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April 25, 2013

Psychopaths are not neurally equipped to have concern for others

Prisoners who are psychopaths lack the basic neurophysiological "hardwiring" that enables them to care for others, according to a new study by neuroscientists at the University of Chicago and the University of New Mexico.

"A marked lack of empathy is a hallmark characteristic of individuals with psychopathy," said the lead author of the study, Jean Decety, the Irving B. Harris Professor in Psychology and Psychiatry at UChicago. Psychopathy affects approximately 1 percent of the United States general population and 20 percent to 30 percent of the male and female U.S. prison population. Relative to non-psychopathic criminals, psychopaths are responsible for a disproportionate amount of repetitive crime and violence in society.

High-volume Bitcoin exchanges less likely to fail, but more likely breached, says study

As of April 2013, Bitcoin's market capitalization had soared to more than $1 billion, making it a frequent target of fraudsters. Bitcoins are encrypted virtual money created by computer programmers and not backed by any country or government.

A traceable form of cyber money, Bitcoins can be purchased and used much like hard currency to pay for goods and services, mostly over the Internet. Part of Bitcoins' attraction is its potential to reduce transaction fees for online purchases, as well as its mathematically-enforced protections against inflation.

Study authors Moore and Christin identified 40 Bitcoin exchanges worldwide that convert the cyber money into 33 hard currencies. Of those 40, 18 have gone out of business. Nine of the 40 experienced security breaches from hackers or other criminal activity, forcing five of them to subsequently close. Another 13 closed without any publicly announced breach, according to Moore and Christin.
From their study, the researchers found the failure rate of Bitcoin exchanges is 45 percent. The median lifetime of an exchange is just over one year, 381 days.

Of the 18 Bitcoin exchanges that closed, in 11 of those cases the authors were able to find evidence of whether or not the customers were reimbursed their money. Five exchanges didn't reimburse their customers. Six claim to have done so.

"The risk of losing funds stored at exchanges is real but uncertain," write Moore and Christin in "Beware the Middleman: Empirical Analysis of Bitcoin-Exchange Risk," which was invited for presentation at the 17th International Financial Cryptography and Data Security Conference held in Okinawa, Japan, April 1-5.

Facebook interests could help predict, track and map obesity

The higher the percentage of people in a city, town or neighborhood with Facebook interests suggesting a healthy, active lifestyle, the lower that area's obesity rate. At the same time, areas with a large percentage of Facebook users with television-related interests tend to have higher rates of obesity. Such are the conclusions of a study by Boston Children's Hospital researchers comparing geotagged Facebook user data with data from national and New York City-focused health surveys.

Together, the conclusions suggest that knowledge of people's online interests within geographic areas may help public health researchers predict, track and map obesity rates down to the neighborhood level, while offering an opportunity to design geotargeted online interventions aimed at reducing obesity rates.

Clenching fists 'can improve memory'

Memory can be improved simply by clenching the fists, a study suggests.

Clenching the right hand for 90 seconds helps in memory formation, while the same movement in the left improves memory recall, say US psychologists.

In an experiment, 50 adults performed better at remembering words from a long list when they carried out these movements.

The researchers think clenching a fist activates specific brain regions that are associated with memory processing.

Lead scientist Ruth Propper, of Montclair State University, Montclair, New Jersey, said the research suggests simple body movements can improve memory by temporarily changing the way the brain functions.

"Clenching your right hand immediately prior to learning information and clenching your left hand immediately before recalling it would be helpful to improve memory," Dr Propper told BBC News.

High performance semiconductor spray paint could be a game changer for organic electronics

Researchers at Wake Forest University's Organic Electronics group have come up with a novel solution to one of the biggest technological barriers facing the organic semiconductor industry today. Oana Jurchescu, an assistant professor of physics, and a team of researchers developed a high performance organic semiconductor 'spray paint' that can be applied to large surface areas without losing electric conductivity. This is a potentially game changing technology for a number of reasons.

