News Articles

Low-intensity electric fields can disrupt the division of cancer cells and slow the growth of brain tumors, suggest laboratory experiments and a small human trial, raising hopes that electric fields will become a new weapon for stalling the progression of cancer.
In the studies, the research team uses alternating electric fields that jiggle electrically charged particles in cells back and forth hundreds of thousands of times per second. The electric fields have an intensity of only one or two volts per centimeter. Such low-intensity alternating electric fields were once believed to do nothing significant other than heat cells.

An increasing body of evidence indicates that we should reduce the amount of salt in our diet. The American Medical Association (AMA), the American Heart Association (AHA), the American Dietetic Association (ADA), and the National Institutes of Health have begun a campaign to cut the salt intake of Americans by one-half. The AMA is even pushing the Food and Drug Administration to withdraw salt’s designation as “safe,” according to UCLA's Healthy Years.
“The consequences of too much salt are hypertension, or high blood pressure, which increases the risk of a stroke or heart attack,” says Amy Schnabel, MS, RD, Clinical Nutrition Manager at the UCLA Medical Center. Ninety percent of Americans will develop hypertension unless they take steps to prevent it.

Monkeys seem to learn the same way humans do, a new research study indicates.
“Like humans, monkeys benefit enormously from being actively involved in learning instead of having information presented to them passively,” said Nate Kornell, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar in psychology and lead author of the study. “The advantage of active learning appears to be a fundamental property of memory in humans and nonhumans alike.”
In Kornell’s study, conducted when he was a psychology graduate student at Columbia University, two rhesus macaque monkeys learned to place five photographs in a particular order. The photographs were displayed on a touch-screen computer monitor similar to those found on ATMs. When the monkeys pressed a correct photograph, a border appeared around it.

Why do we like some music and not others? Why does music feel right and why does it evoke certain moods? The brain's ability to segment the continual stream of sensory information into perceptual chunks and extract meaning, “event segmentation” functions, have long fascinated researchers.
In a series of experiments, a team led by Vinod Menon of Stanford University School of Medicine asked subjects to listen to symphonies of the English composer William Boyce. The symphonies were chosen because they are relatively short and comprise well-defined movements - changes in tempo, tonality, rhythm, and pitch, and brief silences.

In studies with monkeys, researchers have identified in detail the brain regions responsible for the unique ability of primates, including humans, to process visual 3D shapes to guide their sophisticated manipulation of objects.
Specifically, the researchers delineated regions of the parietal cortex responsible for extracting 3D information by integrating disparities in information from the two eyes. Such integration is critical to perceiving three dimensions, because each eye receives only a two-dimensional projection of an image on the retina.

A woman, whose ovaries had failed due to damage caused by chemotherapy and radiotherapy, has received a successful ovarian transplant from her genetically non-identical sister. The transplant restored her ovarian function, she started to menstruate and, after a year, doctors were able to recover two mature oocytes from her ovaries and fertilise them to produce two embryos.
This first case of a successful transplantation of ovarian tissue between two non-identical sisters is reported today by Professor Jacques Donnez, head of the department of gynecology and professor and chairman at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, Belgium, who led the team that carried out the work.

Engineering pliable, new vocal cord tissue to replace scarred, rigid tissue in these petite, yet powerful organs is the goal of a new University of Delaware research project.
Xinqiao Jia, UD assistant professor of materials science and engineering, is leading the project. Jia's research focuses on developing intelligent biomaterials that closely mimic the molecular composition, mechanical responsiveness and nanoscale organization of natural extracellular matrices--the structural materials that serve as scaffolding for cells. These novel biomaterials, combined with defined biophysical cues and biological factors, are being used for functional tissue regeneration.

An international research team, led by scientists at the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN), has found a way to switch a material’s magnetic properties from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ and back again – something which could lead to new ways of controlling electromagnetic devices. The research shows how a magnet can be ‘tuned’ by subjecting it to a second magnetic field, perpendicular to the original.
Magnets can be classified by their ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ magnetic properties. Hard magnets, sometimes called ‘permanent’ magnets, have fixed or ‘pinned’ domain walls which mean the material stays magnetised for a long time. Soft magnets have moveable domain walls that can be easily flipped.

How high is Mount Everest exactly?
Recent surveys have come up with heights that differ by more than five meters. An expedition called the Geodetic Journey is making its way through China and Tibet to highlight the importance of geodesy and how an accurate model of the geoid from ESA's GOCE mission will lead to a unified system for measuring heights.
Geodesy is concerned with measuring and mapping the shape of the Earth's surface, to the benefit of all branches of Earth sciences and has many practical applications. Although surveying techniques go back thousands of years, it traditionally involves taking very precise three-dimensional positioning of points.

Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder that causes people to fall asleep uncontrollably during the day. It also includes features of dreaming that occur while awake. Other common symptoms include sleep paralysis, hallucinations and cataplexy.
About one out of every 2,000 people is known to have narcolepsy. The chance that you have narcolepsy is higher when a relative also has it. It is very rare for more than two people in the same family to have this sleep disorder. It affects the same number of men and women.
Puzzling? It sure is - but Susumu Tanaka, PhD, of the Tokyo Institute of Psychiatry in Japan has written the first report to identify the biological markers of narcolepsy using gene expression in white blood cells.

Inside the body, our organs are elegantly kept apart by slick membranes. Inside our smallest components, our cells, a similar separation is upheld with the help of electrical charges. In the same way that reversed magnets repel each other, gauzes of negative charges prevent proteins, genetic material, and fats from sticking to each other in the wrong way.
Mikael Oliveberg, professor of biochemistry at Stockholm University in Sweden, describes how disturbances in these functions underlie the hereditary form of the motor-neuron disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

Learning to fly is easy, if you are a bird. But why is it that birds learn so easily how to fly? It is well known that birds learn through practice, and that they gradually refine their innate ability into a finely tuned skill.
According to a new theory by Dr Stone of Sheffield University, skills such as flying are easy to refine because the innate ability of today's birds depends indirectly on the learning that their ancestors did, which leaves a genetically specified latent memory for flying.
The theory has been tested on simple models of brains called artificial neural networks, which can be made to evolve using genetic algorithms.
Whilst these networks do not fly, they do learn associations, and these associations could take the form of a skill such as flying.