Gout is a painful rheumatic condition. It occurs when uric acid, a bodily waste product, crystallizes in joints and soft tissues. Gout is often associated with the big toe, but that turns out to be unfair; patients at highest risk of further flare-ups are those whose gout first involved other joints, such as a knee or elbow, according to new research.

Deciding who gets a lung transplant - and thereby who doesn’t - is not easy.  Lungs can only be transplanted from people who are organ donors, who are brain dead, and who died in such a way that their organs remain intact.  Problem is, there are not enough people marking the “organ donor” box on their driver’s license to give everyone on the transplant list a chance to live.

The problem of classifying elements of a data set as belonging to one class or another, depending on their characteristics, is a very, very well-studied one, and one which is particularly important in particle physics.

Imagine, for instance, that you collect events with four high-transverse-momentum leptons (electrons or muons) with the ATLAS or CMS detector, and you wish to sort out which of these fit better to the hypothesis of being originated by Higgs boson decay into two Z bosons (with each Z boson in turn producing a lepton pair) rather than to the alternative hypothesis of being due to the incoherent production of a pair of Z bosons -a process that has nothing to do with Higgs bosons. This means you need to classify the data events using their observed features.

Researchers using magnetic imaging to assess memory  have shown that soccer players who frequently head the ball have brain abnormalities resembling those found in patients with concussion (mild traumatic brain injury).  

“Converging evidence indicates that blirtatiousness is unique in its ability to amplify people’s qualities, making these qualities more readily observable to perceivers.”

By outsourcing manufacturing to China - sending jobs Americans don't want, according to immigration experts - America is also outsourcing carbon dioxide emissions.

China is now doing the same thing, but to themselves. Coastal provinces are outsourcing emissions to poorer provinces in the interior, according to U.C. Irvine scholar Steve Davis and colleagues in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper.

With nuclear power trapped in committee meetings and biofuels exposed as a bad idea, the search for another carbon-neutral alternative is ongoing.

While the sun gives us enough energy in an hour to meet all human needs for a year, solar technologies are an ideal solution that needs better technology - just like it has been for 50 years.

Conversion of solar energy into electrochemical energy on a massive-scale first needs to show proof-of-concept on the micro-scale.  An artificial version of photosynthesis is regarded as one of the most promising of solar technologies because for two billion years nature has employed photosynthesis to oxidize water into molecular oxygen.

An experiment to probe brain circuits involved in compulsive behavior - where mice were bred missing a gene
suspected to be involved in compulsive behavior and obesity - resulted in offspring mice that were neither compulsive groomers nor obese.

Their Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper suggests that the brain circuits that control obsessive-compulsive behavior are intertwined with circuits that control food intake and body weight.  

University of Iowa psychiatrists Michael Lutter, M.D., Ph.D. and Andrew Pieper, M.D., Ph.D., led the study, which included researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Harvard Medical School.

Though the mechanism responsible for generating part of the skeletal support for the membrane in animal cells is not yet understood, researchers have found a well-defined layer beneath the cell outer membrane forms beyond a certain critical level of stress generated by motor proteins within the cellular system.

A 350-year-old mathematical mystery, that two pendulum clocks mounted together could swing in opposite directions, due to tiny vibrations in the beam caused by both clocks affecting their motions, is a step closing to having a formula derived.

And it could lead to a better understanding of medical conditions like epilepsy or even the behavior of predator-prey systems in the wild, University of Pittsburgh researchers report.