News Articles

There are not a lot of new stories to be found by the humanities in ancient parchments, but millions of documents stored in archives could trace agricultural development across the centuries, thanks to increasingly progressive genetic sequencing techniques.
Thanks to sequencing, vital information can be derived from the DNA of the parchment on which they are written.

Women over the age of 70 with certain early-stage breast cancers don't get much benefit from radiation therapy, according to studies, but they still get it.  The reason is because doctors were able to make decisions that overruled the published evidence and every patient wanted to take no chances.
Now, with government increasingly controlling health care in the United States, the search is one for ways to lessen such "defensive medicine" and cut costs. The problem is that it will be difficult to tell doctors and patients they won't get what was previously considered standard care under a free market system now that more treatments are determined by government panels.

Psychology lacks the methodological rigor of science, but bold claims are popular in corporate media and so they become paper of consumer belief. One recent popular claim is that being bilingual is
a cognitive advantage.
The claims are so popular that you will have a hard time getting published in psychology journals if you debunk them. 
Writing in Psychological Science, scholars suggest that publication bias in favor of positive results of the
bilingual-advantage
 hypothesis are skewing the overall literature on bilingualism and cognitive function. Whenever publication bias exists, it is good for creating the belief in a consensus or getting people to take action, but it is bad for public acceptance of science.

What made the wealthy elites in San Fransisco and Seattle who deny the benefits of child vaccines suddenly clamor for government action to create more vaccines? Two cases of Ebola in the United States.
Though 12,000 people died of heart disease in that same time, and their states were leading the nation in preventable debilitating childhood diseases, it got little media, and therefore consumer, attention. There is a reason why. In the modern environment of surveillance medicine and the focus on risk factors for disease, the lines between health and illness have become blurry and even skewed, according to sociological surveys. 

Using commercial solar cells, researchers have converted over 40 percent of the sunlight hitting a solar system into electricity, the highest efficiency ever reported.

A study has found that elite Kenyan athletes have greater brain oxygenation during periods of maximum physical effort, which contributes to their success in long-distance races.Dr. Jordan Santos-Concejero, of the Department of Physical Education and Sport at the University of the Basque Country carried out the research to analyze the response of cerebral oxygenation at maximum and progressive rhythms amongst elite Kenyan runners from the Kalenjin tribe. 

Researchers from the University of Hawai'i (UH) and NOAA's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries today announced the discovery of an intact "ghost ship" in 2,000 feet of water nearly 20 miles off the coast of Oahu - the former cable ship Dickenson, later the USS Kailua.
Launched in Chester, Pennsylvania in early 1923 for the Commercial Pacific Cable Company, Dickenson was part of a global network of submarine cable that carried telecommunications around the world. Repairing cable and carrying supplies, Dickenson served the remote stations at Midway and Fanning Island from 1923 until 1941. it arrived in Pearl Harbor with evacuees from Fanning Island on December 7th, during the Japanese attack that brought America into World War II.

The chemical messenger dopamine, colloquially called the 'happiness hormone', is important outside social psychology articles on Valentine's Day also; it has been linked to motivation and motor skills and may help neurons with difficult cognitive tasks.  Researchers have found how dopamine influences brain cells while processing rules.

Skin color varies according to latitude and therefore by the intensity of incident ultraviolet light; according to biologists, that is why individuals living at low latitudes developed darker skin, whereas those living at high latitudes ended up with paler pigmentation. Yet the mutations that lightened the skin, probably owing to the need to synthesize vitamin D at latitudes with less solar irradiation, also increase the probability of developing melanoma or skin cancer, which is a negative in natural selection. 

A new article  in the Georgia Law Review
details the relationship of two U.S. Supreme Court cases, their impact on freedom of expression, and how they relate to blogging and citizen journalism.

Psychology surveys have found that when people go to bed and thus how long they sleep at a time might actually make it difficult for people to stop worrying.
The surveys showed that people who sleep for shorter periods of time and go to bed very late at night often have more negative thoughts than those who keep regular sleeping hours.  

Alzheimer's disease progresses inside the brain as deposits of the toxic protein amyloid-beta (Aβ),overwhelm neurons. A side effect of accumulating Aβ in neurons is the fragmentation of the Golgi apparatus, the part of the cell involved in packaging and sorting protein cargo including the precursor of Aβ. Or it may be the other way around and loss of Golgi function is a driving force behind Alzheimer's.
Yanzhuang Wang, Gunjan Joshi, and colleagues at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, set out to uncover the mechanism damaging the Golgi using a transgenic mouse and tissue culture models of 
Alzheimer's disease
to look at what was going on.