In the 1980s, scientists captured the precise mechanics of a protein machine. It looked strange, to researchers its tall thin structure with stubby legs invoked the enchanted broomstick that stole the show in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment of Disney's 1940 Fantasia film.
An affordable vaccine that has all but rid the 'meningitis belt' of a major cause of deadly epidemics is now going to be available for infants all across sub-Saharan Africa.
Northern Europeans pride themselves on being tougher than the rest of Europe when it comes to enduring weather. While most people are more likely to die in bad weather, a new paper finds that Norwegian kids were more likely to die when the weather was good.By studying church records from 1750 to 1900 and looking at life history variables, such as how old women were when they had their first child and their last and how many years passed between the birth of each child and how many of these children survived, Gine Roll Skjaervoe at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of Biology made a strange finding - kids born in years with a lot of sunshine died more, and that meant fewer grandchildren.
A paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine links circumcision in boys to autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The results were drawn from part a cohort of all children born in Denmark between 1994 and 2003. During the study, over 340,000 boys were followed up to the age of nine between 1994 and 2013 and almost 5,000 cases of ASD were diagnosed. They found that regardless of cultural background circumcised boys may run a greater risk of developing ASD. The researchers also made the observation of an increased risk of hyperactivity disorder among circumcised boys in non-Muslim families. Risk was particularly high for infantile autism before the age of five, at least in epidemiology.
Hypertension - high blood pressure - affects up to 80 million people in the United States and cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death so lowering blood pressure has the potential to save lives. For most people, exercise and diet are enough and a new study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics finds that daily consumption of blueberries for eight weeks resulted in significant reductions of both systolic and diastolic blood pressure.
Can cancer biopsies spread more cancer? Some patients, and a few doctors think so. Fine needle aspiration is a minimally invasive technique that uses a thin and hollow needle to extract a few cells from a tumor mass. Some contend that a biopsy can cause some cancer cells to spread and it has become a strongly-held belief, but is it true?It came about because some people who got biopsies did have cancer spread but it was so rare that answers were difficult to find. A recent study of more than 2,000 patients by researchers at Mayo Clinics concludes it is a myth and that patients who received a biopsy had a better outcome and longer survival than patients who did not have a biopsy.
Hydrogen fuel cells may be the best option for powering zero-emission vehicles, Toyota will make them available in the United States in 2015, but those fuel cells require an electrocatalyst -- a platinum surface -- to increase the reaction rate, and the cost of the precious metal makes it hard for hydrogen fuel cells to compete economically with the internal combustion engine.
Social attitudes are reinforcing the negative beliefs towards people who self harm, according to an analysis of the life stories of people who self-harm and who were also diagnosed with a personality disorder revealed that several spoke of being refused pain relief while being sutured by hospital staff. Others had met staff who thought they were immune to pain because they self-harmed.
An estimated 5% of adults have self-harmed with the aim of relieving psychological distress.
The was carried out by Dr. Jane Simpson from Lancaster University with Charlotte Morris, Mark Sampson and Frank Beesley from the NHS. The researchers said, “The responses of others had the potential to exacerbate distress and even trigger further self-harm.”
Making sure school-aged kids get to sleep at a regular hour is often a struggle for parents but it’s well worth the effort. The researchers behind a new paper say that a good night’s sleep is linked to better performance in math and languages – subjects that are powerful predictors of later learning and academic success.
By studying the motions of different stellar populations in the disk of the Andromeda galaxy, researchers have deduced that Andromeda has had a more violent past than our Milky Way. The structure and internal motions of the stellar disk of a spiral galaxy hold important keys to understanding the galaxy's formation history. The Andromeda galaxy, called M31 by almost no one except the 2 percent of astronomers who like to insist on renaming and reclassifying things, is the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way and the largest in what is called the Local Group of galaxies in our cosmic address.
It won't exactly set off a Blu-ray versus HD-DVD cultural firestorm, but there is an alternative to 3-D printing. And it's better in many ways. Pop-up assembly relies on compression buckling. If that sounds like one of children's books, with the little structures that fold out when opened, that's because those are a good analog. Pop-up fabrication starts as a flat two-dimensional structure and 'pops up' into a more complex 3-D structure. Using a variety of advanced materials, including silicon, the researchers behind it have produced more than 40 different geometric designs, including shapes resembling a peacock, flower, starburst, table, basket, tent and starfish.So why is it better than 3-D printing?
Games have been test beds for new ideas in Artificial Intelligence (AI) since computers came on the scene and there have been significant milestones - Deep Blue sort of defeated Kasparov in chess and Watson sort of defeated Jennings and Rutter on Jeopardy! But solving a game is a lot tougher than defeating a player, though researchers in the Computer Poker Research Group at the University of Alberta in Canada say they have essentially solved heads-up limit hold'em poker.
In an interstellar race against time, astronomers measured the space-time warp in the gravity of a binary star and determined the mass of a neutron star just before it vanished from view.The researchers measured the masses of both stars in binary pulsar system J1906. The pulsar spins and emits a lighthouse-like beam of radio waves every 144 milliseconds. It orbits its companion star in a little under four hours. The mass of only a handful of double neutron stars have ever been measured, with J1906 being the youngest. It is located about 25,000 light years from Earth.