Organic thin film transistors are currently deposited by one of three methods. Drop casting and spin coating conduct electricity well but are limited to small area applications. They could not be used to make a wall-sized, flexible video screen for instance. On the other hand, organic spray-on techniques can be applied to large areas but have poor performance when compared to their small-area counterparts.

Jurchescu's work provides the best of both worlds. The spray-deposition technology developed in her lab produced the highest performance organic thin film transistors for this method to date -- (April 2, 2013) -- comparable to those of drop casting and spin coating. Unlike drop casting and spin coating, her spray-deposition technology can be applied over large surfaces to any medium-from plastic and metal to human skin.

April 18, 2013

Famous performers and sportsmen tend to have shorter lives

Fame and achievement in performance-related careers may be earned at the cost of a shorter life, according to a study published online today in QJM: An International Journal of Medicine.

Based on the premise that an obituary in the New York Times (NYT) usually implies success in one's career, Professor Richard Epstein and Catherine Epstein analysed 1000 consecutive obituaries published in the NYT during 2009-2011 in terms of gender, age, occupation, and cause of death. They separated subjects into four broad occupational categories: performance/sport (including actors, singers, musicians, dancers, and sportspeople), non-performing creative (including writers, composers and visual artists), business/military/political, and professional/academic/religious.

Researchers abuzz over caffeine as 'cancer-cell killer'

Researchers from the University of Alberta are abuzz after using fruit flies to find new ways of taking advantage of caffeine's lethal effects on cancer cells -- results that could one day be used to advance cancer therapies for people.

Previous research has established that caffeine interferes with processes in cancer cells that control DNA repair, a finding that has generated interest in using the stimulant as a chemotherapy treatment. But given the toxic nature of caffeine at high doses, researchers from the faculties of medicine and dentistry and science instead opted to use it to identify genes and pathways responsible for DNA repair.

"The problem in using caffeine directly is that the levels you would need to completely inhibit the pathway involved in this DNA repair process would kill you," said Shelagh Campbell, co-principal investigator. "We've come at it from a different angle to find ways to take advantage of this caffeine sensitivity."

Increased brain activity predicts future onset of substance use

Do people get caught in the cycle of overeating and drug addiction because their brain reward centers are over-active, causing them to experience greater cravings for food or drugs?

In a unique prospective study Oregon Research Institute (ORI) senior scientist Eric Stice, Ph.D., and colleagues tested this theory, called the reward surfeit model. The results indicated that elevated responsivity of reward regions in the brain increased the risk for future substance use, which has never been tested before prospectively with humans. Paradoxically, results also provide evidence that even a limited history of substance use was related to less responsivity in the reward circuitry, as has been suggested by experiments with animals.

In a novel study using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Stice's team tested whether individual differences in reward region responsivity predicted overweight/obesity onset among initially healthy weight adolescents and substance use onset among initially abstinent adolescents. The neural response to food and monetary reward was measured in 162 adolescents. Body fat and substance use were assessed at the time of the fMRI and again one year later.

April 17, 2013

Harms of harsh discipline are softened by a loving mother

The use of harsh discipline of unwanted behaviour in children has long been controversial. Whether verbal (insults, disparaging remarks, threats) or physical (slapping/spanking), harsh discipline at all stages of childhood carries a large risk of manifesting antisocial 'externalising behaviours' in the child, including aggression, delinquency or hyperactivity.

But a new study published in the journal Parenting: Science and Practice suggests that these painful effects of harsh discipline can be moderated by the child's feelings of being loved by their mother.

The study, conducted among a group of Mexican-American adolescents by Dr Miguelina Germán of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, found that having a loving mother (or 'perception of maternal warmth') protected the youngster from externalizing problems to the extent that, at high levels of maternal warmth, harsh discipline was found to have no correlation with antisocial behaviour.

Where the child's perception of maternal warmth was lower, it still resulted in a positive relationship between harsh disciplinary practices and later externalising problems.

This would suggest that, as long as the child knows they're loved, and feels that it is coming from a good place, their experiences of being strictly disciplined is unlikely to result in antisocial behaviour further down the line.

