Humans acquire fears using similar neural processes whether they’ve personally experienced an aversive event or only witnessed it, according to a study by researchers at New York University’s Departments of Psychology. This is the first study examining the brain basis of fears acquired indirectly, through the observation of others. The study shows that the amygdala, which is known to be critical to the acquisition and expression of fears from personal experience, is also involved during the acquisition and expression of fears obtained indirectly through social observation. The findings appear in the most recent issue of the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN).

Sandia’s huge Z machine, which generates termperatures hottter than the sun, has turned water to ice in nanoseconds. However, don’t expect anything commercial just yet: the ice is hotter than the boiling point of water. "The three phases of water as we know them — cold ice, room temperature liquid, and hot vapor — are actually only a small part of water’s repertory of states," says Sandia researcher Daniel Dolan. "Compressing water customarily heats it. But under extreme compression, it is easier for dense water to enter its solid phase [ice] than maintain the more energetic liquid phase [water]."

Sandia is a National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) laboratory.

Over a span of two decades, warming temperatures have caused annual losses of roughly $5 billion for major food crops, according to a new study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

From 1981-2002, warming reduced the combined production of wheat, corn, and barley—cereal grains that form the foundation of much of the world’s diet—by 40 million metric tons per year.

Since the beginning of the industrial age the ocean has absorbed about half of all anthropic(1) carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into the atmosphere. This has led to an acidification of sea water. Frédéric Gazeau, a scientist at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, and his colleagues, including Jean-Pierre Gattuso, Director of Research at the Oceanographic laboratory at Villefranche-sur-Mer (CNRS/Université Pierre et Marie Curie) have examined the reaction of oysters and mussels cultivated in Europe to this acidification of the oceans. The results, published in the review Geophysical Research Letters, are beyond doubt.

Some 40 years after the release of the classic science fiction movie Fantastic Voyage, researchers in the NanoRobotics Laboratory of École Polytechnique de Montréal’s Department of Computer Engineering and Institute of Biomedical Engineering have achieved a major technological breakthrough in the field of medical robotics. They have succeeded for the first time in guiding, in vivo and via computer control, a microdevice inside an artery, at a speed of 10 centimetres a second.

USC College computational biologist Peter Calabrese has developed a new model to simulate the evolution of so-called recombination hotspots in the genome.

Published March 5 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the mathematical model and its associated software bring much-needed rigor to evolutionary investigations of how natural selection acts on individual genes, said Calabrese, a research assistant professor of biological sciences.