science wire

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory found that single brain cells, if confronted with a difficult task, can identify objects as dissimilar as sports cars and dogs.

Rats exhibit different patterns of neural activity in the dorsolateral and dorsomedial parts of the striatum while learning to navigate a maze. Dorsolateral striatal neurons are most active (red) when the rat performs specific actions like starting, turning, and stopping. Dorsomedial striatal neurons are most active when the rat is deciding which way to turn, but this activity declines over time as the rat masters the task.

High oxygen production in thin-film materials could lead to greatly increased power production for fuel cells CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Driving to and from work is a habit for most commuters ? we do it without really thinking. But before our commutes became routine, we had to learn our way through trial-and-error exploration. A new study out of MIT has found that there are two brain circuits involved with this kind of learning and that the patterns of activity in these circuits evolve as our behaviors become more habitual.

UCL's expertise in biomedical engineering has underpinned a world first in veterinary science that may have major implications for human medicine.

Peat bogs are important as they provide a carbon sink and so aid the capture of CO2. Many bogs in north-western Europe have become dried out through overuse and extraction of peat. The most common way to restore and conserve these vital eco-systems has been to build a dam to raise the water level on a large scale.

Thousands of school children will be helping Cambridge researchers this summer by taking part in the biggest ever survey of UK ladybirds.

Research led by the University of Leeds has found drugs such as anti-diabetic drug Metformin and AICAR, used to combat obesity, can prevent the hepatitis C virus from replicating in the body.

A new computational model of how the primate brain recognizes objects creates a map of 'interesting' features (right) for a given image. The model's predictions of which parts of the image will attract a viewer's attention (green clouds, left) accord well with experimental data (yellow and red dots).

PA 130/10 Olympic swimmer and television personality Sharron Davies MBE will be in Nottingham later this week to open a new clinical trials unit that will take treatments for respiratory illnesses such as asthma from laboratory bench to bedside.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Researchers at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research have developed a new mathematical model to describe how the human brain visually identifies objects. The model accurately predicts human performance on certain visual-perception tasks, which suggests that it's a good indication of what actually happens in the brain, and it could also help improve computer object-recognition systems.

The online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today reports on the work of an international team involving UCL's Professor Hugh Montgomery that has identified a gene that allows Tibetans to live and work more than two miles above sea level without getting altitude sickness. A previous study published 13 May 2010 in Science reported that Tibetans are genetically adapted to high altitude.

Recently, the characterization of brown seaweeds has taken a giant step forward with the decoding of the complete genome of one of these organisms ( Ectocarpus siliculosus ) by an international consortium led by Dr. Mark Cock from the Biological Station Roscoff (Bretagne, France).

Recently, the characterization of brown seaweeds has taken a giant step forward with the decoding of the complete genome of one of these organisms ( Ectocarpus siliculosus ) by an international consortium led by Dr. Mark Cock from the Biological Station Roscoff (Bretagne, France).

Stanford's Department of Sustainability and Energy Management is urging researchers to go green and get rid of their old ultra-low-temperature freezers.

MIT researchers have designed a fluorescent probe that can be targeted to different locations within a cell.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Since the 1990s, a green fluorescent protein known simply as GFP has revolutionized cell biology.

Alastair Poole, Professor of Pharmacology and Cell Biology in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, has been awarded a renewal of a programme grant from the British Heart Foundation.

A topping out ceremony to mark the completion of the main construction stage of a new institute at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology was carried out by the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University today. The £30 million Oxford Molecular Pathology Institute (OMPI) has been designed jointly by Nightingale Associates and Make Architects.

Liverpool, UK - 27 May 2010: Researchers at the University of Liverpool have further improved a risk model that calculates a patient¿s chance of developing lung cancer, with the inclusion of genetic markers that predispose people to the disease.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Sanofi-aventis announced today a strategic alliance agreement with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Biomedical Innovation, which will be known as the sanofi-aventis Biomedical Innovation Program (SABIP).

PASADENA, Calif.—The process of learning requires the sophisticated ability to constantly update our expectations of future rewards so we may make accurate predictions about those rewards in the face of a changing environment.

Efforts to understand the effects of ageing on the brain have been given a major boost with the announcement of a new £5M grant from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) to Cambridge researchers. The funding has been awarded to a team from public health, clinical neurosciences and psychology at the University of Cambridge and scientists from the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit who aim to understand how brain ageing in healthy people affects abilities like language and memory.

It's a discovery that seems counter-intuitive but researchers from UCL and Liverpool University have found that tendons in high-stress and strain areas, like the Achilles tendon, actually repair themselves less frequently than low-stress tendons. The study, led by Dr Helen Birch (UCL Centre for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine) and published in this week's Journal of Biological Chemistry sheds some light on the increased susceptibility of certain tendons to injury during ageing.

Nine undergraduates recently received the 2010 Deans' Award for Academic Accomplishment , which honors students for exceptional, tangible accomplishments in independent research, national academic co

Cambridge, Mass. May 25, 2010 - The majestic animals most closely associated with the African savanna - fierce lions, massive elephants, towering giraffes - may be relatively minor players when it comes to shaping the ecosystem. The real king of the savanna appears to be the termite, say ecologists who've found that these humble creatures contribute mightily to grassland productivity in central Kenya via a network of uniformly distributed colonies.

PASADENA, Calif.— Was Tyrannosaurus rex cold-blooded? Did birds regulate their body temperatures before or after they began to grow feathers? Why would evolution favor warm-bloodedness when it has such a high energy cost? Questions like these—about when, why, and how vertebrates stopped relying on external factors to regulate their body temperatures and began heating themselves internally—have long intrigued scientists.

Four researchers from the University of Oxford have been elected as new Fellows of the Royal Society. The new Fellows are Professor Philip Candelas, Professor Georg Gottlob, Professor Robert C Griffiths and Professor Ian Hickson. Professor Philip Candelas is Rouse-Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, and a Fellow of Wadham College.

Stanford team wins $200,000 MIT Clean Energy Prize with revolutionary electrode design to improve solar panel performance CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

PASADENA, Calif.—Biologists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Yale University have identified two genes, the leucokinin neuropeptide and the leucokinin receptor, that appear to regulate meal sizes and frequency in fruit flies. Both genes have mammalian counterparts that seem to play a similar role in food intake, indicating that the steps that control meal size and meal frequency are not just behaviorally similar but are controlled by the same genes throughout the animal kingdom.

Mouse studies promising to colon cancer patients who currently have surgery as only option May 10, 2010 By Scott LaFee A team of University of California, San Diego School of Medicine researchers has

UC San Diego Health System Seeking Participants for Nationwide Clinical Trial May 10, 2010 By Debra Kain Researchers at the University of California, San Diego Alzheimer's program have begun a Phase III clinical trial testing a new approach to slowing down the progression of Alzheimer's disease using Intravenous Immune Globulin (IVIg), also known as gammaglobulin.

In video interviews, Imperial scientists explain how the state-of-the-art technology will help their research - News By Lucy Goodchild Tuesday 18 May 2010 A new laser laboratory that will help scientists see how proteins become activated at a molecular level launched at Imperial College London on 29 April 2010.