Quantum computing taps nucleus of single atom

A team of Australian engineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has demonstrated a quantum bit based on the nucleus of a single atom in silicon, promising dramatic improvements for data processing in ultra-powerful quantum computers of the future.

Quantum bits, or qubits, are the building blocks of quantum computers, which will offer enormous advantages for searching expansive databases, cracking modern encryption, and modelling atomic-scale systems such as biological molecules and drugs.

The world-first result, to be published in Nature on April 18, brings these machines one-step closer, describing how information was stored and retrieved using the magnetic spin of a nucleus.

"We have adapted magnetic resonance technology, commonly known for its application in chemical analysis and MRI scans, to control and read-out the nuclear spin of a single atom in real time," says Associate Professor Andrea Morello from the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications at UNSW.

Big Bang Didn't Need God, Stephen Hawking Says

Our universe didn't need any divine help to burst into being, famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking told a packed house here at the California Institute of Technology Tuesday night (April 16).

Many people had begun queuing up for free tickets to Hawking's 8:00 p.m lecture, titled "The Origin of the Universe," 12 hours earlier. By 6:00 p.m. local time, the line was about a quarter-mile long.

A second auditorium and a Jumbotron-equipped lawn, which itself was jammed with an estimated 1,000 viewers, were needed to handle the overflow crowd. At least one person was observed offering $1,000 for a ticket, with no success. [Big Bang to Now in 10 Easy Steps]

Stephen Hawking began the event by reciting an African creation myth, and rapidly moved on to big questions such as, Why are we here?

He noted that many people still seek a divine solution to counter the theories of curious physicists, and at one point, he quipped, “What was God doing before the divine creation? Was he preparing hell for people who asked such questions?”

Scientists produce best image yet of atoms moving in real time

Call it the ultimate nature documentary. Scientists at the University of Toronto have recorded atomic motions in real time, offering a glimpse into the very essence of chemistry and biology at the atomic level.

Their recording is a direct observation of a transition state in which atoms undergo chemical transformation into new structures with new properties -- in this case the transfer of charge leading to metallic behaviour in organic molecules. It is described in a study reported in the April 18 issue of Nature.

"It's the first look at how chemistry and biology involve just a few key motions for even the most complex systems," says U of T chemistry and physics professor R. J. Dwayne Miller, principal investigator of the study. "There is an enormous reduction in complexity at the defining point, the transition state region, which makes chemical processes transferrable from one type of molecule to another. This is how new drugs or materials are made."

'Survival of the fittest' now applies to computers: Surprising similarities found between genetic and computer codes

"Survival of the fittest" originally referred to natural selection in biological systems, but new research from Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University scientists shows that this evolutionary theory also applies to technological systems.

Computational biologist Sergei Maslov, a research staff member in Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), holding appointments with Stony Brook University's Department of Physics and Astronomy and Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology, worked with Tin Yau Pang, a graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook, to compare the frequency with which components "survive" in two complex systems: bacterial genomes and operating systems on Linux computers. Their work, "Universal distribution of component frequencies in biological and technological systems," was published in the April 9 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Maslov, who received his PhD in Physics from Stony Brook in 1996, discussed the discovery on NPR's Marketplace Tech.

Maslov and Pang set out to determine not only why some specialized genes or computer programs are very common while others are fairly rare, but to see how many components in any system are so important that they can't be eliminated.

"If a bacteria genome doesn't have a particular gene, it will be dead on arrival," Maslov said. "How many of those genes are there? The same goes for large software systems. They have multiple components that work together and the systems require just the right components working together to thrive.'"

Acute stress primes brain for better cognitive and mental performance

Overworked and stressed out? Look on the bright side. Some stress is good for you.

"You always think about stress as a really bad thing, but it's not," said Daniela Kaufer, associate professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. "Some amounts of stress are good to push you just to the level of optimal alertness, behavioral and cognitive performance."

New research by Kaufer and UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow Elizabeth Kirby has uncovered exactly how acute stress -- short-lived, not chronic -- primes the brain for improved performance.

