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"The same technology could potentially be used for bladder and multiple myeloma cancers, which also shed identifiable markers in urine. "Our goal is a device the size of a home pregnancy test priced around $10. Other prostate cancer tests coming to market cost up to $4,000 each. The UC Irvine team made price a key design factor of their work..The UC Irvine team developed a new type of sensor: They added nanoscale protein receptors to tiny, pencil-like viruses called phages that live only within bacteria. Double wrapping the phages with additional receptors greatly increases the capture and transmission of cancer molecule signals."

"A team of scientists at Oxford University have printed - yes, printed - what could be the predecessors to usable synthetic human tissue. The researchers released a paper called A Tissue-Like Material, announcing that they created their own version of a 3D printer, saying the current ones on the market couldn't print what they were after, according to PhsyOrg. And what were they after? A protein sack of water that can mold itself into different shapes and perform similar functions to human cells. After developing the printer, the team was able to print out a series of droplets that formed a network of human-like cells that could act like nerves and send electrical signals across the network."

Dr Simon Archer and his team at Surrey University were particularly interested in looking at the genes that were switched on or off in our volunteers by changes in the amount that we had made them sleep. "We found that overall there were around 500 genes that were affected," Archer explained. "Some which were going up, and some which were going down." What they discovered is that when the volunteers cut back from seven-and-a-half to six-and-a-half hours' sleep a night, genes that are associated with processes like inflammation, immune response and response to stress became more active. The team also saw increases in the activity of genes associated with diabetes and risk of cancer. The reverse happened when the volunteers added an hour of sleep. So the clear message from this experiment was that if you are getting less than seven hours' sleep a night and can alter your sleep habits, even just a little bit, it could make you healthier

Theodore Berger and his team at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Department of Biomedical Engineering have developed a neural prosthesis for rats that is able to restore their ability to form long-term memories after they had been pharmacologically blocked. In a dramatic demonstration, Berger blocked the ability to rats to form long-term memories by using pharmacological agents to disrupt the neural circuitry that communicates between two subregions of the hippocampus, CA1 and CA3, which interact to create long-term memory, prior research has shown. The rats were unable to remember which lever to pull to gain a reward, or could only remember for 5-10 seconds, when previously they could remember for a long period of time. The researchers then developed an artificial hippocampal system that could duplicate the pattern of interaction between CA3-CA1 interactions. Long-term memory capability returned to the pharmacologically blocked rats when the team activated the electronic device programmed to duplicate the memory-encoding function. The researchers went on to show that if a prosthetic device and its associated electrodes were implanted in animals with a normal, functioning hippocampus, the device could actually strengthen the memory being generated internally in the brain and enhance the memory capability of normal rats. "These integrated experimental modeling studies show for the first time that with sufficient information about the neural coding of memories, a neural prosthesis capable of real-time identification and manipulation of the encoding process can restore and even enhance cognitive mnemonic processes," says the paper. Next steps, according to Berger and Deadwyler, will be attempts to duplicate the rat results in primates (monkeys), with the aim of eventually creating prostheses that might help human victims of Alzheimer's disease, stroke, or injury recover function. Ref.: "A Cortical Neural Prosthesis for Restoring and Enhancing

Apply the electrodes... Externally modulating the brain's activity can boost its performance. The easiest way to manipulate the brain is through transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which involves applying electrodes directly to the head to influence neuron activity with an electric current. Roi Cohen Kadosh's team at the University of Oxford showed last year that targeting tDCS at the brain's right parietal lobe can boost a person's arithmetic ability - the effects were still apparent six months after the tDCS session (newscientist.com/article/dn19679). More recently, Richard Chi and Allan Snyder at the University of Sydney, Australia, demonstrated that tDCS can improve a person's insight. The pair applied tDCS to volunteers' anterior frontal lobes - regions known to play a role in how we perceive the world - and found the participants were three times as likely as normal to complete a problem-solving task (newscientist.com/article/dn20080). Brain stimulation can also boost a person's learning abilities, according to Agnes Flöel's team at the University of Münster in Germany. Twenty minutes of tDCS to a part of the brain called the left perisylvian area was enough to speed up and improve language learning in a group of 19 volunteers (Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2008.20098). Using the same technique to stimulate the brain's motor cortex, meanwhile, can enhance a person's ability to learn a movement-based skill (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0805413106).

