Researchers have isolated an independent processing channel of synapses inside the brain's auditory cortex that deals specifically with shutting off sound processing at appropriate times. The discovery, detailed this week in Neuron, challenges a long-held assumption that the signaling of a sound's appearance and its subsequent disappearance are both handled by the same pathway.

The new finding could lead to new, distinctly targeted therapies such as improved hearing devices, said Michael Wehr, a professor of psychology and member of the University of Oregon Institute of Neuroscience.

An international team of climate scientists say they have developed a new approach to modeling the earth's climate that will improve the accuracy of future models utilized by the IPCC and provide the framework for thousands of individual scientific studies on climate impacts and adaptation, and changes in the way societies generate and use energy.

Previous scenarios used by the IPCC usually assumed that no one would try to reduce climate change. Today, policymakers and researchers are interested in exploring ways to limit changes. Understanding the impacts and interactions of activities such as increasing energy efficiency and conservation, developing new renewable fuels to replace fossil-based fuels, and regulating how land is used are crucial to better decision-making.

There is an apocryphal story about a graduate mathematics student at the University of Virginia studying the properties of certain mathematical objects. In his fifth year some killjoy bastard elsewhere published a paper proving that there are no such mathematical objects. He dropped out of the program, and I never did hear where he is today. He's probably making my cappuccino right now.

If you feel like you have an achy breaky heart, you may not be imagining things. "Broken hearts" are indeed real, although in the medical community they go by the much less lyrical name of stress (tako-tsubo) cardiomyopathy.

A recent article in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology described stress (tako-tsubo) cardiomyopathy as "a rapidly reversible form of acute heart failure reported to be triggered by stressful events and associated with a distinctive left ventricular (LV) contraction pattern." Oooh, romantic. Shakespeare couldn't have written it better.

The authors of a new study published in Human Communication Research say that the media is losing some its ability to sway viewers on important social issues. Specifically, the study shows that the 'OC', a crummy drama series about teens and their turbulent lives in southern California, may be more effective in persuading young women to use birth control than a news-format program on the same issue.

The results show the power that narratives like TV shows can have in influencing people, said Emily Moyer-Gusé, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.

A new commentary just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims that more evidence is mounting that birds did not evolve from ground-dwelling theropod dinosaurs and challenging decades of accepted theories about the evolution of flight.

The weight of the evidence is now suggesting that not only did birds not descend from dinosaurs, but that some species now believed to be dinosaurs may have descended from birds, according John Ruben, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University who authored the PNAS commentary.

A new study conducted by researchers from UC Davis and the John Innes Center in Norwich, England, suggests that it is harder than previously thought to predict when sudden shifts in Earth's natural systems will occur. The finding is troubling for scientists who are trying to identify the tipping points that could push climate change into an irreparable global disaster. The study was published recently in Ecology Letters.

Despite the over-promotion of nicotine replacement therapies by drug companies and anti-tobacco activists, the most successful method used by ex-smokers is unassisted cessation, according to a new policy forum in PLoS Medicine. In the article, researchers from the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney, Australia take a critical look at most tobacco control campaigns, which emphasize that serious attempts at quitting smoking must be pharmacologically or professionally mediated.

A collaborative study involving scientists from 12 UK research institutions, universities and conservation organizations suggests that the trend towards earlier UK springs and summers has been accelerating. The study, published recently in Global Change Biology, is the most comprehensive and rigorous assessment so far of long-term changes in the seasonal timing (phenology) of biological events across marine, freshwater and terrestrial environments in the UK, the authors say.

Vesicular stomatitis virus, or VSV, has shown the potential to serve as an anti-cancer agent, exercising high selectivity in killing cancer cells while sparing healthy cells, and as a potent vaccine against HIV. But in order for the necessary genetic modifications to occur, scientists must have an accurate picture of the virus's structure.

While three-dimensional structural information of VSV's characteristic bullet shape and its assembly process has been sought for decades, efforts have been hampered by technological and methodological limitations.