The sight of just one boot coming through the doorway cues the clatter of tiny hoofs as 500 piglets scramble away from Mike Male. “That’s the sound of healthy pigs,” shouts Male, a veterinarian who has been working on pig farms for more than 30 years. On a hot June afternoon, he walks down the central aisle of a nursery in eastern Iowa, scoops up a piglet and dangles her by her hind legs....
An international collaboration of cancer-research heavy-weights aims to grow 1,000 new cell lines for scientists to study — and that could be just the beginning. The Human Cancer Models Initiative announced its pilot project on July 11, and intends to complete the initial 1,000 models within 3 years. Members of the initiative include the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland; Cancer Research UK in London; the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK; and Hubrecht Organoid Technology of Utrecht in the Netherlands....
The unlikely path that Thumbi Ndung’u followed to become a world-class AIDS researcher began in a rural highland village in Kenya. Ndung’u grew up with five brothers and five sisters in a house with no running water or electricity. He picked coffee beans and milked the family cows when he wasn’t at school. By Kenyan standards, he was middle class, and his father was a hardworking teacher at a neighborhood school....
The difference between American Idols and the karaoke-challenged may be more than voice deep. Researchers have found that tone-deaf people have an unusual distribution of neurons in the front of their brains. Tone-deaf individuals cannot recognize familiar songs without lyrics and do not realize when their own singing is out of tune. About 4 percent of people carry this trait. Previously researchers have hunted for the roots of this musical inability in the auditory centers of the brain....
In the 1800s, a chief in the South Pacific archipelago of Samoa sought medical aid from a Christian missionary stationed there. The missionary, a Scotsman by the name of George Archibald Lundie, urged the chief to renounce his traditional religious beliefs. Eventually, the chief agreed, but he put off professing a change in his faith until after his son received a pe’a tattoo, inked from mid-torso to knees in a ritual that typically takes many days....
It’s one of Hollywood’s classic plotlines: the married couple trying to reignite their passion after years of kids, dirty laundry and, well, life together. Sound familiar? Probably because it echoes a common complaint among real-life couples, who often experience a decline in sexual desire over time. But according to new research, long-term couples can buck the trend and get their groove back if they learn how to be more responsive partners....
CLEVELAND (Reuters) - Women in Ohio would be prohibited from receiving abortions because of a fetal Down syndrome diagnosis under a bill that passed the state senate on Wednesday and is heading to Republican Governor John Kasich’s desk. Lawmakers voted 20-12 in favor of the law, which criminalizes abortion if the physician has knowledge that the procedure is being sought due to a diagnosis of Down syndrome, a genetic disorder caused when abnormal cell division results in an extra full or partial copy of chromosome 21....
Searing statements in this week’s landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report are particularly alarming, considering the characteristically cautious language of science. The first consensus of the document’s 234 authors: it is “unequivocal” that humanity’s burning of fossil fuels has caused climate change. In fact, data reconstructions in the report indicate that Earth’s average surface temperature has likely not been this warm over a long period in about 125,000 years [see “Change in Global Surface Temperature”]....
A three-year investigation into a University of Connecticut biology laboratory has found its chief guilty of falsifying and fabricating data on more than two dozen papers and grant applications. Dipak Das, director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at the University of Connecticut Health Center (UCHC) in Farmington, and his lab studied the beneficial health effects of wine (including one component resveratrol, which has been linked to life extension and other health benefits) and other foods, as well as cardiology....
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drags on, an information war is raging alongside the physical fighting. Russia’s attempts to spread disinformation have not yet found great success in the West. Within the country, however, President Vladimir Putin’s regime is controlling the narrative through censorship, state control of media and other forms of digital repression. This term refers to practices that use digital tools to stamp out dissent through a combination of actions, both online and offline....
