If you want to know the quickest route to a restaurant or hotel, a taxi driver may be your best bet. And new research suggests their savvy skills are imprinted in their brains.
Turns out, the intensive training required of London taxi driver candidates may alter the drivers’ brains, changing the part of the brain in charge of memory and spatial navigation, the new study suggests — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Just one injection could be enough to mean people with haemophilia B no longer need medication, according to an early study in the UK and the US.
Six patients were given a virus that infects the body with the blueprints needed to produce blood-clotting proteins. Four of them could then stop taking their drugs.
Doctors said the gene therapy was potentially life-changing
Empathy lets us feel another person’s pain and drives us to help ease it. But is empathy a uniquely human trait? For decades researchers have debated whether non-human animals possess this attribute. Now a new study shows that rats will free a trapped cagemate in distress. The results mean that these rodents can be used to help determine the genetic and physiological underpinnings of empathy in people — via Slashdot
A cast iron cannonball rocketed through two homes and landed inside a minivan Tuesday when a Mythbusters
TV experiment went wrong.
Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage are hosts of the scientific experimentation show, which airs on The Discovery Channel. The pair was reportedly trying to figure out how fast a cannonball would travel, when it misfired and shot hundreds of feet in the air.
This cannonball was supposed to go through several barrels of water and through a cinder block, and then ultimately into the side of the hill,
said JD Nelson of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department.
Instead the cannonball flew over the foothills surrounding Camp Parks Military Firing Reservation, before spiralling back toward Dublin like a cruise missile — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has announced that it is back in business checking out the new habitable exoplanets recently discovered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope to see if they might be home to alien civilisations. The cash needed to restart SETI’s efforts has come in part from the US Air Force Space Command, who are interested in using the organisation’s detection instruments for space situational awareness
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Research is beginning to indicate that the culprit in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other diseases is the activity of tiny bits of misfolded amyloid-beta protein (small protein aggregates), which have a toxic, destructive effect on neurons.
Now a team of researchers in Berlin have found that orcein, historically a red lichen-derived food and fabric colour, appears to reduce the abundance of these toxic bits (called precursors because they eventually lead to large plaques). Both orcein and O4, a small blue pigment molecule similar to one in the complex 14-molecule orcein compound, bind to the pre-fibrous amyloid-beta aggregates, transforming them to large plaques which are not thought to be neurotoxic — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A team of researchers has confirmed five astronauts who stayed long-term at the International Space Station were able to prevent bone density loss by taking osteoporosis drugs.
The finding is expected to draw attention as something to help astronauts maintain their health when in space for long periods — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Primates have a face recognition system that enables them to distinguish between individuals, and now it seems some wasps do too.
But the new study has also found wasps are likely to have evolved their ability quite separately and it may work in a different way.
Michael Sheehan, a PhD student at the University of Michigan in the USA, and his supervisor, Dr Elizabeth Tibbetts, report their discovery in the latest issue of Science — via redwolf.newsvine.com
River Murray Turtle embryos can adjust their developmental rate so that all the eggs in a clutch can hatch around the same time, a new study has found.
Young turtles face many challenges when they hatch and venture into the world. Synchronous hatching increases their survival chances, as predators are swamped by high numbers of prey. As a large group, hatchlings can also work together to dig their way out of the nest more easily.
Scientists investigated incubation and group hatching in the River Murray Turtle, which is a species restricted to the Murray-Darling River system in southeastern Australia. Although the temperature of the nest affects the developmental rate of eggs, researchers discovered another factor that influences their growth rate — embryo to embryo communication.
Turtle embryos are somehow communicating their developmental rates to each other so that they can emerge as a group,
said Ricky-John Spencer, zoologist from the University of Western Sydney, and co-author of the study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society toda — via redwolf.newsvine.com
GCHQ has launched a code-breaker challenge as part of its attempts to unearth fresh talent from unconventional sources.
The signals intelligence agency’s canyoucrackit
challenge invites would-be codebreakers to crack a visual code at canyoucrackit.co.uk The campaign will be supported in social media channels, including blogs and forums.
GCHQ traditionally recruits graduates but it is also keen to employ talented self-taught codebreakers and those with an interest in ethical hacking too, an audience traditional recruitment schemes and advertising campaigns might miss. The agency has no interest in recruiting anyone who has even dabbled in criminal hacking — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Using fungi to kill coca and other illegal drug crops would be a risky tactic, as there is not enough data about how to control these killer moulds and what effect they could have on people and the environment, according to a US study released Wednesday.
