Culture
A treatment that improves the lives of nearly 1.3 million people with rheumatoid arthritis might one day originate from scorpion venom. A group of researchers led by Dr. Christine Beeton at Baylor College of Medicine has found that one of the hundreds of components in scorpion venom can reduce the severity of the disease in animal models, without inducing side effects associated with similar treatments. The study appears in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.
Maunakea, Hawaii - An international team of astronomers led by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) has made a surprising discovery about the birthplace of groups of stars located in the halo of our Milky Way galaxy.
These halo stars are grouped together in giant structures that orbit the center of our galaxy, above and below the flat disk of the Milky Way. Researchers thought they may have formed from debris left behind by smaller galaxies that invaded the Milky Way in the past.
A little-studied, underground layer of rock may provide a vital reservoir for trees, especially in times of drought, report scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and affiliated with The University of Texas (UT) at Austin and the University of California, Berkeley.
The study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), looked at the water stored inside the layer of weathered bedrock that lies under soils in mountain forest ecosystems.
Scientists, companies and government agencies are hard at work on decreasing greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. In recent years, biofuels produced from corn have emerged as a fuel source to power motor vehicles and, perhaps, airplanes.
But corn is problematic as a biofuel source material. It's resource-intensive to grow, creates many environmental impacts, and is more useful as food.
A University of Pennsylvania paleontologist has described a 5.5 million-year-old fossil species of turtle from eastern Tennessee. It represents a new species of the genus Trachemys, commonly known as sliders, which are frequently kept as pets today.
Offenders should be routinely checked for signs of past head injuries, researchers say.
When a person enters the justice system, there is an "opportunity" to screen them for Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), which could help to better support their medical needs.
TBI is linked to greater violence and to problems when in prison, so better support could help to reduce the likelihood of offending or re-offending, and reduce the societal costs of incarceration.
TORONTO, February 26, 2018 - Is clinical depression always the same illness, or does it change over time?
New brain imaging research from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) shows that the brain alters after years of persistent depression, suggesting the need to change how we think about depression as it progresses.
New Rochelle, NY, February 26, 2018--The functional gut microbiome provides an exciting new therapeutic target for treating psychiatric disorders such as anxiety and trauma-related conditions.
If first-degree relatives are affected by colorectal cancer, this indicates a person's own elevated risk of developing bowel cancer. The same holds true for people who have large numbers of genetic risk markers in their genome. Both factors are usually used alternatively, not combined, to predict risk. Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg have now shown that a combination of family history and an analysis of genetic markers helps determine a person's colorectal cancer risk more precisely.
OAK BROOK, Ill. - The Olympic Games give elite athletes a chance at athletic triumph, but also carry a risk of injury. When injuries occur, it is critical that they be evaluated quickly. Onsite imaging services play an important role in the management of Olympic athletes with sports-related injuries and disorders, according to a new study published online in the journal Radiology.
Demographic characteristics can help identify groups of immigrants in Canada at high risk of tuberculosis (TB), according to new research in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).
"Screening latent TB infection based on demographic factors at the time of immigration is a necessary first step toward eliminating TB in migrants to Canada," says Dr. James Johnston of the University of British Columbia and the BC Centre for Disease Control in Vancouver, BC.
People express greater approval for political outcomes as soon as those outcomes transition from being anticipated to being actual, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Findings from three field studies indicate that people report more favorable opinions about policies and politicians once they become the status quo.
Anxiety can help people to remember things, a study from the University of Waterloo has found.
The study of 80 undergraduate students found that manageable levels of anxiety actually aided people in being able to recall the details of events.
It also found that when anxiety levels got too high or descended into fear, it could lead to the colouring of memories where people begin to associate otherwise neutral elements of an experience to the negative context.
A research team has published a new study lead by Pat Roche, professor of astrophysics at The University of Oxford, and Chris Packham, associate professor of physics and astronomy at The University of Texas at San Antonio. It reveals a new high resolution map of the magnetic field lines in gas and dust swirling around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. The team created the map, which is the first of its kind, using the CanariCam infrared camera attached to the Gran Telescopio Canarias on the island of La Palma.
Deep learning has been experiencing a true renaissance especially over the last decade, and it uses multi-layered artificial neural networks for automated analysis of data. Deep learning is one of the most exciting forms of machine learning that is behind several recent leapfrog advances in technology including for example real-time speech recognition and translation as well image/video labeling and captioning, among many others.