Youth from low-income families who succeed academically and socially may actually pay a price when it comes to their health, because relentlessly pursuing goals can undermine health.

Researchers have uncovered further evidence of a system in the brain that persistently maintains memories for long periods of time.

Paradoxically, it works in the same way as mechanisms that cause mad cow disease, kuru, and other degenerative brain diseases. 

In four papers published in Neuron and Cell Reports, the laboratory of Eric Kandel at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) show how prion-like proteins - similar to the prions behind mad cow disease in cattle and Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in humans - are critical for maintaining long-term memories in mice, and probably in other mammals. 

Currently recommended daily allowances of vitamin D may be insufficient in children, according to researchers at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.  Vitamin D is present in a few foods, milk is usually fortified with it and with enough exposure to sunlight the body naturally produces it.

Metals, which conduct electricity, and insulators, which don’t, are polar opposites.

At least that’s what we’ve believed until now.

But we have discovered that a well-known insulator can simultaneously act like a conductor in certain measurements. We don’t yet know the reason for this mysterious behaviour but it is likely due to new and exciting quantum effects.

Pain treatment researchers have discovered thousands of new peptide toxins hidden deep within the venom of just one type of Queensland cone snail. The scientists hope the new molecules will be promising leads for new drugs to treat pain and cancer.

Though women outnumber men in all but tenured positions, there is concern that the numbers are still not high enough. If that is true, you wouldn't know it by filing patents with the U.S. Patent and Trade Office over the past 40 years.