Sat, 11/12/2010 - 06:18 by Prince damin
Pittsburgh -- Thinking in great detail about eating the foods that make you fat could make you want them less, U.S. researchers say.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh asked volunteers to spend a minute and a half imagining methodically chewing and swallowing 30 M&M candies, one after another.
When then presented with a bowl of M&Ms, those volunteers ate about half as many candies as volunteers who imagined eating only three M&Ms, or none at all, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.
Just thinking about a food can help sate hunger through a process called habituation, the researchers said.
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Fri, 10/12/2010 - 07:00 by Prince damin
Lubbock, Texas -- U.S. researchers say they've found evidence of exposure to harmful chemicals and pesticides in Pacific Ocean-dwelling sperm whales.
Researchers from Texas Tech University tested tissues from whales from all five Pacific regions for DDT, the fungicide hexachlorobenzene, and 30 types of polychlorinated biphenyls, known to cause endocrine disruption and neurotoxicity, a university release said Wednesday.
"Our findings provide a unique baseline for global assessment of pollution exposures and sensitivity in the sperm whale, a globally distributed and threatened species," Celine Godard-Codding, an assistant professor at The Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech, said.
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Thu, 09/12/2010 - 10:22 by Prince damin
Austin, Texas -- U.S. researchers say they've identified a molecule that helps plants "remember" winter and wait until sprint to bloom at the best time.
University of Texas researchers say the timing of blooming is critical to ensure pollination and is important for crop production, a university release said Tuesday.
One way for plants to recognize it's spring and not just a warm spell during winter is that they "remember" they've gone through a long enough period of cold, the researchers say.
"Plants can't literally remember, of course, because they don't have brains," Sibum Sung, assistant professor of molecular cell and developmental biology, says. "But they do have a cellular memory of
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Thu, 09/12/2010 - 10:08 by Prince damin
Evanston, Ill. -- U.S. researchers say they've reached a major milestone in ongoing efforts to wipe out some of the world's most lethal diseases.
Scientists at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute and Northwestern University have experimentally determined three-dimensional protein structures from a number of bacterial and protozoan pathogens, which could potentially lead to new drugs, vaccines and diagnostics to combat deadly infectious diseases, a Northwestern release said Tuesday.
Some of the structures solved by the researchers come from well-known organisms like the H1N1 flu virus and those that cause plague, cholera and rabies, the release said.
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Thu, 02/12/2010 - 07:41 by Prince damin
New Heaven, Conn. -- The observable universe may hold as many as three times the number of stars previously estimated by astronomers just a year ago, U.S. researchers say.
Astronomers at Yale University said a particular kind of galaxy may contain 10 times more red dwarf stars than thought, which would triple the number of stars in the universe as a whole, the Christian Science Monitor reported Wednesday.
The Yale researchers surveyed eight huge elliptical galaxies selected from two vast galaxy clusters 53 million to 321 million light-years from Earth.
Surveys of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, have found red dwarfs outnumber sun-like stars by about 100 to 1, Yale astronomer Pieter van Dokkum said.
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Tue, 30/11/2010 - 23:50 by harsheeb
Philadelphia-- U.S. researchers say they've developed a color-changing patch soldiers could wear on their uniforms to show the severity of their exposure to explosions.
University of Pennsylvania scientists say calibrating the color change to the intensity of the explosion could provide immediate information on possible injury to the brain and the need for medical intervention, a university release said.
"We wanted to create a 'blast badge' that would be lightweight, durable, power-free, and perhaps most important, could be easily interpreted, even on the battlefield," Douglas H. Smith, professor of neurosurgery, said.
Blast-induced traumatic brain injury has been described as the "signature wound" of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Tue, 30/11/2010 - 10:09 by Prince damin
University Park, Pa. -- U.S. researchers say they've developed a color-changing patch soldiers could wear on their uniforms to show the severity of their exposure to explosions.
University of Pennsylvania scientists say calibrating the color change to the intensity of the explosion could provide immediate information on possible injury to the brain and the need for medical intervention, a university release said.
"We wanted to create a 'blast badge' that would be lightweight, durable, power-free, and perhaps most important, could be easily interpreted, even on the battlefield," Douglas H. Smith, professor of neurosurgery at Penn State, said.
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Sat, 27/11/2010 - 09:36 by Prince damin
Washington -- A dry, sand-covered region of Egypt was home 100,000 years ago to a lake as large as one of the Great Lakes, U.S. researchers say.
Radar images taken from the space shuttle confirm that a lake wider than Lake Erie once existed a few hundred miles west of the Nile River, ScienceNews.org reported.
From the time it first appeared about 250,000 years ago, the lake in Egypt's Tushka region would have grown and shrunk periodically until finally drying up about 80,000 years ago, researchers say.
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Thu, 25/11/2010 - 07:15 by Prince damin
Champaign, Ill. -- A tissue-imaging technique developed by U.S. researchers could produce almost instant biopsy test results in searching for cancer cells, scientists say.
Scientists at the University of Illinois demonstrated the novel microscopy technique, called nonlinear interferometric vibrational imaging, on rat breast-cancer cells and tissues.
It produced easy-to-read, color-coded images of tissue, outlining clear tumor boundaries, with more than 99 percent accuracy in less than five minutes, a university release said.
Current diagnostic methods, which can take a day more to produce results, are also subjective, based on visual interpretation of the shape and structure of cells, the researchers say.
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Tue, 23/11/2010 - 06:58 by Prince damin
Nashville -- A brain area critical to vision has regions that respond separately to color and to shape, U.S. researchers say, furthering our understanding of perception.
Vanderbilt University researchers found though these regions are physically separate, they work together to process visual information, ScienceDaily.com reported.
"In vision, objects are defined by both their shape and their surface properties, such as color and brightness," Anna Roe, professor of psychology, said.
"For example, to identify a red apple, your visual system must process both the shape of the apple and its color," she said.
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Mon, 15/11/2010 - 23:25 by Prince damin
Washington -- U.S. researchers say dolphins found weakened or dead near shore often have one thing in common -- they are nearly deaf.
University of South Florida scientists say in a marine world where hearing is as vital as sight dolphins unable to use sound to locate food or find family members often wind up weak and disoriented, The Washington Post reported Monday.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says 1,200 to 1,600 whales and dolphins are found stranded off the U.S. coast each year.
Without the ability to hear sounds, researchers say, dolphins can be helpless.
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Wed, 10/11/2010 - 10:25 by Prince damin
Denver -- U.S. researchers say young children are most at risk for dog bites, usually from a family pet, and that if a dog bites once, it's likely to bite again.
The study by of the University of Colorado School of Medicine found that dogs usually target a child's face and eyes, and most often it's a breed considered `good' with children, such as a Labrador retriever, a university release said.
"People tend to think the family dog is harmless, but it's not," said Vikram Durairaj, associate professor of ophthalmology and otolaryngology-head and neck surgery, said. "We have seen facial fractures around the eye, eye lids torn off, injury to the tear drainage system and the eyeball itself."
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