Patients whose lost red blood cells are recycled and given back to them during heart surgery have healthier blood cells compared to those who get transfusions of blood stored in a blood bank, according to the results of a small study at Johns Hopkins.

To recycle the blood, a machine known as a cell saver is used to collect what a patient loses during surgery, rinse away unneeded fat and tissue and then centrifuge and separate the red cells, which are then returned to the patient if thy need it. Disposable parts of the cell saver, which can be used to process multiple units of blood, cost around $120, compared to $240 for each unit of banked blood.

Pollution is bad, right? To some animals, it's home.

Thousands of shipping containers are lost from cargo vessels each year and many of them sink, never to be found again. 

In February 2004, the cargo vessel Med Taipei was traveling southward along the California coast when severe winds and seas dislodged 24 shipping containers, 15 of which were lost within the boundaries of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Four months later, during a routine research dive using the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Ventana, MBARI scientists discovered one of these containers on the seafloor 4,200 feet below the surface.

 The PRIORI project at University of Michigan says they have created a smartphone app that monitors subtle qualities of a person's voice during everyday phone conversations - and can detect early signs of mood changes in people with bipolar disorder. 

The app still needs a lot of testing before it can be used outside controlled conditions, but the creators say early results from a small group of patients show its potential to monitor moods while protecting privacy.  

The project is
led by computer scientists Zahi Karam, Ph.D. and Emily Mower Provost, Ph.D., and psychiatrist Melvin McInnis, M.D.  They presented first findings on PRIORI
at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Italy. 

Gluten-free fads are all the rage and a preliminary result by reseachers at the University of Copenhagen want to see if there are health benefits for people who don't have celiac disease.

Their experiments on found that mouse mothers on a gluten-free diet led to pups less likely to  develop type 1 diabetes. There's no reason to start paying 242% more for your food just yet.

Homemade, inexpensive stink bug traps crafted from simple household items outshine pricier models designed to kill the invasive, annoying bugs.

A new study looked into the modulatory effects that musical training could have on the use of the different sides of the brain when performing music and language tasks. 

It found that brief musical training can increase the blood flow in the left hemisphere of our brain, which suggests that the areas responsible for music and language share common brain pathways.

Two separate studies which looked at brain activity patterns in musicians and non-musicians.

The first study looked for patterns of brain activity of 14 musicians and 9 non-musicians while they participated in music and word generation tasks. The results showed that patterns in the musician's brains were similar in both tasks but this was not the case for the non-musicians.