Eight people who have spent years paralyzed from spinal cord injuries have regained partial sensation and muscle control in their lower limbs after training with brain-controlled robotics, according to a study published Aug. 11 in Scientific Reports.

The patients used brain-machine interfaces, including a virtual reality system that used their own brain activity to simulate full control of their legs. Videos accompanying the study illustrate their progress.

Blood stem cell transplantation, widely known as bone marrow transplantation, is a powerful technique that potentially can provide a lifelong cure for a variety of diseases. But the procedure is so toxic that it is currently used to treat only the most critical cases.

Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have come up with a way of conducting the therapy that, in mice, dramatically lowers its toxicity. If the method eventually proves safe and effective for humans, it potentially could be used to cure autoimmune diseases like lupus, juvenile diabetes and multiple sclerosis; fix congenital metabolic disorders like "bubble boy" disease; and treat many more kinds of cancer, as well as make organ transplants safer and more successful.

 By assessing electronic medical records (EMR) of 32,835 unique individuals from six Dallas-Fort Worth area hospitals, and noting abnormalities in temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation within 24 hours of discharge, scholars determined that nearly 20 percent had one or more abnormalities, with elevated heart rate being the most common vital sign instability (affecting about 10 percent.) About 13 percent were readmitted or died, and individuals with three or more instabilities had a nearly four-fold increase in the odds of death.  

How to be a healthy eater depends on culture. A recent study shows that in the U.S. and Japan, people who fit better with their culture have healthier eating habits. The results appear in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

"Our results suggest that if you want to help people to eat healthier--or if you want to promote any type of healthy behavior--you want to understand what meaning that behavior has in that culture, and what motivates people to be healthy in that culture," says lead author Cynthia Levine.

Healthy eating can help reduce one's risk for a number of different diseases down the line, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain types of cancer.

The Piltdown Man scandal is arguably the greatest scientific fraud ever perpetrated in the UK, with fake fossils being claimed as evidence of our earliest ancestor.

Published 100 years on from Dawson's death, new research reveals that the forgeries were created using a limited number of specimens that were all constructed using a consistent method, suggesting the perpetrator acted alone.

It is highly likely that an orang-utan specimen and at least two human skeletons were used to create the fakes, which are still kept at the Natural History Museum.

Health researchers predict that the transmission of dengue could actually decrease in a warmer climate, countering previous apocalyptic cocktail projections which included that the lethal virus would spread more easily.

Hundreds of millions of people are already infected with dengue each year, with some children dying in severe cases, so increasing a significant global health problem is an alarming concern. The model instead finds that a warmer climate would mean the ecologically useless mosquitoes that carry Dengue (and also Zika) would die off in the drier sections of the wet tropics of northeast Australia.