A new study says that some aspects of peoples' cognitive skills, like making rapid comparisons, remembering unrelated information and detecting relationships, will peak at about the age of 22 and then begin a slow decline starting around age 27.

Timothy Salthouse, a University of Virginia professor of psychology and the study's lead investigator, and a team conducted the study during a seven-year period, working with 2,000 healthy participants between the ages of 18 and 60.Participants were asked to solve various puzzles, remember words and details from stories, and identify patterns in an assortment of letters and symbols.

Kids love sweet-tasting foods and new research indicates that this heightened liking for sweetness has a biological basis and is related to children's high growth rate.

Liking sweets is a cross-cultural phenomenon for kids, a pattern that declines during adolescence. To explore the biological underpinnings of this shift, Researchers looked at sweet preference and biological measures of growth and physical maturation in 143 children between the ages of 11 and 15.  

Bell curves are everywhere. Pick 100 random people and measure them: measure their height, their weight, their blood pressure, their time to run a mile, or to sprint 50 yards, and their IQ, and you find that most of us fall in the middle of the spectrum, while there are always some people on either extreme. Why?

The puzzle grows deeper when you think about genetics. If a trait like height is controlled largely by genes, how is it that height falls into a bell-curve pattern? Bell-curves seem completely at odds with what we learn about the discrete genetics of Mendel's round and wrinkled peas in high school biology.

It turns out that the solution to this puzzle is fairly simple (although the details get messy). In fact, Darwin's cousin hit on the right answer (long before he or anyone else knew about Mendel's genetics), with what he called the "Supreme Law of Unreason": a bell curve is exactly what you expect when you toss together "a large sample of chaotic elements." In other words, genetics is like one big game of The Price Is Right.

MIGDAL HA'EMEK, Israel, March 18 /PRNewswire/ --

New treatments for infertility could be closer to reality, thanks to a discovery from scientists at the Université de Montréal and Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital Research Centre.

According to a study published in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction, the researchers have become the first to clone, produce and purify a protein important for sperm maturation, termed Binder of Sperm (BSP), which may have implications for both fertility treatments and new methods of male contraception.

MADISON, Wisconsin, March 18 /PRNewswire/ --

The Dutch higher education market is one of the world's most advanced in lecture capture and Technical University of Delft leads the pack, recording 80 class hours that attract 10,000 views - each and every week. But the widespread success of this ambitious campus program did not come without the usual challenges.

Sonic Foundry, Inc. (Nasdaq: SOFO), the recognized market leader for rich media webcasting and knowledge management, will host a webinar in which Leon Huijbers will discuss how he and his Multimedia Department overcame the space, funding and workforce shortages that initially threatened the lecture capture initiative.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, March 18 /PRNewswire/ --

- Attn: Healthcare Editors

Screening for prostate cancer can reduce deaths by 20%, according to the results of the European Randomized Study of Screening for Prostate Cancer (ERSPC) published online 1700 hours CET 18 March (NEJM, Online First*). ERSPC is the world's largest prostate cancer screening study and provides robust, independently- audited evidence, for the first time, of the effect of screening on prostate cancer mortality.

SAN DIEGO, March 18 /PRNewswire/ --

Rayspan Corporation, the world's leading innovator of Metamaterial air interface solutions, is proud to announce that its Chief Technology Officer Dr. Maha Achour will give a presentation entitled The Road to 4G through Metamaterial Air Interface Technology: Long Term Evolution (LTE) and Beyond at the third European Conference on Antenna and Propagation (EuCAP 2009). The company will also exhibit its latest WLAN and WWAN Metamaterial handset solutions.