In studies on rats, they found that significant, but brief stressful events caused stem cells in their brains to proliferate into new nerve cells that, when mature two weeks later, improved the rats' mental performance.

"I think intermittent stressful events are probably what keeps the brain more alert, and you perform better when you are alert," she said.

Parents tend to share more bacteria with family dogs than children

As much as dog owners love their children, they tend to share more of themselves, at least in terms of bacteria, with their canine cohorts rather than their kids.

That is just one finding of a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder that looked at the types and transfer modes of microbes from the guts, tongues, foreheads and palms (or paws) of members of 60 American families, including canines. Identifying how such bacterial communities can be affected by environmental exposure may help scientists better understand how they can be manipulated to prevent or treat disease, say CU-Boulder Associate Professor Rob Knight and CU-Boulder doctoral student Se Jin Song, the study leaders.

Knight and his team sampled 159 people and 36 dogs. Seventeen of the 60 families had children at home ranging in age from 6 months to 18 years, 17 families had one or more dogs and no children, eight families had both children and dogs and 18 families had neither children nor dogs. Each family consisted of at least one couple between the ages of 26 and 87, and all of the children in the study were biologically related to the couples in the study.

April 16, 2013

Small in size, big on power: New microbatteries the most powerful yet

Though they be but little, they are fierce. The most powerful batteries on the planet are only a few millimeters in size, yet they pack such a punch that a driver could use a cellphone powered by these batteries to jump-start a dead car battery -- and then recharge the phone in the blink of an eye.

Developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the new microbatteries out-power even the best supercapacitors and could drive new applications in radio communications and compact electronics.

Led by William P. King, the Bliss Professor of mechanical science and engineering, the researchers published their results in the April 16 issue of Nature Communications.

"This is a whole new way to think about batteries," King said. "A battery can deliver far more power than anybody ever thought. In recent decades, electronics have gotten small. The thinking parts of computers have gotten small. And the battery has lagged far behind. This is a microtechnology that could change all of that. Now the power source is as high-performance as the rest of it."

Peel-and-stick solar cells

It may be possible soon to charge cell phones, change the tint on windows, or power small toys with peel-and-stick versions of solar cells, thanks to a partnership between Stanford University and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

A scientific paper, "Peel and Stick: Fabricating Thin Film Solar Cells on Universal Substrates," appears in the online version of Scientific Reports, a subsidiary of the British scientific journal Nature.

Peel-and-stick, or water-assisted transfer printing (WTP), technologies were developed by the Stanford group and have been used before for nanowire based electronics, but the Stanford-NREL partnership has conducted the first successful demonstration using actual thin film solar cells, NREL principal scientist Qi Wang said.

The university and NREL showed that thin-film solar cells less than one-micron thick can be removed from a silicon substrate used for fabrication by dipping them in water at room temperature. Then, after exposure to heat of about 90°C for a few seconds, they can attach to almost any surface.

Concert cacophony: Short-term hearing loss can be protective, not damaging, researchers find

Contrary to conventional wisdom, short-term hearing loss after sustained exposure to loud noise does not reflect damage to our hearing: instead, it is the body's way to cope.

The landmark finding could lead to improved protection against noise-induced hearing loss in future.

The research, led by University of New South Wales Professor Gary Housley, has found that "reversible hearing loss" is a physiological adaptation mechanism, allowing the cochlea (the auditory portion of the inner ear) to perform normally when exposed to noise stress.

"This explains why we lose our hearing for hours or days after we have been exposed to a rock concert, for example. The adaptation mechanism has been switched on," says Professor Housley, from UNSW Medicine, who worked with researchers from the University of Auckland and the University of California, San Diego.

The bigger the group, the smaller the chance of interracial friendship

The larger the group, the smaller the chance of forming interracial friendships, a new University of Michigan study shows.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study examines how the size of a community affects the realization of people's preferences for friends. U-M researchers Siwei Cheng and Yu Xie tested their theoretical model using both simulated and real data on actual friendships among 4,745 U.S. high school students.

