Banner
Here's Where Your Backyard Was 300 Million Years Ago

We may use terms like "grounded" and terra firma to mean stability and consistency but geology...

Convergent Evolution Cheat Sheet Now 120 Million Years Old

One tenet of natural selection is a random walk of genes but nature may be more predictable than...

Synchrotron Could Shed Light On Exotic Dark Photons

There are many hypothetical particles proposed to explain dark matter and one idea to explore how...

The Pain Scale Is Broken But This May Fix It

Chronic pain is reported by over 20 percent of the global population but there is no scientific...

User picture.
News StaffRSS Feed of this column.

News Releases From All Over The World, Right To You... Read More »

Blogroll

Conservation wants to preserve nature as it is while wildlife management seeks to maintain responsible levels for animal populations. There is a reasonable balance. In Pennsylvania, for example, there are plenty of state and national park acres but hunting is big business and the fees pay for biologists and state nature management.

 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is triggered by a terrifying event, either witnessed or experienced, and the symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event. 

Not everyone who experiences trauma develops PTSD but it has become a far more common psychiatric and psychological diagnosis, so the search is on for a science basis to know who has it and what it means - including a search to identify biomarkers that could better measure each person's vulnerability to the disorder. 

Whether or not humans are the only empathic beings is a debate for anthropologists, because there is no science answer; the ability to experience others' emotions is hard to quantify in a species so it is difficult to measure empathy in any objective way. 

The transmission of a feeling from one individual to another, called 'emotional contagion,' is the most basic form of empathy. Feelings are disclosed by facial expressions (such as sorrow, pain, happiness or tiredness), and these feelings can travel from an "emitting face" to a "receiving face." Upon receipt, the mirroring of facial expressions evokes in the receiver an emotion similar to the emotion experienced by the sender.

Researchers have reported registering three possible occasions of the total destruction of stars by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. 

They astrophysicists used data obtained by X-ray orbiting observatories ROSAT and XMM-Newton. The former was put into orbit in 1990 and served until 1999, XMM-Newton since, and combined they gathered enough information to detect very rare events, such as the destruction of stars by supermassive black holes.

Testosterone, a steroid hormone, contributes to aggressive behavior in males, but the neural circuits through which testosterone exerts these effects have not been clear.

Prior studies found that the administration of a single dose of testosterone influenced brain circuit function. Surprisingly, those studies were conducted exclusively in women.

Researchers, led by Dr. Justin Carré, sought to rectify that gender gap by conducting a study of the effects of testosterone on the brain's response to threat cues in healthy men. They focused their attention on brain structures that mediate threat processing and aggressive behavior, including the amygdala, hypothalamus, and periaqueductal gray.

Asiaticoside is the main saponin constituent of Centella asiatica, a plant long used in the Ayurvedic system of medicine that has become popular for human collagen synthesis applications, like anti-wrinkle treatments.

In the central nervous system, Asiaticoside has been found by some studies to attenuate in vitro neuronal damage caused by exposure to β-amyloid. However, any potential neuroprotective properties in glutamate-induced excitotoxicity have not been fully studied.