News Articles

Your ability to listen to a phone message in one ear while a friend is talking into your other ear—and comprehend what both are saying—is an important communication skill that’s heavily influenced by your genes, say researchers of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), one of the National Institutes of Health.
The finding may help researchers better understand a broad and complex group of disorders—called auditory processing disorders (APDs)—in which individuals with otherwise normal hearing ability have trouble making sense of the sounds around them.
“Our auditory system doesn’t end with our ears,” says James F. Battey, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., director of the NIDCD. “It also includes the part of our brain that helps us interpret the sounds we hear.

Early man was on a constant quest for food. The demands of nourishment and conserving as much energy as possible may even have changed the course of evolution.
While no one has an authoritative answer, anthropologists have long theorized that early humans began walking on two legs as a way to reduce locomotor energy costs.
In the first study to fully examine this theory among humans and adult chimpanzees, researchers have found that human walking is around 75 percent less costly, in terms of energy and caloric expenditure, than quadrupedal and bipedal walking in chimpanzees.

Ground reaction force (GRF) vectors for humans and chimpanzees. © Cary Wolinsky. Credit: Michael D.

In the 40 years that humans have been traveling into space, the suits they wear have changed very little. The bulky, gas-pressurized outfits give astronauts a bubble of protection, but their significant mass and the pressure itself severely limit mobility.
Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, wants to change that.
Newman is working on a sleek, advanced suit designed to allow superior mobility when humans eventually reach Mars or return to the moon.

Each time you press "save" on your computer you force atoms on magnets to align their polarity with the intruding magnetic field. Helping physicists understand why it happens and why it isn't a physics-induced train wreck more often is the goal of Joshua Deutsch and Andreas Berger and they say their research could advanced materials research.
Correcting even a single typo in an e-mail means changing dozens of bits of information. For each bit, a magnetic head grazes a tiny patch of your disk drive, forcing its polarity, or "spin," to align up or down--the magnetic equivalent of a one or a zero.

Who knew the cute koala bears were so promiscuous?
Professor Peter Timms from QUT's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation said chlamydia in koalas was a significant cause of infertility, urinary tract infections, and inflammation in the lining of the eye that often led to blindness.
"The numbers of koalas with chlamydia seems to be increasing," he said.
The first Australian trials of a vaccine developed by Queensland University of Technology that could save Australia's iconic koala from contracting chlamydia are planned to begin later this year.
"The trial is planned to begin before the end of the year and will test the vaccine's ability to induce a good immune response in the koala against chlamydia," he said.

Monkey viruses related to HIV may have swept across Africa more recently than previously thought, according to new research from The University of Arizona in Tucson.
A new family tree for African green monkeys shows that an HIV-like virus, simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, first infected those monkeys after the lineage split into four species. The new research reveals the split happened about 3 million years ago.
Previously, scientists thought SIV infected an ancestor of green monkeys before the lineage split, much longer ago.

On the eve of the 62nd anniversary of the world's first atomic explosion, the Trinity atomic bomb test, a CDC-led study team has reported new insights on the radiation released at the time of the test. Analyzing the doses that nearby residents received, the CDC team has made preliminary estimates of additional doses that the residents could have ingested in their bodies.
The test of a plutonium-based atomic device at the Trinity Site in southern New Mexico on July 16, 1945 was an undertaking unlike any that humankind had tried before. There was much uncertainty among the Los Alamos scientists, military personnel, and Manhattan Project officials assembled for the event as to whether the device would work and how, if it did work, it would affect the local environment.

Using innovative physics, researchers have proposed a system that may one day bring proton therapy, a state-of-the-art cancer treatment method currently available only at a handful of centers, to radiation treatment centers and cancer patients everywhere. Thomas R. Mackie, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and co-founder of the radiation therapy company TomoTherapy, will present this new design at next week's annual meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine in Minneapolis.
Compared to the x rays conventionally used in radiation therapy, protons are potentially more effective, as they can deposit more cell-killing energy in their tumor targets and less in surrounding healthy tissue.

New research suggests that an eyedrop used to diagnose a rare syndrome in infants can cause severe lethargy lasting up to 10 hours and requiring hospital admission and oxygen administration.
In the article “Adverse Effects of Apraclonidine Used in the Diagnosis of Horner Syndrome in Infants”, published in the June issue of Journal of the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus, Dr. Patrick Watts and coauthors described five cases of extreme drowsiness or unresponsiveness after infants under 6 months of age were administered 1% apraclonidine eyedrops.

Jesse Sullivan, a double amputee from Dayton, Tenn., has been called the world's first "bionic man" with his thought-controlled, state-of-the-art prosthetic arm. He can eat with a fork, pick up a cup, paint his house or guide a weed eater by bending his advanced appendage's elbow and rotating its forearm. But he still cannot grasp and throw a baseball, cast a fishing line, tie his shoes or type on a computer keyboard as naturally as before.
That may change with the help of numerous organizations including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, some 50 miles north of Sullivan's hometown.
In 2001 while working as a utility lineman, Sullivan lost both arms after a 7000-volt shock in a power-line accident.

Pediatrics researchers at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and McGill University in Montreal have identified a gene variant that raises a child’s risk for type 1 diabetes, formerly called juvenile diabetes. As investigators continue to pinpoint genes contributing to diabetes, they have their eyes on providing a scientific basis for designing better treatments and preventive measures for the disease.
The research adds a new gene and new knowledge to the four genes previously discovered for type 1 diabetes, in which the immune system destroys insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas and makes patients dependent on frequent insulin injections to keep the body’s blood sugar under control.

Researchers from MIT have uncovered a molecular mechanism that governs the formation of fears stemming from traumatic events. The work could lead to the first drug to treat the millions of adults who suffer each year from persistent, debilitating fears - including hundreds of soldiers returning from conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A study conducted by the Army in 2004 found that one in eight soldiers returning from Iraq reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). According to the National Center for PTSD in the United States, around eight percent of the population will have PTSD symptoms at some point in their lives. Some 5.2 million adults have PTSD during a given year, the center reports.