from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Researchers have found a way to classify breast cancer tumors into 10
distinct categories ranging from very treatable to extremely aggressive,
a major step on the way to the long-sought goal of precisely targeting
therapies for patients.
The new categories, described in a study released Wednesday, should
help scientists devise fresh approaches to treat some of the cancers and
could spare many women the risks and pain of unnecessarily toxic
treatments, oncologists said.
"If you belong to one group you'll need one therapy, and if you're in
another you'll need another," said Dr. Carlos Caldas, a breast cancer
geneticist at the University of Cambridge in England who helped oversee
the research. For some women, he added, tumor typing might indicate that
traditional chemotherapy isn't warranted at all. "A lot of women are
being overtreated," he said. "Can we spare them that?"
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
BOSTON -- The River Street Bridge here is normally unremarkable, the
kind of structure people drive over every day without a thought. When it
fell into disrepair, state officials knew that replacing it would
normally involve two years of detours and frustration for local
drivers.
Instead, they did it over a weekend. By using "accelerated bridge
construction" techniques, a collection of technologies and methods that
can shave months if not years off the process of building and replacing
critical infrastructure, Massachusetts is at the forefront of a national
effort that is aimed at putting drivers first.
"This will be the new normal," said Victor M. Mendez, the head of the
Federal Highway Administration.
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from BBC News
The mystery surrounding the source of the highest-energy particles
known in the Universe has grown deeper. The particles, known as cosmic
rays, can show up with energies a million times higher than the biggest
particle accelerators on Earth can produce.
Astrophysicists believed that only two sources could make them:
supermassive black holes in active galaxies, or so-called gamma ray
bursts. A study in Nature has now all but ruled out gamma ray
bursts as the cause.
Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are the brightest events we know of, though
their sources remain a matter of some debate. They can release in hours
more energy than our Sun will ever produce. Computer models predict that
GRBs could be the source of cosmic rays--mostly subatomic particles
called protons, accelerated to incredibly high speeds.
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from the Guardian (UK)
It was a salutary lesson for the Royal Society and made clear that
the formidable intelligence of its scientific membership was no
guarantee of sound business judgement.
The debacle played out in the 17th century when the country's most
prestigious scientific organisation ploughed its money into the lavishly
illustrated Historia Piscium, or History of Fishes, by
John Ray and Francis Willughby. Though groundbreaking in 1686, the book
flopped and nearly broke the bank, forcing the Royal Society to withdraw
from its promise to finance the publication of Newton's
Principia, one of the most important works in the history of
science.
Today, digital images from Historia Piscium, including a
stunning engraving of a flying fish, are made available with more than a
thousand others in a new online picture archive launched by the Royal
Society.
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from Nature News
By tacking drugs onto molecules targeting rogue brain cells,
researchers have alleviated symptoms in newborn rabbits that are similar
to those of cerebral palsy in children. Cerebral palsy refers to a group
of incurable disorders characterized by impairments in movement, posture
and sensory abilities.
In general, medicines tend to act broadly rather than influence
certain sets of cells in the brain. "You don't expect large molecules to
enter the brain, and if they do, you don't expect them to target
specific cells, and immediately act therapeutically--but all of this
happened," says study co-author Rangaramanujam Kannan, a chemical
engineer at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in
Baltimore, Maryland. The paper is published today in Science
Translational Medicine.
According the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
approximately 1 in 303 children have cerebral palsy by age 8, which
usually results from neurological damage in the womb, caused by, for
example, a kink in the umbilical cord that briefly dimishes the foetus'
oxygen, or maternal infection. Such injuries lead to the activation of
immune cells in the brain called microglia and astrocytes, which cause
further inflammation and exacerbate the damage.
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from BBC News
Two 70-year-old papers by Alan Turing on the theory of code breaking
have been released by the government's communications headquarters,
GCHQ. It is believed Mr. Turing wrote the papers while at Bletchley Park
working on breaking German Enigma codes.