"We found that total school size had a major effect on the likelihood that students would form interracial friendships. Large schools promote racial segregation and discourage interracial friendships," said Xie, a sociologist with the U-M College of Literature, Science and the Arts, Institute for Social Research and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

Their model incorporates the widely held assumption that people prefer to make friends with others of the same race. It also incorporates many other preferences that affect friendship formation. These factors include age, education, hobbies, personality, religious affiliation and political beliefs.

April 15, 2013

Our futures look bright, because we reject the possibility that bad things will happen

People believe they'll be happy in the future, even when they imagine the many bad things that could happen, because they discount the possibility that those bad things will actually occur, according to a new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"I've always been fascinated by the changeability of people's perceptions of happiness," says psychological scientist Ed O'Brien of the University of Michigan. "On some days our futures seem bright and exciting, but on other days the same exact future event can feel stressful and terrifying."

With this new research, O'Brien wanted to explore whether fluency -- how easy or difficult it feels to think about different events -- might play a role in how people think about well-being.

He conducted five studies, asking participants to complete online surveys with questions that addressed past and possible future experiences and perceptions of well-being.

Musicians who learn a new melody demonstrate enhanced skill after a night's sleep

A new study that examined how the brain learns and retains motor skills provides insight into musical skill.

Performance of a musical task improved among pianists whose practice of a new melody was followed by a night of sleep, says researcher Sarah E. Allen, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

The study is among the first to look at whether sleep enhances the learning process for musicians practicing a new piano melody.

The study found, however, that when two similar melodies were practiced one after the other, followed by sleep, any gains in speed and accuracy achieved during practice diminished overnight, said Allen, an assistant professor of music education in SMU's Meadows School of the Arts.

April 11, 2013

In sales, confidence and charisma may not seal the deal

Think of a stereotypical salesperson and you're likely to conjure up someone who's extraverted, gregarious, and assertive. But a new study reveals that "ambiverts," people who are neither introverted nor extraverted but who fall somewhere in between, tend to be the most effective salespeople.

The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Researcher Adam Grant of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania was driven to explore the relationship between sales and personality traits after realizing there was a significant gap in research on the topic.

"Although there are plenty of claims in the literature that more extraverted salespeople would perform better, the evidence was surprisingly weak," says Grant.

Based on his own research, Grant predicted that extraverts wouldn't outshine everyone else -- rather, people who had qualities of both extraversion and introversion would be the most effective in making and closing sales.

Subconscious mental categories help brain sort through everyday experiences

Researchers found that the brain breaks experiences into the "events," or related groups that help us mentally organize the day's many situations, using subconscious mental categories it creates. These categories are based on how the brain considers people, objects and actions are related in terms of how they tend to — or tend not to — pop up near one another at specific times.

Your brain knows it's time to cook when the stove is on, and the food and pots are out. When you rush away to calm a crying child, though, cooking is over and it's time to be a parent. Your brain processes and responds to these occurrences as distinct, unrelated events.

But it remains unclear exactly how the brain breaks such experiences into "events," or the related groups that help us mentally organize the day's many situations. A dominant concept of event-perception known as prediction error says that our brain draws a line between the end of one event and the start of another when things take an unexpected turn (such as a suddenly distraught child).

Nuclear Fusion Rocket Could Reach Mars in 30 Days

Nuclear fusion, the energy source that fuels the sun and other active stars, could one day propel rockets that allow humans to go to Mars and back in 30 days, researchers say.

Fusion-powered rockets promise to solve problems of deep-space travel that have long plagued plans for manned missions to Mars — long journeys, high costs and health risks, among them. Scientists at the University of Washington and a space-propulsion company named MSNW say they are getting to closer to creating a feasible fuel for travel to other planets.

"Using existing rocket fuels, it's nearly impossible for humans to explore much beyond Earth," John Slough, a UW research associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics, said in a statement. "We are hoping to give us a much more powerful source of energy in space that could eventually lead to making interplanetary travel commonplace."