The US Congress asked scientists to look into whether some types of fungi, called mycoherbicides, could stem the flow of illicit drugs into the United States by killing the plants used to make cocaine, marijuana and opium.
But scientists from the National Research Council, one of the national academies of science that advises US policymakers, said evidence about the fungi was sketchy and incomplete — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A 3D printer is being used to create bone-like
material which researchers claim can be used to repair injuries.
The engineers say the substance can be added to damaged natural bone where it acts as a scaffold for new cells to grow.
It ultimately dissolves with no apparent ill-effects
, the team adds.
The researchers say doctors should be able to use the process to custom-order replacement bone tissue in a few years time
ANU researchers have discovered a new type of cell that boosts the human body’s ability to fight infection and disease.
The cell, named the natural killer T follicular helper, is able to recognise infectious bacteria such as pneumonia and meningitis before triggering an antibody response to fight off the infection — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Scientists using the latest in modern boffinry to peel back the layers of time report that they have made important new discoveries at Stonehenge, hinting that the site was already a very ancient centre of ritual when the stones were erected more than 5,000 years ago.
In particular, archaeologists are excited by the discovery of two pits on the ancient Cursus
pathway near Stonehenge. When viewed from the mysterious Heel Stone
— which stands alone just outside the entrance to the henge proper — these pits are aligned with the positions of sunrise and sunset at the midsummer solstice, arguing that they played a role in celestially-based rituals. It’s thought that the pits may have held large standing stones, wooden poles or totems, or perhaps been used for ceremonial fires — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A chemical used by golden orb web spiders to keep ants at bay could make a useful pest control agent, say researchers.
The research is published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Golden orb web spiders (Nephila antipodiana) are a common species found all over the world, particularly in tropical areas including in Southeast Asia and Australia.
They weave giant webs over 1 metre across, catching all manner of insects from flies to cicadas for their supper.
These spiders — and the insects they catch in their web — are potential prey for ants, says researcher Professor Mark Elgar, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Melbourne, so it’s surprising that ants are never found foraging on the webs of these spiders — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Cleaning generally isn’t anyone’s favourite activity, but it’s a lot less fun when you’re spending your hard-earned dollars on several supplies. You can, however, effectively clean your home with a few things you probably already have. Here’s how to do it — via Lifehacker
The battle over scarce radio spectrum that has embroiled the mobile broadband world even extends to a little-known type of wireless network that promises to reconnect the human nervous system with paralysed limbs.
At its monthly meeting next week, the US Federal Communications Commission will consider whether four sets of frequencies between 413MHz and 457MHz can be used by networks of sensors implanted in patients who suffer from various forms of paralysis. One intended purpose of these MMNS (medical micropower network systems) is to transmit movement commands from a sensor on a patient’s spinal cord, through a wearable MCU (master control unit), to implants that electrically stimulate nerves. The same wireless technology might be used in devices to restore sight or hearing — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The task was to help local scientists try to persuade village women to place chunks of iron in their cooking pots to get more iron in their diet and lower the risk of anemia. Great in theory, but the women weren’t having it.
It was an enticing challenge in a country where iron deficiency is so rampant, 60 per cent of women face premature labour, haemorrhaging during childbirth and poor brain development among their babies.
A disease of poverty, iron deficiency affects 3.5 billion people in the world.
The people they worked with — the poorest of the poor
— can’t afford red meat or pricey iron pills, and the women won’t switch to iron cooking pots because they find them heavy and costly. Yet a small chunk of iron could release life-saving iron into the water and food. But what shape would the women be willing to place in their cooking pots?
We knew some random piece of ugly metal wouldn’t work… so we had to come up with an attractive idea,
he said. It became a challenge in social marketing
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
It’s no surprise bees have extraordinary noses, since they can detect pollen from a mile away.
Believe it or not, in some airports they are even being used to sniff out explosives and drugs, and as some Christchurch scientists are discovering soon honey bees might be able to add diagnosing tuberculosis to their CVs.
Hand picked honey bees have no idea they could revolutionise the way Tuberculosis is diagnosed. Believe it or not, humans with the lethal infectious disease have sweet floral smelling breath. People can’t smell it, but bees can — via redwolf.newsvine.com
This remarkable image comes from Sea, a collection of photographs that is published this month by Abrams. In it the fantastic and unusual marine creatures have been treated as still life objects by American photographer Mark Laita.
Underwater photography often gives animals a blue-green tint, because of absorption in the red part of the light spectrum. To show colours as they actually are, Laita photographed the creatures in tanks using studio strobe lighting — via New Scientist
RSS – Posts