A GCHQ mathematician said the fact that the contents had been
restricted "shows what a tremendous importance it has in the foundations
of our subject." It comes amid celebrations to mark the centenary of Mr.
Turing's birth.
The two papers are now available to view at the National Archives at
Kew, west London. GCHQ was able to approximately date the papers because
in one example Mr. Turing had made reference to Hitler's age.
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from NPR
Activity cuts the risk of Alzheimer's disease and slows cognitive
decline, even in the very old, according to a new study.
There's been plenty of evidence for the "use it or lose it" theory of
brain capacity. But this study is one of the first to show that activity
of all sorts benefits people over age 80, even if they're not
"exercising."
"When we say active lifestyle, it's not just about physical
activity," says Aron Buchman, an associate professor in the Department
of Neurological Sciences at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago,
who co-authored the study. Social interaction is probably just as
important as physical activity, Buchman told Shots. Indeed,
recent research has shown that even speaking more than one language
reduces the risk of dementia.
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from ScienceNOW
Beginning 400 million years ago, nautiluslike creatures known as
ammonites--which sported dozens of tentacles and lived in spiral,
conical, or helical shells--roamed the open ocean in search of fish and
other prey. At least that's what paleontologists have long assumed. But
a new study finds that some members of this ancient group--relatives of
octopi, squid, and cuttlefish--were far more sedentary creatures,
spending most of their lives at spots where methane bubbled up from the
sea floor.
Ammonites were one of the most long-lived groups of prehistoric
animals, only dying out 65 million years ago, when they succumbed to the
same mass extinction that claimed the dinosaurs. Scientists have
typically found their fossils--shells that range from thumbnail-size to
2 meters across--in rocks derived from sea-floor sediments that contain
no bottom-dwelling life, indicating that the creatures inhabited the
open ocean and then sank to the barren sea floor after they died.
But new analyses of fossils unearthed in southwestern South Dakota
dispel the notion that all ammonites were nomadic. Researchers led by
Neil Landman, an invertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of
Natural History in New York City, studied fossils embedded in a
13-meter-high, 20-meter-wide chunk of limestone that formed almost 75
million years ago, when South Dakota lay at the bottom of a shallow
inland sea. In addition to ammonites, they found fossils of other marine
creatures such as clams, sponges, corals, and fish.
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from Science News
The farmer's wife in the nursery rhyme "Three Blind Mice" may need a
different mouse hunting strategy. Thanks to new cell transplants, some
formerly night-blind mice can see in the dark again, perhaps even well
enough to evade the carving knife of the farmer's wife.
Injections of light-gathering nerve cells called rods into the
retinas of night-blind mice integrated into the brain's visual system
and restored sight, Robin Ali of the University College London Institute
of Ophthalmology and colleagues report online April 18 in
Nature. The finding gives new hope that cell transplants may
reverse damage to the brain and eyes caused by degenerative diseases and
help heal spinal cord injuries.
Other researchers have tried, and failed, to repair damaged retinas
with stem cell transplants, says Christian Schmeer, a neurologist at the
University Hospital Jena in Germany. The new study is the first to
demonstrate that transplanted nerve cells can restore function. "They
show it is possible and they do it convincingly," Schmeer says. At the
same time, Schmeer cautions, "there's still a lot to be done until it's
ready for clinical use."
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from Smithsonian
How did dinosaurs come to rule the Mesozoic world? No one knows for
sure, but the way dinosaurs reproduced probably had something to do with
it. Dinosaurs grew fast, started mating before they hit skeletal
maturity, and laid clutches of multiple eggs--a life history that may
have allowed dinosaurs to rapidly proliferate and diversify. And egg
laying itself may have been critical to why many dinosaurs were able to
attain gigantic sizes. By laying clutches of small eggs, dinosaurs may
have been able to sidestep biological constraints that have limited the
size of mammals.
