glycine is a non-essential amino acid used by the organism to synthesise proteins and is present in foods such as fish, meat or dairy products.

Within Southern Florida, soil and water conditions indicate potential for leaching from the use of atrazine-based herbicides in corn crops. Scientists from USDA-Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and University of Florida conducted studies to evaluate the specific groundwater risk from atrazine use by focusing on a specific cover crop that seems to have the potential to greatly reduce that risk. The crop is called sunn hemp. It’s a tall, herbaceous annual that grows rapidly to a height of 6 to 7 feet.
The region’s aquifer provides drinkable water for nearly all of the rapidly growing population. Agricultural practices that impair water quality may also stunt a massive project intended to restore the Florida Everglades ecosystem.

It's well known that physical exercise is good for the brain but what about when age takes away the ability to exercise as much? Can mental exercise close the gap?
Yes, say researchers at Yale. For the young and middle-aged, exercise is key but for older people either mental of physical enrichment is good.
The Yale neuroscientists randomly assigned 160 female mice who were young, middle-aged and old adults (about 3, 15, or 21 months old) to either an experimental (treatment) condition or a control group. Treatment conditions included cages where mice could exercise on running wheels, cages where they could play with toys, or cages with both for complex enrichment. The control mice cages were unadorned.

Last week, it was announced that drug addicts in England are to be given shopping vouchers for complying with treatment programs.
Rewarding patients to cooperate is not new, argues Tom Burns, a senior psychiatrist at Warneford Hospital in Oxford. Most mental health practitioners reward patients for “healthy” behavior and financial incentives are no different.
People who criticize money for medicines emphasize the “exploitation of impoverished patients” and worries about how patients would spend the money.

The discovery of a novel molecular switch that powerfully modulates nerve cell activity offers the potential for new mood disorder and epilepsy treatments, University of California, Irvine researchers report.
The researchers looked at the role of the natural substance cholecystokinin (CCK) in modulating communication between cells in the brain. CCK, originally isolated from the digestive tract, is one of the most abundant small proteins, or peptides, in the brain, and it is linked to psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia.

For years, scientists have searched in vain for slivers of the brain that might drive the dramatic differences between male and female behavior. Now biologists at Harvard University say these efforts may have fallen flat because such differences may not arise in the brain at all.
Rather, they say, the epicenter of sex-specific behavior in many species may be a small sensory organ found in the noses of all terrestrial vertebrates except higher primates.

MIT neuroscientists exploring how memory formation differs between children and adults have found that although the two groups have much in common, maturity brings richer memories.
The MIT team reports that children rival adults in forming basic memories, but adults do better at remembering the rich, contextual details of that information. The MIT study provides new insights into how children learn that are not only theoretically important, but could also inform practical learning in everyday settings.
The ability to remember factual information - who, what, where, when - emerges gradually during childhood, and plays a critical role in education.

Cancer causing mutations occur in our bodies every day – but luckily, we have specific genes that recognize these malignant events and keep cells from growing out of control. Only a few of these genes – called tumor suppressors – are currently known.
Now scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School have added to the list another powerful tumor suppressor, a gene called LKB1. Their research indicates that this gene is mutated in almost a quarter of all human lung cancers. In mice, these mutations result in tumors that are more aggressive and more likely to spread throughout the body.

With the finding that fever is produced by the action of a hormone on a specific site in the brain, scientists have answered a key question as to how this adaptive function helps to protect the body during bacterial infection and other types of illness.
Reported by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), the study results appear today in Nature Neuroscience’s Advance Online Publication.
“This study shows how the brain produces fever responses during infections,” explains senior author Clifford Saper, MD, PhD, Chairman of the Department of Neurology at BIDMC and James Jackson Putnam Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School.

Ocean historians affiliated with the Census of Marine Life have painted the first detailed portrait of a burst of fishing from 1900 to 1950 that preceded the collapse of once abundant bluefin tuna populations off the coast of northern Europe.
The chronicle of decimation of the bluefin tuna population in the North Atlantic is being published as other affiliated researchers release the latest results of modern electronic fish tagging efforts off Ireland and in the Gulf of Mexico, revealing remarkable migrations and life-cycle secrets of the declining species.
Dusting off sales records, fishery yearbooks and other sources, researchers Brian R.

When explorers like Magellan and Columbus sailed from Europe to the New World 500 years ago, they amazingly managed to navigate the open sea without terrestrial landmarks, natural boundaries or the navigational technology we have today.
Historical reports suggest that some explorers and other seafaring people did so by imagining an island just over the horizon; if they kept track of where the "virtual island" was, they knew which direction to go in the open water.
But new research from the University of Iowa suggests that people's ability to imagine virtual islands -- without any perceptual cues to help -- is quite limited.

Scientists at the Institute for Stem Cell Research, of the University of Edinburgh show that mouse embryonic stem cells need the protein FGF4 to become competent to be converted into specialized cell types, such as brain or muscle cells.
These findings add to the growing body of knowledge that researchers all over the world are using to direct embryonic stem cells to become specific specialised cells – a fundamental requirement for using lab-grown cells to model disease, test the effects of new drugs and, potentially, treat disease and injury.
Embryonic stem cells have the unique ability to divide to produce both copies of themselves and other, more specialised, cell types. The process whereby embryonic stem cells commit to become specialised cells is still obscure.