A new study co-authored by MIT researchers documents the existence of collective intelligence among groups of people who cooperate well, showing that such intelligence extends beyond the cognitive abilities of the groups' individual members, and that the tendency to cooperate effectively is linked to the number of women in a group.

"We are a machine intelligence team focused on deep learning. We advance the state of the art in order to have a positive impact on the world."

Die Unterlagen waren identisch, sie beschrieben einen begabten jungen Menschen, der seine Möglichkeiten noch nicht ausgeschöpfte. Nur den Vornamen und die Personalpronomen tauschte das Team - drei Frauen und zwei Männer - nach dem Zufallsprinzip aus. Unter den Befragten war ein Viertel weiblich; ihre Bewertungen unterschieden sich nicht systematisch von denen ihrer männlichen Kollegen. Stand in den Unterlagen 'John', hielten die Professoren den Bewerber auf einer Skala von eins bis sieben um etwa einen Dreiviertel-Punkt kompetenter, einer speziellen Förderung würdiger und für eine Einstellung geeigneter als bei 'Jennifer'. Ihr Gehalt sollte im Mittel 26500 Dollar betragen, seines 30300 Dollar. 'Vielversprechende Bewerber, die nicht herausragend sind, bilden genau den Typ von Studenten, dessen Verbleib in der Forschung von der Bewertung der Professoren abhängt', schreiben die Autoren der Studie. Junge Frauen würden daher eher aus den Universitäten gedrängt als junge Männer.

I have a number of trees at my farm house but because of some reason they started to dry fast. Thanks to Arbor Care, Inc. Because of you guys today my farm house looks alive. I must say that the team members of Arbor Care, Inc. are real tree doctors.

Das Vogelweibchen gibt den Ton an, Current Biology http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2812%2901125-6 "Vogeleltern und andere Artgenossen, die bei der Brutpflege helfen, füttern den Nachwuchs nur dann, wenn der Bettelruf der Jungen das gelernte Passwort enthält", erklärt Studienautorin Sonia Kleindorfer von der Flinders University in Australien. Sie und ihr Team entdeckten den Coderuf eher zufällig, als sie Nester des Prachtstaffelschwanzes beobachteten. Ursprünglich untersuchten die Forscher Alarmrufe, welche die Singvögel im Angesicht von Nesträubern von sich geben. Dabei fiel ihnen das seltsame Verhalten der brütenden Vögel auf: Die Mütter sangen dem ungeschlüpften Nachwuchs einen bestimmten Ton vor. Der spätere Bettelgesang des Nachwuchses ähnelte offenbar dem Ruf der Mütter."

FUSE Labs works in partnership with product and research teams to ideate, develop, and deliver new social, real-time, and media-rich experiences for home and work. FUSE Labs experiences give users new ways to create, connect and collaborate with the people, information and ideas that matter to them.

Dead simple machine learning. Our intuitive, easy-to-use platform for machine learning enables anyone to build and deploy models with a few simple clicks. Work in a team? Our platform is specifically designed for collaborative machine learning.

"Die Forscher um Juniorprofessor Dr. Martin Thanbichler von der Philipps-Universität beschreiben die neu entdeckte Struktur in der aktuellen Ausgabe der Fachzeitschrift „Cell", die am 7. Dezember erscheint. „Für Bakterien ist dies das erste Beispiel einer Barriere, welche die Proteindiffussion einschränkt", erklärt Thanbichler, der eine Arbeitsgruppe am Marburger Max-Planck-Institut für terrestrische Mikrobiologie leitet und als Seniorautor des Aufsatzes firmiert. Er und sein Team untersuchten das Modellbakterium Caulobacter crescentus, das an einem Ende einen Stiel bildet, der durch Querbänder unterteilt ist. Er dient vermutlich als Abstandshalter, der die Zelle bei Nährstoffmangel von der Oberfläche entfernt und so in Bereiche erhöhter Nährstoffkonzentrationen bringt."