But there was a catch. Consider a large dinosaur, such as
Diplodocus. Infant Diplodocus hatched out of eggs
roughly the size of a large grapefruit, and if they were lucky, the
dinosaurs grew to be more than 80 feet long as adults. And the little
sauropods were not just small copies of adults. Like many other
dinosaurs, individual Diplodocus changed drastically during
their lives, and young dinosaurs may have preferred different habitats
and food sources from those of more mature individuals. As outlined by
Daryl Codron and co-authors in a new Biology Letters paper,
this peculiar life history may have been a consequence of laying
eggs.
Codron's group created a virtual dinosaur assemblage to see how
intensely dinosaurs might have competed with one another as they grew.
If all dinosaurs started off relatively small, then the largest species
had to pass through a series of size classes and change their ecological
role as they matured. This ramped up the pressure on young dinosaurs.
Juvenile dinosaurs had to contend with other juveniles as well as
dinosaurs that topped out at smaller sizes.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
BOARDMAN, Ore. -- A new link in the world's future energy supply
could soon be built here on the Columbia River, and it would have
nothing to do with the vast acres of wind turbines or the mammoth
hydroelectric dams that give this region's power sources one of the
cleanest carbon footprints in the nation.
Instead, Boardman is pursuing one of the oldest and dirtiest of
fossil fuels: coal. The question is not whether to use it to produce new
energy but whether to make what some say would be tainted new
profits.
Even as coal-fired power plants are being phased out in Oregon and
Washington, Boardman, an agribusiness outpost across the river from
vineyards owned by the Columbia Crest winery and where the Department of
Energy recently awarded $25 million to an innovative biofuel producer,
is among at least half a dozen ports in the region weighing whether to
ship millions of tons of coal to Asia from the Powder River Basin of
Wyoming and Montana.
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from BBC News
Honey bees that dance to give directions to flowers make more errors
when performing horizontally due to gravity, say researchers. Female
foragers perform "waggle runs" on the hive's honeycomb for other bees.
The intricate movements display the direction and distance of the
flowers from the hive.
Researchers from the University of Sussex are "eavesdropping" on bees
to find out more about where they feed in Britain. Dr. Margaret
Couvillon has spent three years decoding the bees' unique method of
communication.
Using observation hives with a glass wall, researchers have filmed
the bees without disturbing their natural behaviour. In honey bee
society, forager bees scout out flower resources and return to the hive
to perform a detailed dance made up of "waggle runs" on the honeycomb
that communicate direction and distance.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Even among psychiatric disorders, depression is a difficult disease
to diagnose. Its causes remain a mystery, its symptoms can't be defined
with precision, and treatments are spotty at best.
But that may soon change. Scientists are looking for ways to identify
patients with depression as reliably as they diagnose cardiovascular
disease, diabetes and cancer. A new study takes a significant, though
preliminary, step in that direction by demonstrating that a simple blood
test can distinguish between people who are depressed and those who are
not.
The test examined a panel of 28 biological markers that circulate in
the bloodstream and found that 11 of them could predict the presence of
depression at accuracy levels that ranged from medium to large. And if
that were not remarkable enough, researchers pulled off this feat in a
group of teenagers, whose angst often defies all efforts at
classification.
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from Nature News
When a listener tunes in to one voice and ignores another, his or her
brain discards the information coming from the superfluous speaker,
researchers have found.
The findings, from a study using electrodes implanted into human
brains, could help scientists to design better hearing aids and cochlear
implants, and to understand how the process breaks down in ageing or
degenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. The report is
published in Nature.
Psychologists call our ability to pick one voice out of a hubbub the
'cocktail party effect.' But how the auditory system makes sense of
speech in confusing conditions hasn't been clear. "That's one of the
remarkable things that humans can do naturally," says neuroscientist
Edward Chang at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the
study.
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from CBS News
Stay positive--it just might save your life. New research shows being
a positive-thinking person can lead to protective benefits for the
heart. The study found people with a positive look at life had a reduced
risk for heart attack, stroke and other cardiovascular events.
But there's a distinction between being optimistic and being content.
The researchers note that simply not being sad or depressed doesn't mean
you're happy--the people in their study who had better heart health
genuinely saw the world more positively.
