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.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have identified a circuit between two brain regions that controls alcohol binge drinking, offering a more complete picture on what drives a behavior that costs the United States more than $170 billion annually and how it can be treated.
The discovery of brain pathology through autopsy in former National Football League (NFL) players called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) has raised substantial concern among players, medical professionals, and the general public about the impact of repetitive head trauma. Using sophisticated neuroimaging and analytics, researchers have now identified abnormal areas of low blood flow in living professional football players. These findings, published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, raises the potential for better diagnosis and treatment for persons with football related head trauma.
TORONTO, April 26, 2016 - In 1442, Shinto priests in Japan began keeping records of the freeze dates of a nearby lake, while in 1693 Finnish merchants started recording breakup dates on a local river. Together they create the oldest inland water ice records in human history and mark the first inklings of climate change, says a new report published today out of York University and the University of Wisconsin.
The researchers say the meticulous recordkeeping of these historical "citizen scientists" reveals increasing trends towards later ice-cover formation and earlier spring thaw since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Schools that provide each student with a laptop computer, as well as the appropriate support for both students and teachers, see significant improvement in academic achievement, a new paper indicates.
Michigan State University's Binbin Zheng and colleagues analyzed years of studies on "one-to-one" laptop programs, including Zheng's own research, and found that such programs that take a comprehensive approach were linked to higher test scores in English, math, science and writing, along with other benefits.
A study led by researchers at Lund University in Sweden shows that ravens are as clever as chimpanzees, despite having much smaller brains, indicating that rather than the size of the brain, the neuronal density and the structure of the birds' brains play an important role in terms of their intelligence.
"Absolute brain size is not the whole story. We found that corvid birds performed as well as great apes, despite having much smaller brains", says Can Kabadayi, doctoral student in Cognitive Science.
Seven international tobacco control experts urged government regulators to avoid heavy-handed condemnation of e-cigarette use, in a study published online today in the journal Addiction.
The researchers noted that regulations of e-cigarettes are clearly needed, but that governments need to weigh growing evidence of the benefits e-cigarettes provide in helping some addicted cigarette smokers quit against the potential for harm if non-smokers take up vaping, the term commonly used to describe use of e-cigarettes.
URBANA, Ill. - Last summer, the Gulf of Mexico's "dead zone" spanned more than 6,400 square miles, more than three times the size it should have been, according to the Gulf Hypoxia Task Force. Nitrogen runoff from farms along the Mississippi River winds up in the Gulf, feeding algae but depriving other marine life of oxygen when the algae decomposes. The 12 states that border the Mississippi have been mandated to develop nutrient reduction strategies, but one especially effective strategy has not been adopted widely: bioreactors.
EAST LANSING, Mich. - Around the world, especially in developing nations, counterfeit medicines are a real problem. Until now, in many countries there hasn't been a standard protocol to conduct investigations and pursue prosecution.
New research, led by Michigan State University and featured in the current issue of the Journal of Forensic Science and Criminology, is providing the foundation to apply criminology theory to preventing the production and sale of fake and substandard medicines.
EUGENE, Ore. -- April 25, 2016 -- Open the box of that new smartphone. Oops, it feels differently from expectations based on what you'd seen. Embrace it or be disappointed? Your reaction is likely tied to your perception of the brand, says Aparna Sundar of the University of Oregon.
A brand viewed as exciting has wiggle room to introduce innovations that don't match consumers' expectations, said Sundar, a professor of marketing in the Lundquist College of Business. Not so for a brand seen as sincere, she said.
Researchers working in the field of synthetic biology use components that occur in nature and combine them in a new way. This is how bacteria acquire functions that they hadn't previously possessed. This offers great potential for biotechnology.
Bacteria respond to temperature and metabolic products
Johanna Roßmanith and her doctoral supervisor Prof Dr Franz Narberhaus from the Chair of Microbial Biology carried out a successful study where they controlled the type of proteins a bacterium would manufacture and its behaviour. This is how they have made a bacterium swim that hadn't previously had the ability to move. The researchers made that possible by combining various modules from the bacterium's RNA in a new way.
Rice and rice products are typical first foods for infants in some countries and a new study found that infants who ate rice and rice products had higher urinary arsenic concentrations than those who did not consume any type of rice.
There have been increases in prevalence of food allergies over the past several decades but a debate over why; some fundraising groups and websites claim it is due to science changing food while some say it is simply better diagnosis and others say it could be a changing relationship between the presence of food-specific immunoglobulin E (IgE) -- a blood marker associated with food allergy -- in children's blood between the 1980s and the 2000s.
A new study using 5,000 stored blood samples in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology found no increase in the presence of IgE.
