news 2009

Cambridge, Mass. July 13, 2009 - A new study of the cognitive processes involved with honesty suggests that truthfulness depends more on absence of temptation than active resistance to temptation. Using neuroimaging, psychologists looked at the brain activity of people given the chance to gain money dishonestly by lying and found that honest people showed no additional neural activity when telling the truth, implying that extra cognitive processes were not necessary to choose honesty.

Physicist Ivan Vitev received a prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers Los Alamos, New Mexico, July 10, 2009—The White House today announced that Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Ivan Vitev has received a prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

Studies of biodiversity at sites such as Colorado's 12,100-foot Hasley Pass are used to estimate total plant species richness over extensive alpine habitat in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. (John Harte/UC Berkeley) BERKELEY — Ask biologists how many species live in a pond, a grassland, a mountain range or on the entire planet, and the answers get increasingly vague.

People who live alone have twice the risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer's disease in later life compared with married or cohabiting people, according to a research study led by Miia Kivipelto from Karolinska Institutet and published on the prominent British Medical Journal's website, bmj.com According to Kivipelto, being widowed or divorced in mid-life carries three times the risk of developing dementia.

Genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia can be explained by the combined effect of a large number of common genes, according to a new study published in the prominent journal Nature. These genes are also linked to bipolar disorder. "As well as the connection between schizophrenia and the combined effect of a large number of genes, we have also obtained some indications that individual genes which form part of the immune system may provide protection against schizophrenia," says Christina Hultman, Professor of psychiatric epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet.

Women who get less than the recommended eight hours? sleep a night are at higher risk of heart disease and heart-related problems than men with the same sleeping patterns, according to a UCL research published today in the journal SLEEP . The study, which was conducted with the Sleep Medicine Unit at the University of Warwick, showed that women who reported sleeping eight hours had significantly lower levels of a marker related to coronary heart disease (Interleukin-6) than those who reported sleeping seven hours per night.

Are freely availably scientific papers better disseminated? Many believe so, but recent research results present new evidence suggesting that the higher number of citations received by open access papers is mostly due to a difference in quality.

A team of researchers at UCL's Ear Institute is using a unique machine to deepen our understanding of how the brain responds to sound. The Ear Institute's new small-animal magnetoencephalograph, or MEG for short, is the most advanced machine of its type in the world. Its installation is a result of a collaboration between UCL, the Kanazawa Institute of Technology (KIT) in Japan and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, France.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have discovered that babies born by planned Caesarean section experience changes to the DNA pool in their white blood cells, which could be connected to altered stress levels during this method of delivery. The findings, presented in the July issue of the scientific journal Acta Paediatrica, may be a part of an explanation for why babies born by Caesarean section have an increased risk of developing certain disease in later life.

PA 181/09 Discovered back in the 1600s quinine was the first effective treatment in the fight against malaria - and it continues to be a commonly used treatment against this devastating disease. But the drug is associated with a long list of side effects which can range from sickness and headaches to blindness, deafness and in rare cases death — and until now no one knew why.

PA 176/09 Rape trial juries need better guidance in the courtroom - and a better understanding of rape victims - to help them reach their verdict. Professor Vanessa Munro of The University of Nottingham and Dr Louise Ellison of the University of Leeds found jurors have a poor understanding of the various ways in which women might react when raped, the levels and types of injuries they might sustain and the different behaviours they might display in the witness box.

The personal experience of patients' forgetfulness in everyday life combined with a sample of cerebrospinal fluid may be two important tools in the detection of Alzheimer's disease as early as possible. This is the conclusion of a study that has been published in Lancet Neurology, in which scientists from the Karolinska Institutet have followed patients with various forms of mild cognitive impairment for three years using, among other tests, analysis of cerebrospinal fluid.

Cassini finding hints at ocean within Saturn's moon Enceladus 24 June 2009 European scientists on the joint NASA/ESA Cassini mission have detected, for the first time, sodium salts in ice grains of Saturn's E-ring, which is primarily replenished by material from the plumes of water vapour and ice grains emitted by Saturn's moon Enceladus.

PA 173/09 In December 2007 a team of experts, led by The University of Nottingham, unveiled an extraordinary set of high-resolution images that gave an insight into the plan of the Roman town of Venta Icenorum at Caistor St Edmund in Norfolk. The new research demonstrated that Caistor is a site of international importance — and tomorrow there will be an event to showcase the work and to clarify some of the mysteries of this buried roman town and highlight the impact of the research in developing Caistor as a cultural resource for Norfolk.

An international group of researchers has developed and tested a new generation of photovoltaic cells in Lausanne, Switzerland.

BERKELEY — Although it is known that infants are more susceptible than adults to the toxic effects of pesticides, this increased vulnerability may extend much longer into childhood than expected, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. Among newborns, levels of paraoxonase 1 (PON1), an enzyme critical to the detoxification of organophosphate pesticides, average one-third or less than those of the babies' mothers.

June 22, 2009 — Virginia Key — Predation is one of the most fundamental and fascinating interactions in nature, and sharks are some of the fiercest predators on Earth. However, their hunting pattern is difficult to study because it is rarely observed in the wild. As a result, shark predatory behavior has remained much of a mystery.

A University of Plymouth lecturer is the lead author of a prestigious new Royal Society publication examining the effects of plastics on the environment and human health. Richard Thompson, who is one of the foremost researchers on this topical subject, was chosen to edit the 180 page special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B which is published online today pending hard copy publication towards the end of the summer.

Cambridge, Mass. June 16, 2009 - Scientists at Harvard University have shown, for the first time, that intelligence varies among individual monkeys within a species - in this case, the cotton-top tamarin. Testing for broad cognitive ability, the researchers identified high, middle, and low performing monkeys, determined by a general intelligence score.

BERKELEY — University of California, Berkeley, researchers have found what they think is a critical and, until now, missing piece of the puzzle about how stress causes sexual dysfunction and infertility. Scientists know that stress boosts levels of stress hormones - glucocorticoids such as cortisol - that inhibit the body's main sex hormone, gonadotropin releasing hormone (GnRH), and subsequently suppresses sperm count, ovulation and sexual activity.