Shimon Edelman of Cornell University and colleagues have developed a method for enabling a computer program to scan text, infer the grammar behind it and generate new sentences. It works for different languages, music and protein sequences. (PNAS: Vol. 102:33, 2005)
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Brandeis researchers say older people suffering a hearing loss might also lose the ability to remember spoken language. The researchers said older adults with mild to moderate hearing loss might expend so much cognitive energy on hearing accurately, their ability to remember spoken language suffers as a result.
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A new study suggests that some of the microorganisms found in cow waste may provide a reliable source of electricity. Results showed that the microbes in about a half a liter of rumen fluid — fermented, liquefied feed extracted from the rumen, the largest chamber of a cow’s stomach — produced about 600 millivolts of electricity. That’s about half the voltage needed to run one rechargeable AA-sized battery.
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More than 15 percent of our genes are mobilized to defend against infections in the bloodstream. The study represents a major step in understanding inflammation in severely injured or burned patients.
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An international team of scientists that includes a researcher from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory has determined the three-dimensional molecular structure of a promising malaria-vaccine component. This research may help lead to a successful vaccine for the disease, which currently infects approximately 400 million people worldwide and kills about two million people each year — mostly children. The study is described in the August 29, 2005, online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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A study provides insight into one of the most vexing issues relating to smoking cessation, one that discourages many people from attempting to quit smoking, the prospect of weight gain.
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Biologists present strong evidence in the September issue of BioScience that a lethal outbreak of needle blight that is killing lodgepole pines in British Columbia is caused by climate change. The blight, caused by the fungus Dothistroma septosporum, causes trees to loose their needles and eventually die. Lodgepole pines are an economically important species, being used in construction and for pulp.
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With genome maps adding new appreciation of the very close relationship between humans and the great apes, scientists at the University of California, San Diego have proposed a series of ethical and scientific guidelines for the expected increase in research on these, our closest evolutionary cousins.
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It was the drug of choice on university campuses, the drug that spawned psychedelic culture as well as countless jail sentences and fines, but LSD actually has respectable roots — roots that a McMaster University researcher is uncovering. “Far from being fringe medical research, trials of LSD were once a legitimate branch of psychiatric research,” explains Erika Dyck, a doctoral researcher in the Department of History at McMaster.
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African-American women who carry the 10398A mitochondrial DNA allele are 60 percent more likely to develop invasive breast cancer than African-American females without that genetic marker, according to research published in the September 1 issue of “Cancer Research.”
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