"The absence of the negative is not the same thing as the presence of
the positive," study author Julia Boehm, a research fellow in the
department of society, human development, and health at Harvard School
of Public Health in Boston, told HealthPop.
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from the Ventura County Star
Ventura County citrus growers are scared--terrified, even--about what
they say will be the inevitable local arrival of the dreaded citrus
disease huanglongbing, now that it has been discovered in Los Angeles
County.
"California had been the only place where citrus is grown
commercially where huanglongbing hadn't been detected until last week,"
said Leslie Leavens-Crowe, a partner with lemon growers Leavens Ranches,
in Santa Paula. "It's just a body blow."
Leavens-Crowe also chairs the Ventura County task force on Asian
citrus psyllids and huanglongbing. The Asian citrus psyllid insect
carries the tree disease, which the task force hopes to delay in its
spread. The disease kills citrus trees, has no cure, and has devastated
the Florida citrus industry. Fearing such a result here, the task force
is ramping up messages to people with backyard trees not to share
plants, cuttings or fruit, especially if it has stems and leaves.
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from BBC News
The DNA of people living in Scotland has "extraordinary" and
"unexpected" diversity, according to a new study. The Scotland's DNA
project, led by Edinburgh University's Dr. Jim Wilson, has tested almost
1,000 Scots in the last four months to determine the genetic roots of
people in the country.
The project discovered four new male lineages, which account for one
in 10 Scottish men. It also found that actor Tom Conti is related to
Napoleon Bonaparte. Scotland's DNA was set up by Dr. Wilson along with
historian Alistair Moffat, the current rector of St Andrews
University.
Using new technology, scientists were able to pinpoint a
participant's DNA marker, from which they tracked the person's history
and lineage. Conti and Napoleon both share the M34 marker, which is
Saracen in origin.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
Apparently, location, location, location is the latest twist on
electric vehicles and the environment: Whether an electric car such as
the Nissan Leaf protects the atmosphere from greenhouse gases depends on
where it's charged, according to a new study. Such a car is no better
than a standard gasoline-powered subcompact such as a Hyundai Elantra in
cities such as Denver and Wichita, but far exceeds even the best hybrids
in Southern California.
That's the finding of a study of electricity generation, greenhouse
gas emissions and electric vehicles by the Union of Concerned
Scientists. The variations in how beneficial an electric vehicle is for
reducing pollution that causes global warming result from regional
differences in how electricity is generated.
The scientific organization, which is a vocal proponent for federal
requirements mandating increased fuel efficiency in vehicles, said in
regions covering 45 percent of the nation's population, "electricity is
generated with a larger share of cleaner energy resources--such as
renewables and natural gas--meaning that EVs produce lower global
warming emissions than even the most efficient gasoline hybrids."
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from Nature News
In a feat of technical mastery, condensed-matter physicists have
managed to detect the elusive third constituent of an electron--its
'orbiton.' The achievement could help to resolve a long-standing mystery
about the origin of high-temperature superconductivity, and aid in the
construction of quantum computers.
Isolated electrons cannot be split into smaller components, earning
them the designation of a fundamental particle. But in the 1980s,
physicists predicted that electrons in a one-dimensional chain of atoms
could be split into three quasiparticles: a 'holon' carrying the
electron's charge, a 'spinon' carrying its spin (an intrinsic quantum
property related to magnetism) and an 'orbiton' carrying its orbital
location.
"These quasiparticles can move with different speeds and even in
different directions in the material," says Jeroen van den Brink, a
condensed-matter physicist at the Institute for Theoretical Solid State
Physics in Dresden, Germany. Atomic electrons have this ability because
they behave like waves when confined within a material. "When excited,
that wave splits into multiple waves, each carrying different
characteristics of the electron; but they cannot exist independently
outside the material," he explains.
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from ScienceNOW
In 2009, while searching for ways to help endangered birds, research
technician Chris Grooms heard that a chimney on his university campus
used to host a migratory species known as the chimney swift. When he
investigated, he found a pile of bird excrement 2 meters deep.
