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.
In the mid-1960s the Elizabethan morality play space western known as "Star Trek" debuted and series creator Gene Roddenberry was cagey about when exactly it took place (thus the reason to use 'star dates'), but it had to have been in the 23rd century if later writers were getting their information relayed correctly. Regardless of the exact dates of their five year mission, the public was energized by the future - and the gadgets it contained.Portable computers were completely believable and wireless communications already existed. A fax machine was clearly on the horizon, since the teletype had already existed since 1915 and a fax just required a phone line - but medical diagnosis was not even close to "Star Trek"'s future yet.
According to some papers, human echolocation is another "sense," working in tandem with hearing and touch to deliver information to people with visual impairment.
A new paper adds evidence for the vision-like qualities of echolocation in blind echolocators - by wrongly judging how heavy objects of different sizes felt.
The experiment, conducted by psychologist Gavin Buckingham of Heriot-Watt University in Scotland and colleagues at the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University in Canada, demonstrated that echolocators experience a "size-weight illusion" when they use their echolocation to get a sense of how big objects are, in just the same way as sighted people do when using their normal vision.
The "Basel-Gasfabrik" Celtic settlement, at the present day site of Novartis, was inhabited around 100 B.C. and is one of the most significant Celtic sites in Central Europe.
A team recently examined samples from the backfill of 2000 year-old storage and cellar pits from the Iron Age and found the durable eggs of intestinal parasites like roundworms (Ascaris sp.), whipworms, (Trichuris sp.) and liver flukes (Fasciola sp.).
Women frequently experience more severe allergic reactions than men but it has been unclear why. Yet that disparity is more reason why gender balance in studies and trials makes sense.
Anaphylaxis is an allergic reaction triggered by food, medication or insect stings and bites. Immune cells, particularly mast cells, release enzymes that cause tissues to swell and blood vessels to widen. As a result, skin may flush or develop a rash, and in extreme cases, breathing difficulties, shock or heart attack may occur. Clinical studies have shown that women tend to experience anaphylaxis more frequently than men, but why this difference exists is unclear.
When people spend time interacting with their smartphones, it is changing the way their thumbs and brains work together, according to a report in Current Biology.
More touchscreen use in the recent past translates directly into greater brain activity when the thumbs and other fingertips are touched, the study found. And smartphones have become a good way to explore the everyday plasticity of the human brain.
Not only are people suddenly using their fingertips, and especially their thumbs, in a new way, but many are doing it an awful lot, day after day. Our phones are also keeping track of our digital histories to provide a readymade source of data on those behaviors.
10 percent of the world's ants are close relatives, belong to just one genus out of 323. That genus is called Pheidole. Pheidole fill niches in ecosystems ranging from rainforests to deserts.
Do doctors make too much money? It depends on who you ask. The public perception is that doctors now overcharge for services to account for the cost of government paperwork while government routinely picks a fee they will pay based on what doctors charge. And the government pays less for Medicaid than Medicare. What expanded dramatically under the Affordable Care Act? Medicaid.
People discriminate between quantities because it is a way to make decisions - armies are less likely to want to attack when the defense outnumbers them - but with animals it is more clear, lions, chimpanzees and hyenas will not attack at all if they don't have superior numbers.
These animals use numerical information to make decisions about their social life.
Testing numerical competence
There are lots and lots of claims about quality - seals of approval are common in lots of businesses, but in the 'sustainable' real estate industry they are frequently touted – and inherently meaningless due to a lack of transparency (see LEED program for energy savings is faith-based more than science-based?).
Diagnostic screening systems for breast cancer like X-ray computed tomography (CT) and mammography are effective at detecting early signs of tumors but they subject patients to ionizing radiation and sometimes inflicting discomfort on women who are undergoing screening, because of the compression of the breast that is required to produce diagnostically useful images.
Effective treatments for lung cancer has been challenging because so many genetic mutations play a role in the disease. Mutations, by their very definition, are difficult to predict, they occur due to random cosmic rays over time and in other natural ways, and can be aggravated by some aspects of the environment.
But by analyzing the DNA and RNA of lung cancers, researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center found that patients whose tumors contained a large number of gene fusions had worse outcomes than patients with fewer gene fusions. Gene fusions are a type of genetic anomaly found in cancers that occurs when genes get rearranged and fuse together.
It's probably not a good idea to buy a car for a teenager, but for parents inclined to do so, financial prudence is recommended: They will not drive with the same skill as an older person, the risk of accident is higher, they may not know how to maintain it and those things all add up to expensive mistakes.
