ASU Biodesign Institute researchers are using the unique conditions of spaceflight to examine how cells remain healthy or succumb to disease, particularly in the face of stress or damage. Their experiment will be launched into low earth orbit on April 5 aboard the space shuttle Discovery on mission STS-131.

The team hopes to provide fundamental new insight into the infectious disease process, and further undestanding of other progressive diseases, including immune disorders and cancer. The Results of the current study will also be used to help mitigate infectious disease risks to the crew, who are particularly vulnerable to infection, due to reduced immune function during spaceflight missions.

Although they only account for a fraction of the synapses in the visual cortex, neurons in the thalamus get their message across loud and clear by coordination -- simultaneously hitting the "send" button—according to a computer simulation developed by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

Their findings may hold important clues to how the brain encodes and processes information, which can be applied to a wide variety of applications, from understanding psychiatric disorders to the development of novel pharmaceuticals and new ways of handling information by computers or communication networks. The results are published in Science.

If our eyes could see radio waves, the nearby galaxy Centaurus A (Cen A) would be one of the biggest and brightest objects in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon.

What we can't see when looking at the galaxy in visible light is that it lies nestled between a pair of giant radio-emitting gas plumes ejected by its supersized black hole. Each plume is nearly a million light-years long.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope maps gamma rays, radiation that typically packs 100 billion times the energy of radio waves. Nevertheless, and to the surprise of many astrophysicists, Cen A's plumes show up clearly in the satellite's first 10 months of data. The study appears today in Science Express.

A team of paleontologists said this week that some sauropod species went through drastic changes in skull shape during normal growth.

Researchers came to the conclusion after examining the The skull of a juvenile sauropod dinosaur, rediscovered in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The fossil offers a rare chance to look at the early life history of Diplodocus, a 150 million-year-old sauropod from western North America.

The researchers believe these changes in skull shape may have been tied to feeding behavior, with adults and juveniles eating different foods to avoid competition. Young Diplodocus, with their narrower snouts, may also have been choosier browsers, selecting high quality plant parts.

Tracking 18- to 21-year-old men enlisted in the Israeli army, researchers from Tel Aviv University say they have demonstrated an important connection between the number of cigarettes young males smoke and their IQ--young men who smoke are likely dumber than their non-smoking peers.

The average IQ for a non-smoker was about 101, while the smokers' average was more than seven IQ points lower at about 94, the study determined. The IQs of young men who smoked more than a pack a day were lower still, at about 90. An IQ score in a healthy population of such young men, with no mental disorders, falls within the range of 84 to 116.

How quickly the Andes Mountains reached their current height, an average elevation of 13,000 feet, has been a contentious debate in geological circles. Some researchers claim the mountains rose abruptly and others maintain that the uplift was a more gradual process.

Paleoclimatologists writing in Science suggests that the quick-rise view is based on misinterpreted evidence. What some geologists interpret as signs of an abrupt rise are actually indications of ancient climate change, the researchers say. The confusion results when ratios of oxygen's two main isotopes, oxygen-18 and oxygen-16, are used to estimate past elevation.