The Registry is a continuously growing collection of genetic parts that can be mixed and matched to build synthetic biology devices and systems. Founded in 2003 at MIT, the Registry is part of the Synthetic Biology community's efforts to make biology easier to engineer. It provides a resource of available genetic parts to iGEM teams and academic labs. You can register a new lab here.

The PROOF (Prevention of Organ Failure) Centre is a not-for-profit organization that develops and implements blood-based biomarker tests to better manage patients with heart, lung and kidney failure and prevent disease progression. By embracing a cross-disciplinary team of people and uniting organizations including commercial partners, we can speed up the development of these tests, applying them sooner to improve and save lives.

Our passion for developing e-learning material for the automotive sector allows us to realize the full potential of what computers and the Internet can achieve. The Electude team is driven by a vision that we must fundamentally change the way people acquire and retain knowledge and skills - by making it fun, effective and efficient.

"The results are indeed worthy of attention, with Prof Taylor's team finding that in an early stage clinical trial of 11 people who were put on a diet of just 600 calories As written about in Dr Ben Goldacre's latest Bad Science column, producing a pattern from experimental data to come to a conclusion can be a 'magical' experience, but medicine is an 'imperfect art'. "We all know one atom of experience isn't enough to spot a pattern." writes Goldacre, "But when you put lots of experiences together and process that data, you get new knowledge.""

"We are a superficial species. And this brings me to a fascinating new paper by an all star team of psychologists, including Kurt Gray, Joshua Knobe, Mark Sheskin, Paul Bloom and Lisa Feldman Barrett.. we automatically assume that the capacity to think and the capacity to feel are in opposition. It's a zero sum game. What does all this have to do with nakedness? The psychologists demonstrated it's quite easy to shift our perceptions of other people from having a mind full of agency to having a mind interested in experience: all they have to do is take off their clothes."

"In der neuen Studie konnte das Team um Tobias Krause von der Universität Bielefeld nun zusätzlich zeigen, dass die Singvögel aufgrund dieses Geruchs auch wissen, mit wem sie verwandt sind und mit wem nicht. "Zebrafinken eignen sich für eine solche Untersuchung besonders gut, da sie Nesthocker sind und so während ihrer Aufzucht nur mit einigen wenigen Verwandten in Berührung kommen. Im erwachsenen Alter leben sie aber in großen, miteinander verwandten Verbänden zusammen", erläutern die Wissenschaftler. Ab dann sei es für die Tiere also entscheidend, unbekannte Verwandte von Nicht-Verwandten zu unterscheiden. Da ihnen dabei Gefieder oder Gesang nicht unbedingt hilft, vermuteten die Wissenschaftler, dass die Vögel Verwandte erschnuppern."

"Wie stark jemand dabei auf Oxytocin reagiert, scheint unter anderem von seiner genetischen Ausstattung abzuhängen, insbesondere der Beschaffenheit seines Oxytocinrezeptor-Gens, auch OXTR-Gen genannt. Schon in früheren Studien hatten Wissenschaftler Hinweise auf einen Zusammenhang zwischen der jeweils vorherrschenden Variante dieses Gens und der Neigung zu Empathie und anderen prosozialen Verhaltensweisen gefunden. Von allen möglichen Kombinationen - GG, AG und AA - scheint sich dabei vor allem die GG-Variante als förderlich für soziales Verhalten zu behaupten. AA-Träger haben dagegen häufiger Schwierigkeiten, elterliche Gefühle zu entwickeln und ein größeres Risiko für autistische Züge. In der aktuellen Studie wollte das Team um Aleksandr Kogan von der Universität in Toronto nun herausfinden, ob ein Fremder die Chance hat, GG-Träger nur durch eine flüchtige Beobachtung zu identifizieren"