ANN ARBOR, Mich.— A non-invasive brain imaging technique gives new hope to patients with Parkinson’s disease in finding new and better treatment plans and tracking the disease progression, a new University of Michigan study shows.
The technique uses an MRI to measure resting state brain activity oscillations, said Rachael Seidler, associate professor in the School of Kinesiology and the Department of Psychology, and study author. (more…)
Why, and when, do we learn to speak the way that we do? Research from North Carolina State University on African-American children presents an unexpected finding: language use can go on a roller-coaster ride during childhood as kids adopt and abandon vernacular language patterns.
“We found that there is a ‘roller-coaster effect,’ featuring an ebb and flow in a child’s use of vernacular English over the course of his or her language development,” says Dr. Walt Wolfram, William C. Friday Distinguished University Professor of English Linguistics at NC State and co-author of several recent papers describing the research. “This was totally unanticipated.” Vernacular English is defined here as culturally specific speech patterns that are distinct from standard English; in this case, the vernacular is African-American English (AAE). (more…)
Using a unique and relatively simple cell-based fluorescent assay they developed, scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC), Berkeley have identified a means by which fluoxetine, the active ingredient in Prozac, suppresses the activity of the TREK1 potassium channel. TREK1 activity has been implicated in mood regulation and could be an important target for fluoxetine and other antidepressant drugs. (more…)
What is conformity? A true adoption of what other people think—or a guise to avoid social rejection? Scientists have been vexed sorting the two out, even when they’ve questioned people in private.(more…)
“Am I just a face in the crowd? Is that all I’ll ever be? … Do you think I stand out?”
—The Kinks, “A Face in the Crowd”
It may seem paradoxical, but being part of a crowd is what makes you unique, according to UCLA life scientists.
Biologists Kimberly Pollard and Daniel Blumstein examined the evolution of individuality —personal uniqueness — by recording alarm-call vocalizations in eight species of rodents that live in social groups of various sizes. They found that the size of the groups strongly predicted the individual uniqueness in the animals’ voices: The bigger the group, the more unique each animal’s voice typically was and the easier it was to tell individuals apart.(more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Rising carbon dioxide levels associated with global warming may affect interactions between plants and the insects that eat them, altering the course of plant evolution, research at the University of Michigan suggests.
The research focused on the effects of elevated carbon dioxide on common milkweed, Asclepias syriaca. Milkweed is one of many plants that produce toxic or bitter chemical compounds to protect themselves from being eaten by insects. These chemical defenses are the result of a long history of interactions between the plants and insects such as monarch caterpillars that feed on them. (more…)
PASADENA, Calif. — The Herschel Space Observatory has revealed how much dark matter it takes to form a new galaxy bursting with stars. Herschel is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission supported with important NASA contributions.
The findings are a key step in understanding how dark matter, an invisible substance permeating our universe, contributed to the birth of massive galaxies in the early universe. (more…)
