News Articles

The use of novel psychoactive substances, synthetic compounds with stimulant or hallucinogenic effects, is on the rise and the diversity and breadth of these substances - a change in one atom means an illegal drug is no longer illegal - has led policymakers, law enforcement officers, and healthcare providers to feel overwhelmed. A recent review has led to proposing a "forecasting method" for policymakers and researchers to focus on what is likely to happen with new recreational drugs. Dr. John Stogner of UNC Charlotte says a five step forecasting method will rely on the availability of a potential user base, the costs of the drug (legal and otherwise), the subjective experience, the substance’s dependence potential, and the overall ease of acquisition.

The plant-based Mediterranean diet is an ongoing diet fad, and proponents now have some new ammunition - it is associated with improved cognitive function in a study of older adults in Spain, according to a paper in JAMA Internal Medicine.

A numerical model estimates the  potential impact of environmental processes on contaminant fate of growth-promoting hormones used in beef production and leads the authors to believe they may persist in the environment at higher concentrations and for longer durations than previously thought - and they also believe their model illustrates potential weaknesses in the U.S. system of regulating hazardous substances, which focuses on individual compounds and but cannot always account for complex and sometimes surprising chemical reactions that occur in the environment

Researchers have discovered a gene, which they have named ICARUS1,  that enables plants to regulate their growth in different temperatures, and it could lead to new ways of optimizing plant growth in different climates.

The act of identifying a perpetrator is memory and involves thinking but it also constitutes a moral decision - because by identifying or not identifying someone, an eyewitness runs the risk of either implicating an innocent person or letting a guilty person go free.
In a recent article, Spring et al. discuss two studies in which children and adolescents of different ages watched a film involving a potential wrong-doing: throwing a lit birthday cake into a wastebasket, either with or without the intention of starting a fire and resulting in either no fire or a serious fire.
The filmed act is identical in all conditions; what is varied is the way the filmed act is 'framed' or described by a voice-over.

A new metal matrix composite that is so light that it can float on water, so a boat made of it would not sink despite damage to its structure - and this syntactic foam has good heat resistance too.
Syntactic foams have been around for many years but this is the first lightweight metal matrix syntactic foam, say the researchers from Deep Springs Technology (DST) and the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering.
Their magnesium alloy matrix composite is reinforced with silicon carbide hollow particles and has a density of only 0.92 grams per cubic centimeter compared to 1.0 g/cc of water. Not only does it have a density lower than that of water, it is strong enough to withstand the rigorous conditions faced in the marine environment.

It's been known since the 16th century that neurons and blood vessels often traverse the body side by side but it was only more recently discovered that the growth of neuronal and vascular networks is controlled by the same molecules. “Most interesting is the interaction between neurons and blood vessels in the cerebral cortex. To date, we know very little about how neurons communicate with endothelial cells in order to structure a functional network in the brain.” explains Prof. Dr. Amparo Acker-Palmer, who plans to assess these processes in the layering of the cerebral cortex during embryonic development.

When ants go exploring in search of food they end up choosing collective routes that fit statistical distributions of probability, according to a team of mathematicians who analyzed the trails of a species of Argentine ant. It's unknown how flocks of birds, shoals of fish, lines of ants and other complex natural systems organize themselves so well when moving collectively so researchers from Spain and the U.S. analyzed the movements of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile, an invasive species in many parts of the world) while they forage or explore an empty space (a petri dish) and then they proposed a model explaining how they form their routes.

During the short, dreary days of winter, some people feel tired and oversleep, they are depressed and irritable and have trouble concentrating.  But once spring arrives, they say they feel fine.
4 percent of the American public say they suffer from this seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a type of depression that occurs during the same season each year.
Biologists know that variations in the amount of sunlight a person receives and her or his circadian clock play a role in the disorder and some have proposed that the neurotransmitters serotonin and melatonin may be involved. However, they have not yet identified the underlying neurobiological mechanisms responsible.

Kids from
multilingual environments
become better communicators, according to a new paper in 
Psychological Science
which says that such children are better at interpreting a speaker's meaning than children who are exposed only to their native tongue - even if the kids are not bilingual themselves.
Exposure to more than one language is the key for building effective social communication skills, says University of Chicago Katherine Kinzler, who believes this paper is the first to demonstrate the social benefits of just being exposed to multiple languages. 

"It takes a village to raise a child" is folk wisdom which means that quality communities turn out quality individuals.
It may have seemed like a new idea when First Lady Hillary Clinton said it in the 1990s but ancient societies formed cooperative groups to help raise their children. Why did that happen?
University of Utah anthropologist Karen Kramer and colleagues created an economic model where mothers had one dependent offspring at a time, ended support of their young at weaning and received no help from others and then mapped it to where mothers often have multiple kids who help rear other children.

Before 2009, nearly 4 in 10 cattle ranchers and slaughterhouse in Brazil reported recent deforestation but by 2013, this number dropped to 4 in 100, a 10-fold decrease.What changed? Policies that were not simply advocated by first world elites that told people in Brazil they couldn't have an economy. Brazil is home to the world’s largest commercial herd of cattle, and its cattle ranchers were once linked to the destruction of huge swaths of rainforest. “Zero-deforestation agreements” put into place in 2009 use market-based strategies to reduce the impact of the beef industry on the environment, a much different methodology than in the past where some would follow guidelines and be penalized economically.