The poop lay at the bottom of a five-story-high chimney and had been
deposited over 48 years by the birds, which had roosted there until the
top was capped in 1992. Now, Grooms and his colleagues have dug into
that pile of guano, revealing new clues about why the chimney swift and
other species like it have begun to disappear.
Grooms volunteers for an environmental group in Ontario, Canada,
that's trying to conserve local wildlife. He also works in a lab at
Queen's University in Kingston that studies sediments in lakes. As dirt
and dead things sink to the bottom of these bodies of water, they
preserve a record of environmental conditions. Grooms wondered if the
same thing had happened with his pile of bird poop. He brought the idea
to the head of the lab, ecologist John Smol. Smol was intrigued: "It
could be 2 meters of bird poop, or it could be a pretty important
story."
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
In the fall of 2010, Dr. Ferric C. Fang made an unsettling discovery.
Dr. Fang, who is editor in chief of the journal Infection and
Immunity, found that one of his authors had doctored several
papers.
It was a new experience for him. "Prior to that time," he said in an
interview, "Infection and Immunity had only retracted nine
articles over a 40-year period."
The journal wound up retracting six of the papers from the author,
Naoki Mori of the University of the Ryukyus in Japan. And it soon became
clear that Infection and Immunity was hardly the only victim of
Dr. Mori's misconduct. Since then, other scientific journals have
retracted two dozen of his papers, according to the watchdog blog
Retraction Watch.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
April Dunlap was 17 and weighed 165 pounds when she began a diet and
exercise regimen. After three months, the 5-foot-5 teen had lost the 20
pounds she had hoped to shed. But she kept going. "It was like a drug,"
she said. "I always wanted to lose a little more."
When she hit 120 pounds, Dunlap's mother worried that April was
losing too much weight. The family's doctor agreed. Four months after
Dunlap's diet began, she found herself in a treatment program for
anorexia nervosa. After only 10 days, she had gained enough weight to be
discharged from the hospital.
"If it wasn't for my mother, it would have taken a lot longer for me
to realize I had a problem," said Dunlap, now 28 and living in
Charleston, W.Va.
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from BBC News
Orangutans show remarkably advanced engineering skills when making
nests, researchers say. The researchers, led by scientists at the
University of Manchester, followed and filmed the apes in the forests of
Sumatra.
The team also took orangutans' nests apart to see how they were
constructed. Their study, in the journal PNAS, reveals that the
apes select thick branches for a scaffold and thinner branches for a
springy mattress.
Roland Ennos from the University of Manchester, a senior member of
the research team, told BBC Nature that the behaviour revealed
the animals' "sophisticated tool use and construction skills." "They
show a lot of engineering know-how in how they build their nests," he
said.
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from Science News
PORTLAND, Ore. -- The simple act of walking continues to take strange
detours among ancient human ancestors.
To wit, 1.5 million-year-old footprints excavated in Africa,
initially thought to reflect a thoroughly modern walking style, were
instead made by individuals that walked differently than people today
do, researchers reported April 13 at the annual meeting of the American
Association of Physical Anthropologists. And findings presented April 12
at the meeting revealed the surprisingly apelike qualities of foot
fossils from a 2 million-year-old species that some researchers regard
as the root of the Homo genus.
These reports come on the heels of evidence that a previously unknown
member of the human evolutionary family 3.4 million years ago possessed
a gorillalike grasping big toe and an ungainly stride.
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from Popular Science
With their strange 60-atom structures, buckyballs could have
potential as drug carriers, medical tracers, cancer fighters and other
interesting applications in the human body, but studies examining their
impact on the body have had mixed results. A group of French researchers
set out to study its toxicity and other effects, and came up with a
surprising find--not only are buckyballs safe, a buckyball diet doubled
the lifespan of lab rats.
It's a limited study, and the longer-lasting rats could be the result
of a calorie-restricted diet instead, as some skeptics have pointed out.