Innovative self-cooling, thermoelectric system consumes no electricity

Researchers at the UPNA/NUP-Public University of Navarre have produced a prototype of a self-cooling thermoelectric device that achieves "free" cooling of over 30ºC in devices that give off heat. It is a piece of equipment that acts as a traditional cooler but which consumes no electricity because it obtains the energy it needs to function from the very heat that has to be dissipated.

The researchers want to apply this system to power converters and transformers present in power stations that produce renewable electrical power employing, for example, wind, solar photovoltaic, solar thermoelectric and hydraulic energy.David Astrain-Ulibarrena, of the UPNA/NUP's Department of Engineering, Mechanics, Energy and Materials and head researcher in the project, explains what the system consists of: "When these devices are functioning, they heat up and need to be cooled down.In many cases, heat exchangers with fans are used which naturally need to be powered externally and consume a certain amount of electrical power. What we do is take advantage of the heat flow emitted by the power converter and transformer to produce the electrical power needed to make the fans work. That way we achieve the cooling of the device and control its temperature, but without any energy cost."

April 8, 2013

Mind over matter? Core body temperature controlled by the brain

A team of researchers led by Associate Professor Maria Kozhevnikov from the Department of Psychology at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences showed, for the first time, that it is possible for core body temperature to be controlled by the brain. The scientists found that core body temperature increases can be achieved using certain meditation techniques (g-tummo) which could help in boosting immunity to fight infectious diseases or immunodeficiency.

Published in science journal PLOS ONE in March 2013, the study documented reliable core body temperature increases for the first time in Tibetan nuns practising g-tummo meditation. Previous studies on g-tummo meditators showed only increases in peripheral body temperature in the fingers and toes. The g-tummo meditative practice controls "inner energy" and is considered by Tibetan practitioners as one of the most sacred spiritual practices in the region. Monasteries maintaining g-tummo traditions are very rare and are mostly located in the remote areas of eastern Tibet.

The researchers collected data during the unique ceremony in Tibet, where nuns were able to raise their core body temperature and dry up wet sheets wrapped around their bodies in the cold Himalayan weather (-25 degree Celsius) while meditating. Using electroencephalography (EEG) recordings and temperature measures, the team observed increases in core body temperature up to 38.3 degree Celsius. A second study was conducted with Western participants who used a breathing technique of the g-tummo meditative practice and they were also able to increase their core body temperature, within limits.

April 5, 2013

A 'light switch' in brain illuminates neural networks: Scientists can see cells communicate by flipping a neural light switch

There are cells in your brain that recognize very specific places, and have that as one of their main jobs. These cells, called place cells, are found in an area behind your temple called the hippocampus. While these cells must be sent information from nearby cells to do their job, so far no one has been able to determine exactly what kind of nerve cells, or neurons, work with place cells to craft the code they create for each location. Neurons come in many different types with specialized functions. Some respond to edges and borders, others to specific locations, others act like a compass and react to which way you turn your head.

Now, researchers at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have combined a range of advanced techniques that enable them to identify which neurons communicate with each other at different times in the rat brain, and in doing so, create the animal's sense of location. Their findings are published in the 5 April issue of Science.

"A rat's brain is the size of a grape. Inside there are about fifty million neurons that are connected together at a staggering 450 billion places (roughly)," explains Professor Edvard Moser, director of the Kavli Institute. "Inside this grape-sized brain are areas on each side that are smaller than a grape seed, where we know that memory and the sense of location reside. This is also where we find the neurons that respond to specific places, the place cells. But from which cells do these place cells get information?"

April 3, 2013

Feeling hungry may protect the brain against Alzheimer's disease

The feeling of hunger itself may protect against Alzheimer's disease, according to study published today in the journal PLOS ONE. Interestingly, the results of this study in mice suggest that mild hunger pangs, and related hormonal pathways, may be as important to the much-discussed value of "caloric restriction" as actually eating less.

