Neuroscientists at New York University and Harvard University say they have identified the neural systems involved in forming first impressions of others. The findings may show how we encode social information and then evaluate it in making these initial judgments, according to the study in Nature Neuroscience.
Making sense of others in a social interaction is not easy—each new person we meet may be a source of ambiguous and complex information. However, when encountering someone for the first time, we are often quick to judge whether we like that person or not. In fact, previous research has shown that people make relatively accurate and persistent evaluations based on rapid observations of even less than half a minute.
Researchers say they have discovered eight similar genes that, when mutated, appear to be responsible for medulloblastoma – the most common of childhood brain cancers.
About 250 Canadian children are diagnosed with various types of brain cancer every year. About 70 per cent of these survive. Brain tumors are the leading cause of childhood cancer deaths. The most common childhood brain cancer is medulloblastoma – a tumour that occurs at the back of the brain in the cerebellum. It is primarily a disease of very young children and is particularly deadly among babies under 18 months of age. In Canada, about 40 children are diagnosed with medulloblastoma every year and half of these will survive.
I have been downloading a cartload of books on my new Kindle lately, since I really enjoy the idea of walking into the subway carrying a rather inconspicuous, very light, yet incredibly large library with me. One of these books is Samir Okasha’s Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction, which I’m reading because I intend to review and promote it.
Cells keep up with the Joneses. The peer pressure of signals from complementary cells tells a stem cell how and when to differentiate and grow.
Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi and her team at Lawrence Berkeley laboratory are using molecular self-organization tendencies to give cells the orderly neighborhoods they desire. However, this microscopic community has an unusual dress code-- the cells display DNA on the outside of their membranes, which allows them to keep each other in line.
No, that isn't a New York Times headline(1), Swedish researchers really do say their studies of twins have showed significant genetic differences between men and women who smoke and develop lung disease - women are more susceptible to the consequences of smoking than men.
The team, led by Professor Magnus Svartengren from the Karolinska Institute, has been looking at the interaction of the environment with the genes of nearly 45,000 twins over 40 years old. They were interested in twins with chronic bronchitis or emphysema.
Pleasure and desire are essential to all human behavior, says Oxford University neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach , and he challenges us to trust our animal instincts in pursuit of those.
Pleasure and our sense of reward are produced by the interaction of many different brain regions, processed consciously or unconsciously. In the day-to-day routine of life, we may feel we are continually fighting our desires for what we really want. But doing so, he argues, is irrational and a huge waste of energy and resources, for it is pleasure and desire that underlie all our decisions and actions, and, therefore, our experiences.
A new species of Antarctic fish, Gosztonyia antarctica, has been discovered at a depth of 650 meters in the Bellingshausen Sea in the Antarctic Ocean, an area which had not been studied since 1904 and where the fauna is "completely" unknown. Jesús Matallanas, the Spanish researcher responsible for the find, collected four specimens of the new species during Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO) campaigns in the southern hemisphere summers of 2003 and 2006.
Gamers caught an early glimpse of the future of serious games aimed at the health sector during the PlayMancer project’s demos at the latest Vienna Science Fair. The European PlayMancer project is working hard to improve the technology for serious game engines and tools for 3-D networked gaming.
The platform is being tested and validated physical rehabilitation and behavioral and addictive disorders with the inclusion of innovative multimodal I/O devices.
“We want to build actual games, serious games, around serious health-related problems like bulimia and chronic pain,” PlayMancer’s project manager Elias Kalapanidas tells ICT Results. “Using gaming in this way is really breaking new ground.”
Revered in India as "holy powder", the marigold-colored spice known as turmeric has been used for centuries to treat wounds, infections and other health problems. In recent years, research into the healing powers of turmeric's main ingredient, curcumin, has increased as scientists have examined claims of antioxidant, anti-cancer, antibiotic, antiviral and other properties, though little has been learned about exactly how curcumin works inside the body.
University of Michigan researchers led by Ayyalusamy Ramamoorthy now say that curcumin acts as a disciplinarian, inserting itself into cell membranes and making them more orderly, a move that improves cells' resistance to infection and malignancy.
During the television program Ulysses which aired in Italy on Saturday the 28th of February, the well-known scientific divulgator Piero Angela stated that a secret drawing, a youthful self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, had just been discovered. Actually, the Leonardo3 ( http://www.leonardo3.net) research center in Milan, Italy, had published its own edition of the Codex of Flight (book interactive software) in the October of 2007: this work included the digital restoration of page 10, revealing the underlying portrait. The same center had also created a 3D reconstruction of the image.
At the beginning of 2007, within the Leonardo3 research center, Massimiliano Lisa (the center's President) had noted the resemblance between the Self-Portrait and the sanguine at page 10.
