News Articles

A man-made form of insulin delivered by nasal spray may improve working memory and other mental capabilities in adults with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease dementia, according to a pilot study led by researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.
The study's subjects were 60 adults diagnosed with amnesic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or mild to moderate Alzheimer's dementia (AD). Those who received nasally-administered 40 international unit (IU) doses of insulin detemir, a manufactured form of the hormone, for 21 days showed significant improvement in their short-term ability to retain and process verbal and visual information compared with those who received 20 IU does or a placebo.

The debate over policy implications of climate science can have no clear winners - everyone claims science is on their side and that scientists on the other side are misguided. Though both sides are experts at framing - CO2 is good for us in any quantity, skeptics are all dupes of Big Oil - one was clearly taking it to the next level: In 2000, Professor Paul Crutzen, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland for work on ozone, said humankind's impact was so drastic it has changed the actual geology of Earth and since then environmentalist have been promoting Crutzen's new Epoch - the Anthropocene - as a distinct chapter in the Earth's geological history.

Scientists have extracted DNA from mysterious marsupial megafauna that roamed Australia over 40,000 years ago -  Australia's extinct giant kangaroos.The team extracted DNA sequences from two species: a giant short-faced kangaroo (Simosthenurus occidentalis) and a giant wallaby (Protemnodon anak). These specimens died around 45,000 years ago and their remains were discovered in a cold and dry cave in Tasmania.Relatively good preservation conditions in the cave allowed enough short pieces of DNA to survive so researchers could reconstruct partial "mitochondrial genomes" - genetic material transmitted from mother to offspring and widely used to infer evolutionary relationships.

A molecule known as coenzyme A plays a key role in cell metabolism by regulating the actions of nitric oxide. according to a new study.
Cell metabolism is the ongoing process of chemical transformations within the body's cells that sustains life, and alterations in metabolism are a common cause of human disease, including cancer and heart disease. Their findings about the mechanisms of action for coenzyme A, as well as discovering a new class of enzymes that regulate coenzyme A-based reactions. 

Chemical analysis of some of the world’s oldest rocks has provided the earliest record yet of Earth's atmosphere and shows that the air 4 billion years ago was very similar a billion years later, when the atmosphere, though it likely would have been lethal to oxygen-dependent humans, supported a thriving microbial biosphere that ultimately gave rise to the diversity of life on Earth today.Until now, researchers have had to rely on widely varying computer models of the earliest atmosphere's characteristics.

Dinosaurs once flourished in Europe but when an asteroid hit 66 million years ago, they died quickly, according to a new study.
That an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs is widely held, but until recently dinosaur fossils from the late Cretaceous, the final period of dinosaur evolution, were almost exclusively found in North America. This raised questions about whether the sudden decline of dinosaurs in the American and Canadian west was merely a local story.
The new study synthesizes research on European dinosaurs over the past two decades. Fossils of late Cretaceous dinosaurs are now commonly discovered in Spain, France, Romania, and other countries. 

According to the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction, cocaine is the second most commonly used illegal addictive in Europe, after cannabis.  A discovery related to the mechanism behind a dopamine transporter could help in the development of future medical treatment against cocaine addiction.  

In space no one can hear you bleed, but what about on a private spacecraft? The commercial aviation industry has medical care standards, as does NASA for traditional space missions. Eventually someone is going to tell Elon Musk and Richard Brandon that the commercial space transportation industry will need to define medical care practices as well. There are well-known risks, of course, but there can be disclaimers 400 pages long and if an attorney stands in front of a jury and talks about what lax safety standards there are, someone with the passionate pleading skill of John Edwards will get a judgment that runs their companies into bankruptcy.

If you want to make your children neurotic, clinginess and overprotectiveness on your part - helicopter parenting - is the way to go.Assuming you don't want to cause that, it is still okay to hover over your dogs and cats, according to an analysis of pet owners by psychologists at U.C. Berkeley and California State University, East Bay.

For most people, they can extend their healthy lifespan by walking for 20 minutes a day. Yet most people don't do it.It's become a popular sport to criticize obese people while lamenting that our pop culture encourages people to be too thin. We should be criticizing people who don't go for walks rather than fat people if we care about lowering health care costs, according to a study of over 334,000 European men and women which found that twice as many deaths may be attributable to lack of physical activity compared with the number of deaths attributable to obesity.

In the future, if we use money to fund basic research for solar and stop subsidizing existing technology that does not work very well, there will be no energy crisis. In the time it takes you to read this article, the sun will provide enough energy to power the planet for a year.But that does not translate to everything.  An international group of scientists has noted once again that "renewable" is not synonymous with "unlimited."

The change in global sea level rise since the beginning of the 20th century has been significantly larger than previous estimates according to new estimates in a new paper.The paper, co-authored by Carling Hay, a Harvard post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS), and Eric Morrow, a recent PhD graduate, says that previous estimates of global sea-level rise from 1900-1990 had been over-estimated by as much as 30 percent.  But it confirms previous estimates of sea-level change since 1990, and that suggests that the rate of sea-level change is increasing more quickly than previously believed.