Scientists have successfully produced functional auditory hair cells in the cochlea of the mouse inner ear. The breakthrough suggests that a new therapy may be developed in the future to successfully treat hearing loss.
- Article Source

Shortly after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the US, engineers studied damage done to offshore drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. If tropical storm Gustav strengthens into a Category 3 hurricane, as forecasters are predicting, the damage could be extensive.
- Article Source

Patients are not the only ones at risk during cardiac procedures. Doctors performing heart surgery also face health risks, namely to their eyes. The IAEA is helping to raise awareness of threats, through training in radiation protection related to medical uses of X-ray imaging systems.
- Article Source

While more Americans believe that mental illness has genetic causes, the nation is no more tolerant of the mentally ill than it was 10 years ago.
- Article Source

For the first time, researchers have described hour-by-hour changes in the amount of amyloid beta, a protein that is believed to play a key role in Alzheimer’s disease, in the human brain.
- Article Source

How do blood vessel cells understand that they should organize themselves in tubes and not in layers? A special type of “instructor” molecule is needed, according to new research. This might be an important step towards using stem cells to build new organs.
- Article Source

They aren’t the lost cities early explorers sought fruitlessly to discover. But ancient settlements in the Amazon, now almost entirely obscured by tropical forest, were once large and complex enough to be considered “urban” as the term is commonly applied to both medieval European and ancient Greek communities.
- Article Source

People who walk on a treadmill even years after stroke damage can significantly improve their health and mobility, changes that reflect actual “rewiring” of their brains, according to new research.
- Article Source

Researchers have found evidence explaining why a common chemotherapy drug, cisplatin, may not always work for every cancer patient. They have shown that when a variant version of a key protein that normally causes cell death is active, patients may be resistant to the cancer-killing drug.
- Article Source

Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators have uncovered the first experimental evidence for why the transition temperature of high-temperature superconductors cannot simply be elevated by increasing the electrons’ binding energy. The research demonstrates how, as electron-pair binding energy increases, the electrons’ tendency to get caught in a quantum mechanical “traffic jam” overwhelms the interactions needed for the material to act as a superconductor — a freely flowing fluid of electron pairs.
- Article Source