Channel 42
Science is the answer to everything.

Some slow-moving faults may help protect against destructive earthquakes, suggests new research. Until now, geologists thought when the crack between two pieces of the Earth’s crust was at a very gentle slope, there was no movement along that particular fault line. Now two University of Arizona geoscientists have found that such a low-angle normal fault in Italy is moving slowly and steadily.

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Patients infected with a particular subtype of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, are more likely to develop dementia than patients with other subtypes, a study led by Johns Hopkins researchers shows.

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A new congressionally mandated report from the National Research Council, “Driving and the Built Environment: the Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use and CO2 Emissions,” examines how suburbanization — made possible largely due to the prevalence of automobiles and the extensive US highway system — impacts the number of miles we drive, our reliance on petroleum fuel, and the percent of greenhouse gas emissions from transportation.

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Addressing safety concerns related to potential gene therapies for Parkinson’s disease, researchers at the University of Florida’s McKnight Brain Institute have constructed a gene transfer therapy that can be inhibited with a common antibiotic. Experiments in rats show that the gene therapy product can be completely shut off, indicating for the first time that genes that have been irrevocably delivered to the brain to treat Parkinson’s can be regulated.

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Almost 15 percent of preschoolers have atypically high levels of depression and anxiety, according to a new study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. The five-year investigation also found that children with atypically high depression and anxiety levels are more likely to have mothers with a history of depression.

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Biophysicists at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen are leading an effort to develop and apply models of the so-called lateral-line system found in fish and some amphibians. This sensory organ enables an animal, even in murky water, to map its surroundings and recognize other animals. In Physical Review Letters, the researchers report mathematical models that capture essential elements of the system, agree with experimental data, and could be easy to implement technically, as in robots.

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A group of researchers from the Fat Institute (CSIC) and the University of Seville have confirmed that some wild plants have a high nutritional value. The scientists have found that several species of lupines from the mountains of Andalusia have a protein content similar to that of other cultivated legumes, as they publish in the online version of the Food Chemistry magazine.

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Our vocabulary continues to grow and expand even in adulthood. Just 10 years ago, the word “blog” did not yet exist — and now we no longer remember when we heard this word for the first time or when we learned its meaning. At some stage new words become just as familiar to us as words we have learned earlier.

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Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a technique widely used in studying the human brain. However, it has long been unclear exactly how fMRI signals are generated at brain cell level. This information is crucially important to interpreting these imaging signals. Scientists from the Academy of Finland’s Neuroscience Research Program have discovered that astrocytes, support cells in brain tissue, play a key role in the generation of fMRI signals.

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Scientists in the Academy of Finland’s Neuroscience Research Program have reported promising new results with potential implications for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. They have been studying the impacts of nerve growth factors in the treatment of PD, and their latest results show that a certain growth factor can be used to halt the progress of damage brought on by a nerve poison and possibly even restore the function of damaged cells.

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