Caloric restriction is a regimen where an individual consumes fewer calories than average, but not so few that they become malnourished. Studies in many species have suggested that it could protect against neurodegenerative disorders and extend lifespans, but the effect has not been confirmed in human randomized clinical trials.

Efforts to understand how cutting calories may protect the brain have grown increasingly important with news that American Alzheimer's deaths are increasing, and because the best available treatments only delay onset in a subset of patients.

Study authors argue that hormonal signals are the middlemen between an empty gut and the perception of hunger in the brain, and that manipulating them may effectively counter age-related cognitive decline in the same way as caloric restriction.

Dark Matter Possibly Found by $2 Billion Space Station Experiment

A massive particle detector mounted on the International Space Station may have detected elusive dark matter at last, scientists announced today (April 3).

The detector, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), measures cosmic-ray particles in space. After detecting billions of these particles over a year and a half, the experiment recorded a signal that may be the result of dark matter, the hidden substance that makes up more than 80 percent of all matter in the universe.

AMS found about 400,000 positrons, the antimatter partner particles of electrons. The energies of these positrons suggest they might have been created when particles of dark matter collided and destroyed each other.

NASA will hold a press conference detailing the AMS science results at 1:30 p.m. EDT (1830 GMT) today. You can watch the AMS science results live on SPACE.com, via NASA TV.

Laser light zaps away cocaine addiction

By stimulating one part of the brain with laser light, researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at UC San Francisco (UCSF) have shown that they can wipe away addictive behavior in rats -- or conversely turn non-addicted rats into compulsive cocaine seekers.

"When we turn on a laser light in the prelimbic region of the prefrontal cortex, the compulsive cocaine seeking is gone," said Antonello Bonci, MD, scientific director of the intramural research program at the NIH's National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), where the work was done. Bonci is also an adjunct professor of neurology at UCSF and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Described this week in the journal Nature, the new study demonstrates the central role the prefrontal cortex plays in compulsive cocaine addiction. It also suggests a new therapy that could be tested immediately in humans, said Billy Chen of NIDA, the lead author of the study.

Any new human therapy would not be based on using lasers, but would most likely rely on electromagnetic stimulation outside the scalp, in particular a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Clinical trials are now being designed to test whether this approach works, Chen added.

Breakthrough cancer-killing treatment has no side-effects in mice: New chemistry may cure human cancers

Cancer painfully ends more than 500,000 lives in the United States each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The scientific crusade against cancer recently achieved a victory under the leadership of University of Missouri Curators' Professor M. Frederick Hawthorne. Hawthorne's team has developed a new form of radiation therapy that successfully put cancer into remission in mice. This innovative treatment produced none of the harmful side-effects of conventional chemo and radiation cancer therapies.

Clinical trials in humans could begin soon after Hawthorne secures funding.

"Since the 1930s, scientists have sought success with a cancer treatment known as boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT)," said Hawthorne, a recent winner of the National Medal of Science awarded by President Obama in the White House. "Our team at MU's International Institute of Nano and Molecular Medicine finally found the way to make BNCT work by taking advantage of a cancer cell's biology with nanochemistry."

Cancer cells grow faster than normal cells and in the process absorb more materials than normal cells. Hawthorne's team took advantage of that fact by getting cancer cells to take in and store a boron chemical designed by Hawthorne. When those boron-infused cancer cells were exposed to neutrons, a subatomic particle, the boron atom shattered and selectively tore apart the cancer cells, sparing neighboring healthy cells.

April 2, 2013

Monkey study reveals why middle managers suffer the most stress

A study by the universities of Manchester and Liverpool observing monkeys has found that those in the middle hierarchy suffer the most social stress. Their work suggests that the source of this stress is social conflict and may help explain studies in humans that have found that middle managers suffer the most stress at work.

Katie Edwards from Liverpool's Institute of Integrative Biology spent nearly 600 hours watching female Barbary macaques at Trentham Monkey Forest in Staffordshire. Her research involved monitoring a single female over one day, recording all incidents of social behaviour. These included agonistic behaviour like threats, chases and slaps, submissive behaviour like displacing, screaming, grimacing and hind-quarter presentation and affiliative behaviour such as teeth chatter, embracing and grooming.

