News Articles

Neuroscientists have discovered a brain pathway that underlies the emotional behaviours critical for survival.
New research by the University of Bristol, published in the Journal of Physiology today [23 April], has identified a chain of neural connections which links central survival circuits to the spinal cord, causing the body to freeze when experiencing fear.
Understanding how these central neural pathways work is a fundamental step towards developing effective treatments for emotional disorders such as anxiety, panic attacks and phobias.

Cougars may have survived the mass extinction that took place about 12,000 years ago because they were not particular about what they ate, unlike their more finicky cousins--the saber-tooth cat and American lion. Both perished along with the woolly mammoth and many of the other supersized mammals that walked the Earth during the late Pleistocene.
That is the conclusion of a new analysis of the microscopic wear marks on the teeth of cougars, saber-tooth cats and American lions described in the April 23 issue of the journal Biology Letters.

Inspired by the fist-like club of a mantis shrimp, researchers have developed a design structure for composite materials that is more impact resistant and tougher than the standard used in airplanes.
The peacock mantis shrimp, or stomatopod, is a 4- to 6-inch-long rainbow-colored crustacean with a fist-like club that accelerates underwater faster than a 22-caliber bullet. Researchers, led by Kisailus, an associate professor of chemical engineering, are interested in the club because it can strike prey thousands of times without breaking.

Canadians may seem polite to outsiders, that maple leaf on a backpack says pacificism all over the world, but they are apparently quite hard on their kids.
A
Canadian Medical Association Journal articles says that almost one-third of adults in Canada have experienced sexual abuse, child abuse or been exposed to intimate partner violence, such as parental, step-parental or guardian violence in their home. Child abuse has been linked to mental disorders and suicidal ideation (thoughts) or suicide attempts.

Last month, scientists announced the first hard evidence for cosmic inflation, the process by which the infant universe swelled from microscopic to cosmic size in an instant.
While this almost unimaginably fast expansion was theorized more than three decades ago, there had been no evidence. Then researchers from the BICEP2 collaboration announced the first direct evidence for cosmic inflation and the first images of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time, described as the "first tremors of the Big Bang."

"Not tonight, dear, I have a headache." Generally speaking, that line is attributed to the wife in a couple, implying that women's sexual desire is more affected by pain than men's.
Now, researchers from McGill University and Concordia University in Montreal have investigated, possibly for the first time in any species, the direct impact of pain on sexual behaviour in mice. Their study, published in the April 23 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, found that pain from inflammation greatly reduced sexual motivation in female mice in heat -- but had no such effect on male mice.

Researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch and the Stillbirth Collaborative Research Network have identified a link between stillbirth and either restricted or excessive fetal growth. Findings from the study are online in the April 22 issue of PLOS Medicine.
Using a new approach developed by the network to estimate gestational age in stillborn babies, Dr. Radek Bukowski, lead researcher and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UTMB, and his colleagues evaluated 663 stillbirths and 1932 live births that occurred over a two-and-a-half year period at 59 hospitals in five U.S. regions.

Researchers report that they have discovered a new genus and species of electric knifefish in several tributaries of the Negro River in the Amazonia State of Brazil.
Professor Cristina Cox Fernandes at UMass Amherst, with Adília Nogueira and José Antônio Alves-Gomes of INPA, describe the new bluntnose knifefish in the current issue of the journal Proceedings of the Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and detail the new genus and species' anatomy, range, relationship to other fish, salient features of its skeleton, coloration, electric organs and patterns of electric organ discharge (EOD).
True to their name, these fish produce electric discharges in distinct pulses that can be detected by some other fish. 

Anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of women who undergo routine screening mammography during a ten-year period will experience a false-positive mammogram.
They then suffer anxiety while they undergo additional testing, sometimes involving a biopsy, to confirm that cancer is not present.
Researchers have suspected that increased anxiety, pain, and the bother of additional tests might adversely affect the quality of life for women who experience false-positive screening mammograms. In a new paper, Dartmouth scholars used data collected by the Digital Mammographic Imaging Screening Trial (DMIST), which was conducted by the American College of Radiology Imaging Network (ACRIN), to study the impact a false-positive mammogram has on women's lives.

Are you on the go a lot? Is your time so limited even moving your eyeballs is putting you behind?
If so, there is an app for that. If not, app developers are looking to create a market for that kind of personalized optimization, so they have devised speed-reading software that eliminates the time we supposedly waste by moving our eyes as we read.
Are eyes just passive conduits getting in the way of the modern world with their ancient biological mechanism? 
A paper in Psychological Science argues that eye movements we make during reading actually play a critical role in our ability to understand what we've just read.

The term "tween" is a marketing colloquialism for a child who is between the ages of 8 and 12 -not quite a little kid but not yet a teenager. A pre-adolescent.
This demographic watches more television than any other age group and is thus considered a lucrative market for advertisers. Tween television programming often consists of the following: "teen scene" and "action-adventure" , which a pair of academics say is shaping stereotypes in tweens rather than reflecting what kids want to watch.

77% of Americans prefer summer over winter and while we know what temperatures actually were this past winter, what people think they were in a recent Harris Poll is something else. When it came to the temperature, 88 percent of Midwesterners and 84 percent of Easterners say it was colder than normal. 71 percent believe it was while only 18 percent felt it was colder than normal. 45% in the West believe it was warmer than normal.When it came to precipitation, 77 percent of those in the Midwest, 73 percent in the East and 49 percent say there was more rain or snow in their area. In the West, 62% say they had less rain or snow this winter.Was the snow due to climate change?