But it raises some interesting questions about the potential health
benefits of buckyballs.
Computer simulations and other studies have shown buckyballs--more
specifically, the fullerene known as C60--are soluble in fat and can
cross cell membranes, which is one reason why they could be useful as
drug carriers or molecular targets. But this ability could also make
them toxic. Previous research has been mixed; in one study, small doses
of fullerene were more toxic than large doses.
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from NPR
If you've ever had a bacterial infection like staph or strep throat,
your doctor may have prescribed penicillin. But if you've had the flu or
a common cold virus, penicillin won't work. That's because
antibacterials only kill bacteria, and both the flu and the common cold
are viruses. So for illnesses like the flu, doctors prescribe antiviral
drugs, which target the mechanisms that viruses use to reproduce.
"For example, there are antivirals for the flu that interfere with
the virus as it tries to get out of its host cell," says science writer
Carl Zimmer. "So this molecule latches on to that particular protein
that the virus uses to escape, and interferes with it so that the virus
is trapped inside."
Zimmer's latest piece for Wired magazine profiles the
scientists who are developing antiviral medications, and examines the
new ways medicine is working to attack viruses.
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from Nature News
Medical geneticists are giving genome sequencing its first big test
in the clinic by applying it to some of their most baffling cases. By
the end of this year, hundreds of children with unexplained forms of
intellectual disability and developmental delay will have had their
genomes decoded as part of the first large-scale, national clinical
sequencing projects.
These programmes, which were discussed last month at a rare-diseases
conference hosted by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge,
UK, aim to provide a genetic diagnosis that could end years of
uncertainty about a child's disability. In the longer term, they could
provide crucial data that will underpin efforts to develop therapies.
The projects are also highlighting the logistical and ethical
challenges of bringing genome sequencing to the consulting room. "The
overarching theme is that genome-based diagnosis is now hitting
mainstream medicine," says Han Brunner, a medical geneticist at the
Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands, who leads
one of the projects.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Diagnoses of attention hyperactivity disorder among children have
increased dramatically in recent years, rising 22 percent from 2003 to
2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But
many experts believe that this may not be the epidemic it appears to
be.
Many children are given a diagnosis of A.D.H.D., researchers say,
when in fact they have another problem: a sleep disorder, like sleep
apnea. The confusion may account for a significant number of A.D.H.D.
cases in children, and the drugs used to treat them may only be
exacerbating the problem.
"No one is saying A.D.H.D. does not exist, but there's a strong
feeling now that we need to rule out sleep issues first," said Dr.
Merrill Wise, a pediatric neurologist and sleep medicine specialist at
the Methodist Healthcare Sleep Disorders Center in Memphis.
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
In the largest collaborative study of the brain to date, scientists
using imaging technology at more than 100 centers worldwide have for the
first time zeroed in on genes that they agree play a role in
intelligence and memory.
Scientists working to understand the biology of brain function--and
especially those using brain imaging, a blunt tool--have been badly
stalled. But the new work, involving more than 200 scientists, lays out
a strategy for breaking the logjam. The findings appear in a series of
papers published online Sunday in the journal Nature
Genetics.
"What's really new here is this movement toward crowdsourcing brain
research," said Paul Thompson, a professor of neurology at the UCLA and
senior author of one of the papers. "This is an example of social
networking in science, and it gives us a power we have not had."
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from the Christian Science Monitor
The Sun erupted in an amazing solar flare Monday, unleashing an
intense eruption of super-heated plasma that arced high above the star's
surface before blasting out into space.
The powerful solar flare occurred at 1:45 p.m. EDT (1745 GMT) and
registered as a moderate M1.7-class on the scale of sun storms, placing
it firmly in the middle of the scale used by scientists to measure flare
strength. The storm is not the strongest this year from the sun, but
photos and video of the solar flare captured by NASA spacecraft revealed
it to be an eye-popping display of magnetic plasma.
"Great eruption happening on the sun now," scientists with NASA's
Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) wrote in a Twitter post.
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