Technology – Page 698 – Shamskm: A site to exchange knowledge and solutions

Martian Crater May Once Have Held Groundwater-Fed Lake

PASADENA, Calif. — A NASA spacecraft is providing new evidence of a wet underground environment on Mars that adds to an increasingly complex picture of the Red Planet’s early evolution.

The new information comes from researchers analyzing spectrometer data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which looked down on the floor of McLaughlin Crater. The Martian crater is 57 miles (92 kilometers) in diameter and 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers) deep. McLaughlin’s depth apparently once allowed underground water, which otherwise would have stayed hidden, to flow into the crater’s interior. (more…)

Costly Breast Cancer Screenings Don’t Add up to Better Outcomes

Even though Medicare spends over $1 billion per year on breast cancer screenings such as a mammography, there is no evidence that higher spending benefits older women, researchers at Yale School of Medicine found in a study published Online First by JAMA Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication.

Led by Dr. Cary Gross, associate professor of internal medicine at Yale School of Medicine and director of the Cancer Outcomes, Public Policy, and Effectiveness Research (COPPER) Center at Yale, the study sought to provide a comprehensive understanding of breast cancer expenditures that incorporate the cost of screening and associated work-up, as well as treatment. They assessed overall national costs, as well as variation in costs across geographic regions. (more…)

Flying Test Bed: New Aerial Platform Supports Development of Lightweight Sensors for UAVs

A research team at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is developing an airborne testing capability for sensors, communications devices and other airborne payloads. This aerial test bed, called the GTRI Airborne Unmanned Sensor System (GAUSS), is based on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) made by Griffon Aerospace and modified by GTRI. (more…)

Study Explains Skin’s Response to UVA Light

Researchers have strengthened their understanding of how skin cells called melanocytes sense ultraviolet light and act to protect themselves with melanin. In a new study, they report experiments showing that an ion channel well-known elsewhere in the body for its chemical sensitivity, plays a central role in this process. (more…)

Evolution of Human Resources

Future of organizational development Employee Development Roundtable topic

Remember the personnel department? It’s an old fashioned concept now with its focus on record-keeping and employee policies, evolving into “human resources management” in the latter half of the 20th century.

But the future of human resources is also changing. Panelists and attendees at the University of Delaware’s Employee Development Roundtable in December discussed how organizations will develop their employees in the future, how local and global business pressures will affect the field, how technology will change employee development and what organizational development professionals should do now to shape the future. (more…)

Mating Swarm Study Offers New Way to View Flocks, Schools, Crowds

The adulthood of a midge fly is decidedly brief — about three days. But a new study of its mating swarm may yield lasting benefits for analyses of bird flocks, fish schools, human crowds and other forms of collective animal motion.

“This is a field where there’s been almost no quantitative data,” said Nicholas T. Ouellette of the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science, principal investigator of the research, published Jan. 15 in the journal Scientific Reports. “What we’ve been able to do is put this in the laboratory, and that lets us take as much data as we want.” (more…)

New Insights into the ‘Borderline Personality’ Brain

TORONTO, ON — New work by University of Toronto Scarborough researchers gives the best description yet of the neural circuits that underlie a severe mental illness called Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), and could lead to better treatments and diagnosis.

The work shows that brain regions that process negative emotions (for example, anger and sadness) are overactive in people with BPD, while brain regions that would normally help damp down negative emotions are underactive. (more…)

Lack of Protein Sp2 Disrupts Neuron Creation in Brain

A protein known as Sp2 is key to the proper creation of neurons from stem cells, according to researchers at North Carolina State University. Understanding how this protein works could enable scientists to “program” stem cells for regeneration, which has implications for neural therapies.

Troy Ghashghaei and Jon Horowitz, both faculty in NC State’s Department of Molecular Biomedical Sciences and researchers in the Center for Comparative Medicine and Translational Research, wanted to know more about the function of Sp2, a cell cycle regulator that helps control how cells divide. Previous research from Horowitz had shown that too much Sp2 in skin-producing stem cells resulted in tumors in experimental mice. Excessive amounts of Sp2 prevented the stem cells from creating normal cell “offspring,” or skin cells. Instead, the stem cells just kept producing more stem cells, which led to tumor formation. (more…)