News Articles

Exercise has a similar effect to antidepressants on depression. This has been shown by previous research. Now Astrid Bjørnebekk at Karolinska Institutet has explained how this can happen: exercise stimulates the production of new brain cells.
In a series of scientific reports, she has searched for the underlying biological mechanisms that explain why exercise can be a form of therapy for depression and has also compared it with pharmacological treatment with an SSRI drug.

Penn State researchers did a study and found that web searchers who evaluated identical search-engine results preferred Yahoo first and Google second even though more claimed to use Google regularly. These results, they say, provide evidence that branding matters as much on the Internet as off and that there is "carry over" branding in effect too.
Here is their method - they copied identical Google results pages (“camping Mexico,” “laser removal,” “manufactured home” and “techno music”) and attributed them to four different search engines -- Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo! and an in-house engine they created for the study.

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has revealed an X-ray jet blasting away from a neutron star in a binary system. This discovery may help astronomers understand how neutron stars as well as black holes can generate powerful beams of relativistic particles.
The jet was found in Circinus X-1, a system where a neutron star is in orbit around a star several times the mass of the Sun, about 20,000 light years from Earth. A neutron star is an extremely dense remnant of an exploded star consisting of tightly packed neutrons.
Many jets have been found originating near black holes - both the supermassive and stellar-mass variety - but the Circinus X-1 jet is the first extended X-ray jet associated with a neutron star in a binary system.

Dr. Zahi Hawass
June 2007
When the Discovery Channel approached me to search for the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut, I did not really think I would be able to make a definite identification. But I did think that this would give me the perfect opportunity to look at the unidentified female mummies from Dynasty 18, which no one had ever studied in as a group. There were already many theories about the identities of these mummies, but the latest scientific technology had not yet been used to study them.
There are a number of unidentified high-status mummies of the New Kingdom, mostly found in what we call the Royal Mummy Caches.

Experts from all over the world are gathering at the University to exchange the latest insights on concepts of 'Health and the Healthy Body' in early medieval times, 400-1200 A.D at a two-day conference, which brings together leading experts in the field from the USA, Norway, Germany, Israel and the UK on July 6-7, 2007.

A ban on smoking in England may be good for more than just public health. It may be good for the phone company. A new survey by Sheffield Hallam University and, not surprisingly, Virgin Mobile says smokers will turn to texting to talk about it and even improve their social lives in the process.
Those struggling not to light up during the first days of the smoking ban are expected to turn to their mobile to help them cope. The research found that most people see their phone as being as personal as a diary, and increasingly use them as an emotional support, helping them to express their feelings, gossip with friends and to simply let off steam.

The strongest and fittest of a species might be expected to produce the best offspring, but this is not always the case, researchers at the University have found.
Studies of red deer suggest that the most successful males are more likely to produce less fertile daughters.
Male and female deer need different attributes to succeed. Genes which prove to be an advantage in fathers don't necessarily prove beneficial in daughters.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have discovered that attaching polymeric nanoparticles to the surface of red blood cells dramatically increases the in vivo lifetime of the nanoparticles. The research, published in the July 07 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine, could offer applications for the delivery of drugs and circulating bioreactors.
Polymeric nanoparticles are excellent carriers for delivering drugs. They protect drugs from degradation until they reach their target and provide sustained release of drugs.

Researchers have discovered that calcium ions could play a crucial role in multiple sclerosis by activating enzymes that degrade the fatty sheath that insulates nerve fibers.
Learning exactly how the myelin sheath is degraded might enable scientists to determine how to halt disease progress and reverse damage by growing new myelin, said Ji-Xin Cheng, an assistant professor in Purdue University's Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Chemistry.
"Although multiple sclerosis has been studied for many years, nobody knows exactly how the disease initially begins," he said. "The pathway is not clear."

NASA's Tropical Composition, Cloud and Climate Coupling (TC4) field campaign will begin this summer in San Jose, Costa Rica, with an investigation into how chemical compounds in the air are transported vertically into the stratosphere and how that transport affects cloud formation and climate.
The study will begin the week of July 16 with coordinated observations from satellites, high-flying NASA research aircraft, balloons and ground-based radar. The targets of these measurements are the gases, aerosols and ice crystals that flow from the top of the strong storm systems that form over the warm tropical ocean.

Chemists from UCLA and the University of Florence in Italy may have solved an important mystery about a protein that plays a key role in a particular form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a progressive, fatal neurodegenerative disorder that strikes without warning.
Joan Selverstone Valentine, UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry, has studied the protein — copper-zinc superoxide dismutase — since the 1970s, long before it was implicated in ALS in 1993. Since the link was discovered, Valentine’s laboratory has made more than two dozen mutant, ALS-causing enzymes, most of which have only one wrong amino acid out of 153, to try to understand their properties and learn what makes them toxic.

To understand the meaning of a conversation, kids automatically do what adults do —besides processing the meaning of words, they unconsciously “read” the expression on a person’s face and listen to their tone of voice, then integrate that information with the context at hand to discern meaning, be it humor, anger, irony or straightforwardness.
Individuals with autism typically don’t do this. They often miss the subtle meanings conveyed by a person’s face and tone of voice, and thus have trouble determining the communicative intent of others.