Every day you wake up with a slightly less connected brain than the night before. New research in mice reveals that during sleep the connections between brain cells, which hold information learned throughout the day, undergo massive shrinkage. The process makes room for learning new memories while shedding weak ones. As author Marie Kondo would put it, this is the brain’s very own “life-changing magic of tidying up.” “When we are awake, learning and adapting to the environment, synapses—or the connections between neurons—get strengthened and grow,” says neuroscientist Chiara Cirelli of the University of Wisconsin–Madison....
Nearly a week before the World Health Organization first warned of a mysterious new respiratory disease in Wuhan, China, a team of Boston-based sleuths at the global disease monitoring system HealthMap captured digital clues about the outbreak from an online press report. That same day, December 30, ProMED, another digital disease detection group, became aware of online chatter about a pneumonia of unknown origin on China’s micro-blogging website, Weibo. As researchers later reported, newly popular keywords on the social media platform WeChat included “SARS,” “shortness of breath” and “diarrhea....
The human brain has approximately 100 billion neurons, and each, on average, connects to about 1,000 other neurons. A quick multiplication reveals that there are 100 trillion synaptical connections. So how is all this input getting spliced and integrated into a coherent package? How do we get order out of this chaos of connections? Even though it may not always seem so, our consciousness is rather kicked back and relaxed when you think about all the input with which the brain is being bombarded and all the processing that is going on....
Originally posted on the Nature news blog The Hubble Space Telescope has begun searching for an icy world in the outer Solar System that NASA’s New Horizons probe can visit after it flies past Pluto in July 2015. The awarding of Hubble observing time, announced today, could greatly increase the chances of the mission’s success. The spacecraft was meant to fly first past Pluto and then past another object in the cluster of icy bodies known as the Kuiper belt....
In 1996 neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his co-workers at the University of Parma in Italy published some remarkable findings. They had run an experiment to record electrical activity from neurons specialized for hand movement in two pigtail macaques. As anticipated, these neurons fired when the animals reached for peanuts placed in front of them. What was entirely unexpected, however, was that these same neurons fired when a scientist in the lab reached for the nuts instead....
Staff at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have been told that President Donald Trump is preparing a handful of executive orders to reshape the agency, to be signed once a new administrator is confirmed, two sources who attended the meeting told Reuters on Wednesday. A senior EPA official who had been briefed by members of the Trump administration mentioned the executive orders at a meeting of staffers in the EPA’s Office of General Counsel on Tuesday, but did not provide details about what the orders would say, said the sources, who asked not to be named....
Editor’s note: After this story was posted, delegates at the U.N. Climate Summit resumed negotiations into the early hours of Saturday morning and the body eventually came to a consensus to recognize the deal outlined in the story below. COPENHAGEN—The U.S., China, India and South Africa form the core of a growing group of nations that have agreed upon a commitment to combat climate change, concluding a grueling two weeks of negotiations in the Danish capital here as part of the United Nations’ climate summit....
Robert L. Clark of Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering explains. Just for the record, feedback is actually the mechanism used to control almost every electronic device manufactured. Stability is a critical issue for all of these feedback control systems, and the gain, or level of amplification, used is a critical element in their design. When musicians talk about feedback, however, the connotation is negative because it is the term they use to describe the shreek that results when the gain is too high on the output of an amplified instrument or microphone....
Scientific American presents Everyday Einstein by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Seventeen-year-old student Brittany Wenger recently made headlines by creating an artificial neural network that doctors can use to help diagnose whether or not a breast tumor is malignant. Brittany’s network is especially notable in that it out-performs several commercial efforts, a feat that helped her to win the grand prize in the Google Science Fair....
Advocates and opponents of capturing CO2 emissions from power plants and storing them underground agree on at least one thing: doing it will not be cheap. Current cost estimates for sending the gas deep underground are in the range of tens of dollars per metric ton of CO2, so sequestering one gigaton (Gt) a year—roughly one sixth of U.S. emissions—would cost tens of billions of dollars annually. Most of that cost arises from the thermodynamics of separating CO2 from flue gas emitted by burning hydrocarbons....
