Howard Hughes had a 'Spruce Goose' but the University of Michigan now has a 'flying fish' - an unmanned seaplane with a 7-foot wingspan believed to be the first seaplane that can initiate and perform its own takeoffs and landings on water.

Funded by the Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), it is designed to advance the agency's "persistent ocean surveillance" program.

Engineering researchers from U-M recently returned from sea trials off the coast of Monterey, Calif., where they demonstrated the craft's capability to DARPA officials.

Patricia Ford, MD, a hematologist/oncologist and Medical Director of the Center for Bloodless Medicine and Surgery at Pennsylvania Hospital, is one of the pioneers of bloodless surgery and has been teaching its technique to doctors around the world.

One technique a bloodless surgery can employ is called “cell salvage” in which blood lost during surgery is siphoned from the body, passed through a filter for cleaning and returned to the body. It can also be used by the physician during surgery to limit blood loss and to avoid the need for transfusion of blood from sources other than the patient.

A family of proteins commonly found in mouse urine is able to trigger fighting between male mice, a study in the Dec. 6, 2007, issue of Nature has found.

Pheromones are chemical cues that are released into the air, secreted from glands, or excreted in urine and picked up by animals of the same species, initiating various social and reproductive behaviors. The study is the first to identify protein pheromones responsible for the aggression response in mice.

"Although the pheromones identified in this research are not produced by humans, the regions of the brain that are tied to behavior are the same for mice and people. Consequently, this research may one day contribute to our understanding of the neural pathways that play a role in human behavior," says James F.

One way to alleviate the pain of banging your shin while on a hike is to encounter a grizzly bear—a well-known phenomenon called stress-induced analgesia. Now, researchers have elucidated a key mechanism by which the stress hormone noradrenaline — which floods the bloodstream during grizzly encounters and other stressful events — affects the brain’s pain-processing pathway to produce such analgesia.

Pankaj Sah and colleagues published their findings in the December 6, 2007, issue of the journal Neuron, published by Cell Press.

In an accompanying perspective article on the research, Harvard Medical School researchers Keith Tully, Yan Li, and Vadim Bolshakov wrote that “The impressive new study… provides important mechanistic clues helping to explain this phenomenon.”

Children learn by imitating adults—so much so that they will rethink how an object works if they observe an adult taking unnecessary steps when using that object, according to a Yale study today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Even when you add time pressure, or warn the children not to do the unnecessary actions, they seem unable to avoid reproducing the adult’s irrelevant actions,” said Derek Lyons, doctoral candidate, developmental psychology, and first author of the study. “They have already incorporated the actions into their idea of how the object works.”

Learning by imitation occurs from the simplest preverbal communication to the most complex adult expertise.

A missing brain protein may be one of the culprits behind autism and other brain disorders, researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory report in the Dec. 6 issue of Neuron. Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, has uncovered an enzyme that is key to that protein's activity.

Synapses are complex structures consisting of ion channels, receptors and intricate protein complexes that all work together to send and receive signals. Improperly formed synapses could lead to mental retardation, and mutations in genes encoding certain synaptic proteins are associated with autism.

Tsai studies a kinase (kinases are enzymes that change proteins) called Cdk5.