There are many changes in human physiology as the body adapts to zero gravity environments but a new study led by researchers from the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University shows that the tiniest passengers flown in space — microbes — can be equally affected by space flight, making them more infectious pathogens.

“Space flight alters cellular and physiological responses in astronauts including the immune response,” said Cheryl Nickerson, who led a project aboard NASA’s space shuttle mission STS-115 (September 2006) involving a large, international collaboration between NASA, ASU and 12 other research institutions. “However, relatively little was known about microbial changes to infectious disease risk in response to space flight.”

Overall, student achievement in mathematics and reading in the United States is on the rise, according to results from The 2007 Nation's Report Card(TM), with some of the larger gains made by the nation's minority students.

Two reports released today, The Nation's Report Card(TM): Mathematics 2007 and The Nation's Report Card(TM): Reading 2007, detail the achievement of 4th- and 8th-graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), administered by the U.S. Department of Education earlier this year.

Recent research from Vidi researcher Josef Stuefer at the Radboud University Nijmegen reveals that plants have their own chat systems that they can use to warn each other. Therefore plants are not boring and passive organisms that just stand there waiting to be cut off or eaten up. Many plants form internal communications networks and are able to exchange information efficiently.

Many herbal plants such as strawberry, clover, reed and ground elder naturally form networks. Individual plants remain connected with each other for a certain period of time by means of runners. These connections enable the plants to share information with each other via internal channels. They are therefore very similar to computer networks. But what do plants want to chat to each other about?

Music training, with its pervasive effects on the nervous system’s ability to process sight and sound, may be more important for enhancing verbal communication skills than learning phonics, according to a new Northwestern University study.

Musicians use all of their senses to practice and perform a musical piece. They watch other musicians, read lips, and feel, hear and perform music, thus, engaging multi-sensory skills. As it turns out, the brain’s alteration from the multi-sensory process of music training enhances the same communication skills needed for speaking and reading, the study concludes.

What will we find in the way of planets similar to Earth as we keep expanding our ability to see into the universe?

No one is sure but a team of MIT, NASA, and Carnegie scientists wants to come up with the possibilities. So far they have created models for 14 different types of solid planets that might exist in our galaxy.

The 14 types have various compositions, and the team calculated how large each planet would be for a given mass. Some are pure water ice, carbon, iron, silicate, carbon monoxide, and silicon carbide; others are mixtures of these various compounds.

Why are some people prejudiced and others are not? The authors of a study in Psychological Science investigate how some individuals are able to avoid prejudicial biases despite the pervasive human tendency to favor one’s own group.

Robert Livingston of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Brian Drwecki of the University of Wisconsin conducted studies that examined white college students who harbored either some or no racial biases.

They found that only seven percent did not show any racial bias (as measured by implicit and explicit psychological tests), and that non-biased individuals differed from biased individuals in a fundamental way -- they were less likely to form negative affective associations in general.