Global lifespans have risen dramatically in the past 40 years, but the increased life expectancy is not benefitting body equally, say University of Toronto researchers. In particular, adult males from low- and middle-income countries are losing ground.
People are living longer on average than they were in 1970, and those extra years of life are being achieved at lower cost, the researchers, led by U of… read more
A new device about the size of a business card could allow health care providers to test for insulin and other blood proteins, cholesterol, and even signs of viral or bacterial infection all at the same time — with one drop of blood.
Preliminary tests of the V-chip, created by scientists at The Methodist Hospital Research Institute and MD Anderson Cancer Center, were published by… read more
Stanford neurosurgeon John Adler, MD, has launched Curēus, a new open-source medical journal that leverages crowdsourcing to make scientific research more readily available to the general public.
Leveraging the power of an online, crowd-sourced community platform (readers can rate material based on the article’s quality), Curēus promotes medical research by offering tools that better serve and highlight the people who create it, resulting in… read more
Reaching out to “high five” someone, grasping and moving objects of different shapes and sizes, feeding herself dark chocolate.
For Jan Scheuermann and a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and UPMC, accomplishing these seemingly ordinary tasks demonstrated for the first time that a person with longstanding quadriplegia can maneuver a mind-controlled, human-like robot arm in seven dimensions (7D) to consistently… read more
After conducting the largest online intelligence study on record, with more than 100,000 participants, a Canadian Western University-led research team has concluded that the notion of measuring one’s intelligence quotient or IQ by a singular, standardized test is highly misleading.
Utilizing an online study open to anyone, anywhere in the world, the researchers asked respondents to complete 12 cognitive tests tapping memory, reasoning, attention and… read more
MIT researchers have demonstrated experimentally the existence of a fundamentally new kind of magnetic behavior called a quantum spin liquid (QSL),adding to the two previously known states of magnetism.
Ferromagnetism — the simple magnetism of a bar magnet or compass needle — has been known for centuries. In a second type of magnetism, antiferromagnetism, the magnetic fields of the ions within a metal or alloy cancel… read more
A new series of studies in mouse models by Mayo Clinic researchers uncovered that the aging process is characterized by high rates of whole-chromosome losses and gains in various organs, including heart, muscle, kidney and eye, and demonstrate that reducing these rates slows age-related tissue deterioration and promotes a healthier life span.
“We’ve known for some time that reduced levels of BubR1 are a hallmark of aging… read more
Researchers from North Carolina State University have created conductive wires that can be stretched up to eight times their original length while still functioning.
The wires can be used for everything from headphones to phone chargers, and have potential uses in electronic textiles.
To make the wires, researchers start with a thin tube made of an extremely elastic polymer and then fill the tube… read more
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and colleagues have proposed a new “network-extracted ontology” (NeXO) method that creates a computational model of the cell from large networks of gene and protein interactions, discovering how genes and proteins connect to form higher-level cellular machinery.
“Our method creates [an] ontology, or a specification of all the major players in the cell and… read more
How do we make sense of the thousands of images that flood our retinas each day? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the brain is wired to organize all the categories of objects and actions that we see, and they have created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings.
Continuous semantic space
The result… read more
Astronomers have discovered what may be five planets orbiting Tau Ceti, the closest single star beyond our solar system whose temperature and luminosity nearly match the sun’s, Science Now reports.
If the planets are in fact there, one of them is about the right distance from the star to sport mild temperatures, oceans of liquid water, and even life, and slight changes in Tau Ceti’s… read more
Stretchable electronics are the future of mobile electronics, leading giants such as IBM, Sony and Nokia to incorporate the technology into their products, says University of Delaware mechanical engineering professor Bingqing Wei.
Potential stretchable applications include biomedical, wearable, portable and sensory devices, such as cyber skin for robotic devices and implantable electronics.
But rechargeable and stretchable energy storage devices, also known as supercapacitors, are urgently needed to complement… read more
By using electric voltage instead of a flowing electric current, researchers from UCLA‘s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have made major improvements to an ultra-fast, high-capacity class of computer memory known as magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM).
The UCLA team’s improved memory, which they call MeRAM for magnetoelectric random access memory, has great potential to be used in future memory… read more
The “Z Space” display, developed by Californian company Infinite Z, tracks a user’s eye and hand movements and adjusts the 3-D image that he or she sees in real-time, MIT Technology Review reports.
The resulting effect is stunning. Unlike the 3-D video seen in a movie theater or on a 3-D TV, you can move your head around an object — to look it from… read more
Specific proteins secreted by cancer cells circulating in the bloodstream could help diagnose cancer earlier, but the quantity of these biomarkers is so low that detecting them has proven difficult.
Now MIT researchers, led by Sangeeta Bhatia, have developed nanoparticles that interact with cancer proteins to produce thousands of biomarkers that can be easily detected in the patient’s urine.
This biomarker amplification system could also be… read more