News Articles

In modern times, nitrous oxide is a pollutant or a way to make an old custom Nissan go really fast, but it was once common as an anesthetic in medicine and dentistry and that is how it got its common name - laughing gas.
In a small pilot study, it was shown to have another modern use - as a treatment for depression.In 20 patients who had treatment-resistant clinical depression, the researchers found that two-thirds experienced an improvement in symptoms after receiving nitrous oxide. In comparison, one-third of the same patients reported improved symptoms after treatment with a placebo. The patients were evaluated on the day of and day after each treatment.

Though humans did not exist 400,000 years ago, human ancestors did - and they left behind engravings on a fossilized shell from Java, establishing a new benchmark for the earliest known example of ancient humans deliberately creating pattern.
The newly discovered engravings resemble the previously oldest-known engravings, which are associated with either Neanderthals or modern humans from around 100,000 years ago.  The zig-zag pattern engravings were only recently discovered on the fossilized mussel shells, which had been collected 100 years ago. There is no way to know if the pattern was intended as art or served some practical purpose.  

Epigenetics has gotten new life 200 years after it was first postulated - it is temporary biochemical changes in the genome, caused by various forms of environmental impact that can be permanent and even passed down to future generations, basically an update on Jean Baptiste Lamarck's inheritance of acquired characteristics. 
One type of epigenetic change is methylation, where a methyl group is added to or removed from a base in the DNA molecule without affecting the original DNA sequence. Epigenetic researchers liken it to computers: If genes are considered the hardware of cells, then epigenetics can be seen as their software. 
A small study

A Parkinson's disease vaccine
developed by the Austrian biotech company AFFiRiS AG
is going into a Phase I trial clinical trial. The vaccine,  called AFFITOPE® PD03A , targets a protein called alpha-Synuclein. The protein plays a key role in the onset and progression of Parkinson's as well as multiple system atrophy (MSA), an orphan disease. This vaccine has the potential to modify disease progression, rather than only symptomatic improvements available with current treatment strategies.

How do drug prices get picked? Some of it is simple economics. If you develop 20 drugs and 19 of them fail at various stages and one succeeds after a billion dollars in costs and bureaucracy, you are going to price it to make back all that lost money before generic companies are allowed to come along and sell your product without doing any work at all.

An analysis of U.C. Berkeley students has concluded that inflated or deflated feelings of self-worth are linked to afflictions like bipolar disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, anxiety and depression - more evidence that the widening gulf between rich and poor can be bad for your health, say the psychologists who conducted the survey. 

Titan is Saturn's largest moon and the only planetary body outside Venus, Earth and Mars to have fields of wind-blown dunes on its surface.

Government and non-profit employees have higher public service motivations than corporate managers, according to surveys of government and non-profit employees in Georgia.
They don't simply do the minimum when it comes to eco-friendly initiatives, they also engage in discretionary programs. They just care more than other people, which is a nice bonus, since it is well-known that government workers have higher salaries than the private sector in the United States. It is why if they leave government service, they often take years to get back to their government salary levels.
The results in the American Review of Public Administration are based on a survey of hundreds of public servants about their environmental and organizational behaviors. 

You don't have to be a jerk to get the right thing done but sometimes out-of-the-box thinking requires some angry evangelism. Yet even legendary jerks like
Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison
knew you can't use the belligerence strategy too often or the next brilliant idea you have could fall on deaf ears.
Samuel Hunter of Pennsylvania State University and Lily Cushenbery of Stony Brook University, writing in the Journal of Business and Psychology, say jerks that are disagreeable by nature, overly confident, dominant, argumentative, egotistic, headstrong or sometimes even hostile are lauded, like Jobs, if they are innovative and succeed and happen to be CEO of the company, but for most people it can backfire. 

If you want children ages 4 to 8 to tell the truth, it's best not to threaten to punish them if they lie.
An experiment involving 372 children, led by Prof. Victoria Talwar of McGill's Dept. of Educational and Counselling Psychology, left each child alone in a room for 1 minute with a toy behind them on a table, having told the child not to peek during their absence. 
While they were out of the room, a hidden video camera filmed what went on.
When the researchers returned, they asked the child, a simple question: "When I was gone, did you turn around and peak at the toy?"
What the researchers discovered was that:

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have accelerated subatomic particles to the highest energies ever recorded from a compact accelerator -  a laser-plasma accelerator, which is a new class of particle accelerators that can fit on a table.
The team used a specialized petawatt laser and a charged-particle gas called plasma to get the particles up to speed - electrons in this case - inside a nine-centimeter long tube of plasma. The speed corresponded to an energy of 4.25 giga-electron volts. The acceleration over such a short distance corresponds to an energy gradient 1000 times greater than traditional particle accelerators and marks a world record energy for laser-plasma accelerators.  

Macrophages sweep up cellular debris and pathogens in order to thwart infection - sometimes even before the white blood cells, which are designed for that task. 
Neutrophils, white blood cells, are "first responders" that are attracted to wounds by signaling molecules called reactive oxygen species (ROS) that activate a protein kinase. When neutrophils finish their work, inflammation is partly resolved through apoptosis, or cell suicide, and then macrophages arrive to clean up the infection.
But neutrophils can also elect to leave wounded tissue in a process known as reverse migration. Whether macrophages promote this mode of inflammation resolution is unclear.