1. On Wednesday, May 15th, the House Committee on Natural Resources: Subcommittee on Water, Oceans, and Wildlife will hold a Legislative Hearing on H.R. 2532: To protect grizzly bear populations, and for other purposes, in the Longworth House Office Building 1324. We'd like to solicit an article examining how serious the issue is. Fee: $100
Investigators at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine describe the basis for developing a biological interface that could link a patient's nervous system to a thought-driven artificial limb. Their conceptual framework - which brings together years of spinal-cord injury research - is published in the January issue of Neurosurgery.
"We're at a junction now of developing a new approach for a brain-machine interface," says senior author Douglas H. Smith, MD, Professor of Neurosurgery and Director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at Penn. "The nervous system will certainly rebel if you place hard or sharp electrodes into it to record signals.
Fats hidden in thousands of foods can harm a woman’s chance of having a baby, scientists said yesterday.
They can increase the risk of fertility problems by 70 per cent or more. Eating as little as one doughnut or a portion of chips a day can have a damaging effect. The scientists behind the study advised women who want to have a baby to avoid the fats, known as trans fats.
They are used in thousands of processed foods, from chocolate to pies, as well as take-away meals. They have no nutritional value but are included simply to extend the shelf life of food.
Fats hidden in thousands of foods can harm a woman’s chance of having a baby, scientists said yesterday.
They can increase the risk of fertility problems by 70 per cent or more. Eating as little as one doughnut or a portion of chips a day can have a damaging effect.
Taking a cue from the financial world, MIT researchers along with experts in industry and government have developed a list of 13 measures that engineers can use to predict how well a system -- or project -- will perform before it is even finished.
Known as leading indicators, analogous measures are regularly used by economists, investors and businesses to help predict the economy's performance.
The idea behind the new set of leading indicators is to improve the management and performance of complex programs before they are delivered, in a more predictive way than simple business metrics.
"Leading indicators can provide important insights for managers of complex programs, such as those in the aerospace industry, and can allow them to make real-ti
Carnivores are some of the widest ranging terrestrial mammals for their size, and this affects their energy intake and needs. This difference is also played out in the different hunting strategies of small and large carnivores.
The human brain underwent explosive growth after we split from our chimp cousins, but the pace of evolutionary change among the thousands of genes expressed in brain tissue has since slowed, says a new study in PLOS Biology.
By absorbing half of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, the oceans have a profound influence on climate. However, their ability to take up this carbon dioxide might be impaired as a result of climate change. To determine their response to global warming, ESA has backed two projects that provide systematic data on key oceanic variables – colour and temperature.
Plankton bloom off the coast of Norway, acquired on 10 June 2006 by Envisat's MERIS - an instrument optimised to detect ocean colour. (Image courtesy of European Space Agency)
Mosquitoes' thirst for sugar could prove to be the answer for eliminating malaria and other mosquito-transmitted diseases, says Hebrew University researcher Prof. Yosef Schlein in a study published in the American Science magazine and the International Journal for Parasitology.
How did our evolutionary ancestors make sense of their world? What strategies did they use, for example, to find food? Fossils do not preserve thoughts, so we have so far been unable to glean any insights into the cognitive structure of our ancestors.
Padana, a young female orangutan at the Leipzig Zoo, who was one of the research subjects. (Image: Knut Finstermeier, MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology)
Sacred flaming temples, gas-guzzling RVs that converge for a week on the dry Black Rock Desert lakebed - The Exxon-Mobil National Convention, you are thinking? Not at all. It's the Burning Man Art Festival in Nevada and it causes global warming. For 21 years this ecological disaster has been using gas-powered generators, up to 37,000 of them, so that smelly hippies can gorge themselves on wasteful fossil-fuel consumption. San Francisco scientists are unsure how much this contributes to global warming but they intend to find out.
Although the human brain is skilled at facial recognition and discrimination, new research from Georgetown University Medical Center suggests that the brain may not have developed a specific ability for “understanding faces” but instead uses the same kind of pattern recognition techniques to distinguish between people as it uses to search for differences between other groups of objects, such as plants, animals and cars.
The study, published in the April 6 edition of the journal Neuron, adds new evidence to the debate over how the brain understands and interprets faces, an area of neuroscience that has been somewhat controversial.
Scientists have made the astonishing discovery that sound might drive supernovae explosions. Their computer simulations say that dying stars pulse at audible frequencies – for instance, at about the F-note above middle C – for a split second before they blow up.
Researchers in the 1960s began using computer models to test ideas about what, exactly, causes stars to explode.