The following day faecal samples from the same female were collected and analysed for levels of stress hormones at Chester Zoo's wildlife endocrinology laboratory.

Katie explains what she found: "Not unsurprisingly we recorded the highest level of stress hormones on the days following agonistic behaviour. However, we didn't find a link between lower stress hormone levels and affiliative behaviour such as grooming."

April 1, 2013

More Diagnoses of A.D.H.D. Causing Concern

Nearly one in five high school age boys in the United States and 11 percent of school-age children over all have received a medical diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to new data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

These rates reflect a marked rise over the last decade and could fuel growing concern among many doctors that the A.D.H.D. diagnosis and its medication are overused in American children.

The figures showed that an estimated 6.4 million children ages 4 through 17 had received an A.D.H.D. diagnosis at some point in their lives, a 16 percent increase since 2007 and a 53 percent rise in the past decade. About two-thirds of those with a current diagnosis receive prescriptions for stimulants like Ritalin or Adderall, which can drastically improve the lives of those with A.D.H.D. but can also lead to addiction, anxiety and occasionally psychosis.

'OK' contact lenses: New technique shows promise in restoring near vision without glasses

By middle age, most people have age-related declines in near vision (presbyopia) requiring bifocals or reading glasses. An emerging technique called hyperopic orthokeratology (OK) may provide a new alternative for restoring near vision without the need for glasses, according to new research.

The study, "Refractive Changes from Hyperopic Orthokeratology Monovision in Presbyopes," appears in the April issue of Optometry and Vision Science, official journal of the American Academy of Optometry. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins , a part of Wolters Kluwer Health.

For middle-aged patients with presbyopia, wearing OK contact lenses overnight can restore up-close vision in one eye, according to the study by Paul Gifford, PhD, FAAO, and Helen A Swarbrick, PhD, FAAO, of University of New South Wales, Sydney. "The authors have shown the feasibility of correcting one eye for near vision through OK, in which overnight contact lens wear shapes the cornea of one eye to allow in-focus near vision for reading," comments Anthony Adams, OD, PhD, Editor-in-Chief of Optometry and Vision Science.

New mathematical model shows how society becomes polarized

Anyone who has spent more than a few minutes watching some of the more partisan "news" networks lurking in the bowels of cable television is aware that America has grown more polarized in recent years. What's not so certain is why. In a paper published online March 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team of researchers at Stanford has devised a mathematical model that helps demonstrate what's behind the growing rift.

Hint: It's you, not them.

"We believe that polarization is less a reflection on the state of our society, but instead stems from the process people go through to form opinions," said Ashish Goel, a professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering (MS&E) and co-author of the paper.

Quantum dot commands light: A solid state ultrafast logic gate on a photon

If you could peek at the inner workings of a computer processor you would see billions of transistors switching back and forth between two states. In optical communications, information from the switches can be encoded onto light, which then travels long distances through glass fiber. Researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering are working to harness the quantum nature of light and semiconductors to expand the capabilities of computers in remarkable ways.

All computers, even the future quantum versions, use logic operations or "gates," which are the fundamental building blocks of computational processes. JQI scientists, led by Professor Edo Waks, have performed an ultrafast logic gate on a photon, using a semiconductor quantum dot. This research is described in the March 31 Advance Online Publication of Nature Photonics.

Photons are a proven transit system for information. In quantum devices, they are the ideal information carriers that relay messages between quantum bits (qubits) such as neutral atoms, ion traps, superconducting circuits, nitrogen vacancy centers, and of course the device used here: quantum dots. A quantum dot (QD) is a semiconductor structure that acts like an atom. This means it has allowed energy levels that can be populated and even shifted around using lasers and magnetic fields. Quantum dots are an attractive platform for quantum processing because they live inside a semiconductor material, thus the technology for integration with modern electronics already exists.