A Department of Veterans Affairs and Northwestern University researcher has developed the first reliable measure of neurobehavioral functioning that will help physicians predict the likelihood of a patient recovering consciousness during coma from severe brain injury within the first year of injury–with up to 86 percent certainty.
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Older people often have more intense and complex emotional lives than their younger cohort. What accounts for the difference, wondered UC San Diego psychologist Ursina Teuscher: Wisdom gained with the gathering years? A shift in values thanks to greater life experience? Or, is it a keener sense of time itself — a precious and, of necessity, diminishing resource?
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The lovely Andromeda galaxy appeared as a warm fuzzy blob to the ancients. To modern astronomers millennia later, it appeared as an excellent opportunity to better understand the universe. In the latter regard, our nearest galactic neighbor is a gift that keeps on giving.
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Scientists at the U-M Medical School have developed a way to block the signals responsible for neuropathic pain. The secret to their success is a virus called herpes simplex or HSV — the same virus that causes cold sores and genital herpes. The scientists use a disabled form of the virus, called a vector, to deliver genes to the nucleus of neural cells.
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Three papers published in the May 20 issue of the journal Science by an international group of seismologists provide a comprehensive scientific analysis of the December 2004 and March 2005 earthquakes, and discuss future earthquake potential near Sumatra and the Andaman Islands. The data raise new concerns about the possibility of earthquakes in a region to the southeast of the great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of Dec. 26, 2004, which last experienced a great earthquake in 1833.
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People with diabetes may be at higher risk for cardiovascular problems when air pollution levels are higher, according to a new study of Boston-area residents. The ability of the blood vessels to control blood flow was impaired in adults with diabetes on days with elevated levels of particles from traffic and coal-burning power plants.
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Gold surfaces are often used as baseplates of sensors and in nanomaterials, and scientists have been searching for stable organic coatings they can attach to gold to form an interface between the organic and inorganic worlds. Findings suggest that amines may be the best candidate group of such materials.
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Nearly one out of two visits to a doctor’s office for help with a sleep disorder result in the prescription of potentially addictive medications, a new study reports. Office visits by older patients and those with publicly funded health insurance plans were nearly twice as likely to result in the prescription of these kinds of medications.
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Researchers recently discovered a gene essential to one of the plant kingdom’s key immune responses–programmed cell death (PCD). Plants use PCD to create a protective zone of dead cells around the infection site to prevent the invading pathogen from spreading. But how the plants keep from killing themselves after they turn on the cell-suicide process was a mystery.
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A newly released method to analyze fMRI enabled researchers to demonstrate that interconnections between different brain areas are dynamic. Equally important, they found that the brain region performing information integration shifts depending on the cognitive task. The study sheds new light on effective connectivity and answers longstanding debates about how brain networks operate. It suggests the IFG modulates other brain regions but that integration processing is primarily done in the task-specific regions.
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