Your fat may help you heal

It frequently happens in science that what you throw away turns out to be most valuable. It happened to Deepak Nagrath, but not for long. The Rice assistant professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering was looking for ways to grow cells in a scaffold, and he discarded the sticky substance secreted by the cells. "I thought it was contamination, so I threw the plates away," said Nagrath, then a research associate at Harvard Medical School. Nagrath, who joined Rice in 2009, and his co-authors have since built a biological scaffold that allows cells to grow and mature. He hopes the new material, when suffused with stem cells, will someday be injected into the human body, where it can repair tissues of many types without fear of rejection. The research by Nagrath and his co-authors...

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Meet X-woman: a possible new species of human

The human family tree may be in for a dramatic rewrite. DNA collected from a fossilised finger bone from Siberia shows it belonged to a mysterious ancient hominid – perhaps a new species. "X-woman", as the creature has been named, last shared an ancestor with humans and Neanderthals about 1 million years ago but is probably different from both species. She lived 30,000 to 50,000 years ago. "This is the tip of the iceberg," says Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the find. More hominids that are...

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Other Suns and Planets May Provide Better Conditions for Life than Our Own

While our sun and Earth have allowed for the development of a relative bounty of life, many astronomers are starting to believe that the conditions they provide aren't unique, or even ideal, suggesting we may not be alone after all. At this year's meeting of the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union, at a panel titled "Solar and Stellar Variability ― impact on Earth and Planets," a multidisciplinary group of experts discussed the evolving research into the types of suns and planets that would be hospitable to the development of life. Edward Guinan, a professor of astronomy at Villanova University, claims that our sun provided better conditions for the formation of life in its youth. Over four billion years ago,...

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We Could Be Discovering Earthlike Planets By 2013

There are probably billions of Earthlike planets in our galaxy alone, predicts scientist Alan Boss. With NASA launching the Kepler satellite, seeking other Earths, you can expect the first discoveries in a few years. The Kepler satellite will use the same planet-finding method that's already found a few hundred planets outside our solar system: looking for subtle dips in stellar brightness. But it'll use more sensitive methods, looking for smaller, cooler planets that are closer to Earth and more hospitable to life. Boss, who's just written a new book called The Crowded Universe, argues that Earthlike planets should be quite common: First, if you talk to astronomers who look at young stars, they will tell you that when stars form,...

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History of Pizza

The roots of modern pizza come from the ancient Greek colony of Naples in Magna Graecia, which is part of southern Italy.Although flat breads had been baked since way back in the Stone Age, it is around 1000 BC that the pizza pie really began its long evolution on the Italian peninsula. In northern Italy, the ancient Etruscans began baking a flat bread beneath stones on a hearth. To add taste, simple toppings consisting of herbs, olive oil, and spices were added after the bread was cooked. This dish was given the name “picea” which in the old Neapolitan dialect means “to pick” or “to pluck,” perhaps referring to the act of plucking this bread out of the oven or to picking at with the hands.In southern Italy and Sicily where Greek colonists...

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Nouns and verbs are learned in different parts of the brain

Two Spanish psychologists and a German neurologist have recently shown that the brain that activates when a person learns a new noun is different from the part used when a verb is learnt. The scientists observed this using brain images taken using functional magnetic resonance, according to an article they have published this month in the journal Neuroimage."Learning nouns activates the left fusiform gyrus, while learning verbs switches on other regions (the left inferior frontal gyrus and part of the left posterior medial temporal gyrus)", Antoni Rodríguez-Fornells, co-author of the study and an ICREA researcher at the Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit of the University of Barcelona, tells SINC. The Catalan researcher, along with psychologist...

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Intelligent people have 'unnatural' preferences and values that are novel in human evolution

More intelligent people are significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that...

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Thicker brains fend off pain

Montreal, February 24, 2010 – People can reduce their sensitivity to pain by thickening their brain, according to a new study published in a special issue of the American Psychological Association journal, Emotion. Researchers from the Université de Montréal made their discovery by comparing the grey matter thickness of Zen meditators and non-meditators. They found evidence that practicing the centuries-old discipline of Zen can reinforce a central brain region (anterior cingulate) that regulates pain. "Through training, Zen meditators appear to thicken certain areas of their cortex and this appears to be underlie their lower sensitivity to pain," says lead author Joshua A. Grant, a doctoral student in the Université de Montréal Department...

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