More men than women develop Parkinson’s disease and new work presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies says that it is do to sex differences in how brain cells change. Parkinson’s disease affects about 9 million people and becomes increasingly prevalent with age.
All light sources work by absorbing energy - for example, from an electric current - and emit energy as light. But the energy can also be lost as heat and it is therefore important that the light sources emit the light as quickly as possible, before the energy is lost as heat. Superfast light sources can be used, for example, in laser lights, LED lights and in single-photon light sources for quantum technology. New research results from the Niels Bohr Institute show that light sources can be made much faster by using a principle that was predicted theoretically in 1954. The results are published in the scientific journal, Physical Review Letters.
Turin, Italy: Young women with early breast cancer face a difficult choice about whether to opt for a mastectomy or breast conserving therapy (BCT). This is because there is little evidence as to whether the greater risk of a return of the disease at the site of the original tumour after BCT is linked to a greater risk of the cancer spreading to other parts of the body, leading to higher death rates.
BALTIMORE, MD - Mirroring national estimates, a new study that will be presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies 2016 Meeting found the percentage of children enrolled in the U.S. Military Healthcare System diagnosed with and treated for mental health disorders increased significantly during the past 15 years.
Tablet and laptop users beware. Using digital platforms such as tablets and laptops for reading may make you more inclined to focus on concrete details rather than interpreting information more abstractly, according to a new study published in the proceedings of ACM CHI '16, the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, to be held May 7-12, 2016. The findings serve as another wake-up call to how digital media may be affecting our likelihood of using abstract thought.
CORVALLIS, Ore. - Although the coastal regions of the Greenland Ice Sheet are experiencing rapid melting, a significant portion of the interior of that ice sheet has remained stable - but a new study suggests that stability may not continue.
Researchers found that very little of the snow and ice on the vast interior of the ice sheet is lost to the atmosphere through evaporation because of a strong thermal "lid" that essentially traps the moisture and returns it to the surface where it refreezes.
However, there are signs that this lid is becoming leaky as global temperatures increase. The researchers say there may be a threshold at which warming becomes sufficient to turn on a switch that will destabilize the snow surface.
In modern microelectronics, nanobiotechnology, nanorobots increasingly have being used both organic biomacromolecules and fragments, as nucleotides, peptides, DNA, and inorganic elements, like as metallic nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes. The charge transfer in such heterogeneous systems to a large extent has to determined by the conformational changes of biological fragments. In studying the properties of these complex nanoparticles one of the effective tool is a hybrid method of molecular dynamics simulation, combining molecular-mechanical and quantum-mechanical approaches.
In 2014, scientists discovered a bizarre fossil--a crocodile-sized sea-dwelling reptile that lived 242 million years ago in what today is southern China. Its head was poorly preserved, but it seemed to have a flamingo-like beak. But in a paper published today in Science Advances, paleontologists reveal what was really going on--that "beak" is actually part of a hammerhead-shaped jaw apparatus, which it used to feed on plants on the ocean floor. It's the earliest known example of an herbivorous marine reptile.
It is one of the most famous paintings in American history: Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth. The painting, which hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, depicts a young woman in a field, gazing at a farmhouse on an idyllic summer day.
But this lovely image has a dark side.
The subject in the painting is Christina Olson, Wyeth's good friend and neighbor. For most of her life, she suffered from a mysterious disorder, which slowly took away her ability to walk, and eventually to use her hands. She died at the age of 74 after a difficult life, and her disease has never been diagnosed.
Until now.
Thanks to science and technology, food is no longer a luxury, it is a commodity. If anti-science groups spent less time scaring uneducated people and more time caring about humanity, there would be enough food to feed 10 billion people right now, just by reducing food waste.
Right now, almost 50 percent of the world's fruit and vegetable crops are lost, much of it due to perishable foods, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. A new study has one interesting solution - an odorless, biocompatible silk solution so thin as to be virtually invisible that keeps fruit fresh for more than a week without refrigeration.
A study finds greater prevalence of mental health symptoms in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and questioning (LGBQ) community in your bisexual women.
During routine visits with physicians, participants in the study, numbering 2,513 between the ages of 14 and 24, took a survey through Behavioral Health Screen, a tool designed to uncover mental health concerns in patients. The tool was developed by Guy Diamond, PhD, director of the Family Intervention Science program and co-author of the study.
ITHACA, NY--Potato plants boost the chemical defenses in their leaves when Guatemalan tuber moth larvae feed on their tubers, report researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI).
While the potato's response may seem counterintuitive, it protects against leaf-eating pests, ensuring that the plant can maintain sugar production, to continue growing tubers during the moth larvae infestation. The study, which was led by BTI Professor Georg Jander and Katja Poveda, Assistant Professor of Entomology at Cornell University, appears in the journal Oecologia. The discovery may one day help reduce potato damage from insect pests and increase tuber yields.
By studying fossils from southern China, scientists have gained insights into how primates in Asia evolved to resemble the array seen today. The results suggest that a distinct period marked by cooler weather served as a filter of sorts in Asia, altering the makeup of primates there to reflect fewer anthropoids (monkeys and apes) and more strepsirrhines, a suborder of primates that includes lemurs. Primates are sensitive to shifts in temperature, and thus, to climate change.
