Brain
For people who survive a heart attack, the days immediately following the event are critical for their longevity and long-term healing of the heart's tissue. Now researchers at Northwestern University and University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego) have designed a minimally invasive platform to deliver a nanomaterial that turns the body's inflammatory response into a signal to heal rather than a means of scarring following a heart attack.
Despite volumes of data currently available on mankind, it is surprising how little we know about other species. A paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) confirms that critical information, such as fertility and survival rates, is missing from global data for more than 98 percent of known species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians.
EUGENE, Ore. - April 18, 2019 - University of Oregon neuroscientists report that two areas of the mouse brain combine representations of what is heard and anticipated, guiding behavior that leads mice to the best reward.
Researchers have known that signals go from the ears to the brain stem, the thalamus and auditory cortex and then onward. What was not known is how these signals about sounds are used by other brain areas to make decisions and drive behavior.
Researchers at the University of California San Diego have improved their recycling process that regenerates degraded cathodes from spent lithium-ion batteries. The new process is safer and uses less energy than their previous method in restoring cathodes to their original capacity and cycle performance.
Zheng Chen, a professor of nanoengineering who is affiliated with the Sustainable Power and Energy Center at UC San Diego, led the project. The work was published in Advanced Energy Materials.
A University of Waterloo researcher has spearheaded the development of a software tool that can provide conclusive answers to some of the world's most fascinating questions.
The optical laser has grown to a $10 billion global technology market since it was invented in 1960, and has led to Nobel prizes for Art Ashkin for developing optical tweezing and Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland for work with pulsed lasers. Now a Rochester Institute of Technology researcher has teamed up with experts at the University of Rochester to create a different kind of laser - a laser for sound, using the optical tweezer technique invented by Ashkin.
A novel technique developed by MIT researchers rethinks hardware data compression to free up more memory used by computers and mobile devices, allowing them to run faster and perform more tasks simultaneously.
Could a medication someday help the brain heal itself after a stroke, or even prevent damage following a blow to the head? A new USC study lends support to the idea.
When a person has a stroke, the brain responds with inflammation, which expands the area of injury and leads to more disability. In the April 9 issue of Cell Reports, USC researchers describe a key gene involved with tamping down inflammation in the brain, as well as what happens when the injured brain gets an added boost of that gene.
A research team in Ehime University characterized the complex composition of chlorinated, brominated and mixed halogenated dioxins as well as their major precursors in soils from e-waste burning and dismantling areas in Agbogbloshie (Accra, Ghana), a major hub of informal e-waste processing in Africa. The findings were published on February 22, 2019 in Environmental Science & Technology.
Targets to eliminate pain after surgery have driven increases in the use of opioids, and are a major cause of the opioid crisis in the USA, Canada and other countries. For the first time, a new Series of three papers, published in The Lancet, brings together global evidence detailing the role of surgery in the opioids crisis.
Chronic post-surgical pain is a growing problem as the population ages and more surgeries are done. It can occur after any type of surgery. Each year there are 320 million people having surgery, and chronic pain occurs in 10% of cases.
New Haven, Conn. - Cthulhu is calling from the ancient depths -- and this time, researchers are only too happy to speak its name.
Researchers at Yale, Oxford, the University of Leicester, Imperial College London, and University College London have identified a 430 million-year-old fossil as a new species related to living sea cucumbers. They named the creature Sollasina cthulhu, after H.P. Lovecraft's tentacled monster, Cthulhu.
A study announcing the discovery appears April 10 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Chinese scientists have synthesized new nanowires with high carrier mobility and fast infrared light (IR) response, which could help in high-speed communication. Their findings were published in Nature Communications on April 10th.
Nowadays, effective optical communications use 1550 nm IR, which is received and converted into an electrical signal for computer processing. Fast light-to-electrical conversion is thus essential for high-speed communications.
Defensive compounds produced by microbes are a major source of antibiotics and other important medicines. But with resistant bugs appearing faster than potential allies, researchers are taking their search for drug candidates offshore.
For the vast majority of cancer drugs experiencing shortages over a seven-year period, a new USC research study found no statistically significant effect of shortages on chemotherapy treatment.
"These findings are surprising in light of the substantial media and policy attention that the cancer drug shortage problem has garnered," said Mireille Jacobson, study coauthor and associate professor of gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School and the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics.
Orlando, Fla. (April 7, 2019)--Device-guided breathing may improve physiological symptoms in people with severe posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to a new study. The findings will be presented today at the American Physiological Society's (APS) annual meeting at Experimental Biology 2019 in Orlando, Fla.