New research from The University of Western Ontario reveals how the brain processes the 'rewarding' and addictive properties of nicotine, providing a better understanding of why some people seemingly become hooked with their first smoke. The research, led by Steven Laviolette of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry could lead to new therapies to prevent nicotine dependence and to treat nicotine withdrawal when smokers try to quit.

The researchers found one brain pathway in particular uses the neurotransmitter 'dopamine' to transmit signals related to nicotine's rewarding properties. This pathway is called the 'mesolimbic' dopamine system and is involved in the addictive properties of many drugs of abuse, including cocaine, alcohol and nicotine.

University of Minnesota researchers have answered a key question as to why antiretroviral therapy isn't effective in restoring immunity in HIV-infected patients.

Once a person is infected with the virus, fibrosis, or scarring, occurs in the lymph nodes – the home of T cells that fight infection. And once fibrosis occurs, T cells can't repopulate the lymph nodes when HIV therapy begins, said Timothy Schacker, M.D., professor of medicine and principal investigator on the study.

Globular star clusters, dense bunches of hundreds of thousands of stars, contain some of the oldest surviving stars in the Universe. A new international study of globular clusters outside our Milky Way Galaxy has found evidence that these hardy pioneers are more likely to form in dense areas, where star birth occurs at a rapid rate, instead of uniformly from galaxy to galaxy.

Astronomers used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to identify over 11 000 globular clusters in the Virgo cluster of galaxies, most of which are more than 5 billion years old. Comprised of over 2 000 galaxies, the Virgo cluster is located about 54 million light-years away and is the nearest large galaxy cluster to Earth. Along with Virgo, the sharp vision of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) resolved the star clusters in 100 galaxies of various sizes, shapes, and brightness – even in faint, dwarf galaxies.

You may have laughed when you read in history books that in years gone by maggots were used to cure disease.

Laugh no more. It’s not uncommon for someone to suffer from chronic infected wounds for 18 months, despite all sorts of conventional treatment, but when maggots are applied to the same wound they can often begin to clear infection in just a few days. They have even been known to save people from having limbs amputated.

MRSA infections cause suffering, amputations and death, not to mention the estimated £1 billion cost to the NHS. Between 2002 and 2006, 6,201 deaths in England and Wales involved MRSA and 15,683 deaths in England and Wales involved C. difficile. The rapid rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria means that scientists urgently need to find a solution.

A study published in the International Journal of Obesity says that eating two eggs for breakfast, as part of an overall reduced-calorie diet, helps overweight adults lose more weight and feel more energetic than those who eat a bagel breakfast of equal calories.(1) This study supports previous research, published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, which showed that people who ate eggs for breakfast felt more satisfied and ate fewer calories at the following meal. (2)

It may not be an ever popular artificial sweetener like NutraSweet, or have the crystalline texture of pure sugar, but the herb, which is commonly found at Trader Joes when it isn’t in its natural South American setting is sweeter than its sweetener counterparts—and calorie free.

The once banned herb stevia, which is 300 times the sweetness of sugar, is safe to consume in the U.S. as a dietary supplement, but pronounced unsafe by the Food and Drug Administration if used in food.

My colleague Peter Turchin over at the University of Connecticut (my Alma Mater) has recently published an intriguing short article in Nature (3 July 2008) on what he termed “cliodynamics,” the possibility of turning history into a science. The word comes from Clio, the muse of history for the Greek and Romans, with the “dynamics” part referring to the central concept proposed by Turchin, that history -- contrary to what most historians might think -- is not just one damn thing after another, that there are regular and predictable patterns, from which we can learn and that we can predict.

The architecture of haematopoiesis – which is the process by which all blood cells originate – is essentially the same throughout the mammal world, report scientists in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. This is an unexpected result considering the thousands of mammals’ species with a myriad of habitats and lifestyles, as so well demonstrated when comparing the 30 mm flying bumblebee bat and the 30 metre-long aquatic blue whale both mammals. But the work now published shows that the variations in the blood system - necessary to adapt to the evolutionary changes found within the mammals’ world -can be explained quantitatively (for example by producing more cells or having the cells dividing faster), and are directly correlated to the animals’ body mass and do not require any fundamental alteration in the haematopoietic process.

Metabolic changes responsible for the evolution of our unique cognitive abilities indicate that the brain may have been pushed to the limit of its capabilities, according to research published today in Genome Biology.

This adds weight to the theory that schizophrenia is a costly by-product of human brain evolution.

Philipp Khaitovich, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led a collaboration of researchers from Cambridge, Leipzig and Shanghai who investigated brains from healthy and schizophrenic humans and compared them with chimpanzee and rhesus macaque brains.

The first thing iRobot Corporation wants you to know, because they have been asked so many times, is that the Packbot is no Terminator - and never will be.

Robots in the military are not the stuff of science fiction but their mission parameters are very specific - and they are all teleoperated, meaning that there is someone operating the robot from a remote location, perhaps with a joystick and a computer screen.

While this may seem like a caveat in plans to add robots to the military, it is actually very important to keep humans involved in the robotic operations.