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Why Older Adults Become Fraud Victims More Often

By Guest PostDecember 6, 2012Scienceanterior insula, brain, brain mechanism, brain scan, dishonest, early warning, elizabeth castle, face, financial exploitation, financial scam, financial swindles, fmri, fraud, functional, ian boggero, imaging, magnetic, mark grinblatt, money, naomi eisenberger, older people, photograph, region, resonance, shelley e taylor, signal, ucla study, untrustworthy face, victim, vulnerable

Brain shows diminished response to untrustworthiness, UCLA scientists report

Why are older people especially vulnerable to becoming victims of fraud? A new UCLA study indicates that an important clue may lie in a particular region of the brain that influences the ability to discern who is honest and who is trying to deceive us.

Older people, more than younger adults, may fail to interpret an untrustworthy face as potentially dishonest, the study shows. The reason for this, the UCLA life scientists found, seems to be that a brain region called the anterior insula, which is linked to disgust and is important for discerning untrustworthy faces, is less active in older adults. (more…)

Next Scientific Fashion Could be Designer Nanocrystals

By Guest PostDecember 6, 2012Sciencedesigner atoms, electronic glue, keck project, nanocrystalline arrays, nanocrystals, quantum phenomena

Three University of Chicago chemistry professors hope that their separate research trajectories will converge to create a new way of assembling what they call “designer atoms” into materials with a broad array of potentially useful properties and functions. (more…)

Grand Canyon as Old as the Dinosaurs, Suggests New Study Led by CU-Boulder

By Guest PostDecember 6, 2012Scienceapatite, apatite crystals, arizona, atom, bottom, caltech, colorado boulder, colorado river, detect, earth, evolution, grand canyon, helium atom, hydrology, kenneth farley, landscape, mineral grains, phosphate mineral, radioactive decay, rebecca flowers, surface, tectonics, thermal structure, thorium, topography, university, uranium, variation, western

An analysis of mineral grains from the bottom of the western Grand Canyon indicates it was largely carved out by about 70 million years ago — a time when dinosaurs were around and may have even peeked over the rim, says a study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.

The new research pushes back the conventionally accepted date for the formation of the Grand Canyon in Arizona by more than 60 million years, said CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Rebecca Flowers. The team used a dating method that exploits the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium atoms to helium atoms in a phosphate mineral known as apatite, said Flowers, a faculty member in CU-Boulder’s geological sciences department. (more…)

Promising Nanotechnology

By Guest PostDecember 5, 2012Sciencea k rajasekaran, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, all, alternative, biomedical engineering, cancer cell, chemotherapy, childhood leukemia, delaware scientist, dex, drug treatment, encapsulated dexamethasone, healthy cell, mouse model, Nanotechnology, normal cell, pediatric leukemia, side effect, treatment, university of delaware, vinu krishnan, xian xu, xiaowei yang, xinqiao jia

Nanotechnology for drug delivery shows promise in treatment of pediatric leukemia

Nanotechnology developed by Delaware scientists could potentially deliver chemotherapy to children in a way that attacks cancer cells without harming healthy cells, greatly reducing side effects.

The work, conducted by researchers in the University of Delaware’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Nemours Center for Childhood Cancer Research, was published this month in the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics. (more…)

First Measurements Made of Key Brain Links

By Guest PostDecember 5, 2012Scienceamalia gonzalez, axons, barry connors, behavioral significance, brain scientists, brown university, consciousness, cortex cells, excitatory cells, fundamental functions, inhibitory neurons, margot elmaleh, mental arousal, milliseconds, nonspecific thalamus, omar ahmed, optogenetics, outermost layer, prefrontal cortex, saundra patrick, scott cruikshank, sensory signals, tanya stevens, thalamic signals, thalamocortical partnership

Until now, brain scientists have been almost completely in the dark about how most of the nonspecific thalamus interacts with the prefrontal cortex, a relationship believed to be key in such fundamental functions as maintaining consciousness and mental arousal. Brown University researchers performed a set of experiments, described in the Journal of Neuroscience, to explore and measure those circuits for the first time.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Inside the brains of mice and men alike, a relatively big football-shaped region called the thalamus acts like a switchboard, providing the prefrontal cortex, the part that does abstract thinking and decision-making, with most of its information. The thalamus’s responsibility even includes helping the prefrontal cortex to maintain consciousness and arousal. (more…)

NASA Mars Rover Fully Analyzes First Soil Samples

By Guest PostDecember 4, 2012Scienceanalyze, carbon organics, chemin, chemistry, chlorine, curiosity rover, gale crater, ingredient, john grotzinger, ken edgett, life, mahli camera, mars, martian organics, martian soil, mount, NASA, organic compounds, pathfinder, paul mahaffy, rock sample, rocknest, sam, sample analysis, sharp, sulfur, water, water molecules, windblown dust

PASADENA, Calif. – NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover has used its full array of instruments to analyze Martian soil for the first time, and found a complex chemistry within the Martian soil. Water and sulfur and chlorine-containing substances, among other ingredients, showed up in samples Curiosity’s arm delivered to an analytical laboratory inside the rover.

Detection of the substances during this early phase of the mission demonstrates the laboratory’s capability to analyze diverse soil and rock samples over the next two years. Scientists also have been verifying the capabilities of the rover’s instruments. (more…)

Harmful Protein-Coding Mutations in People arose Largely in the Past 5,000 to 10,000 Years

By Guest PostDecember 2, 2012Scienceinsulin resistance, new mutations, nucleotide variants, protein coding mutations, single nucleotide variants

A study dating the age of more than 1 million single-letter variations in the human DNA code reveals that most of these mutations are of recent origin, evolutionarily speaking. These kinds of mutations change one nucleotide – an A, C, T or G – in the DNA sequence. Over 86 percent of the harmful protein-coding mutations of this type arose in humans just during the past 5,000 to 10,000 years. (more…)

Moral Evaluations of Harm are Instant and Emotional, Brain Study Shows

By Guest PostDecember 2, 2012Scienceaccidental, age, amygdala, brain, brain activity, callous unemotional traits, Chicago, data, emotion, empathy, evolutionary heritage, humans, hurtful action, intentional, jean decety, milliseconds, moral computations, moral response, morality, mri scans, posterior, psychopaths, split second, step, stephanie cacioppo, sulcus, superior, temporal, tpj area, university, ventromedial prefrontal cortex

People are able to detect, within a split second, if a hurtful action they are witnessing is intentional or accidental, new research on the brain at the University of Chicago shows.

The study is the first to explain how the brain is hard-wired to recognize when another person is being intentionally harmed. It also provides new insights into how such recognition is connected with emotion and morality, said lead author Jean Decety, the Irving B. Harris Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at UChicago. (more…)

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