science newsletter: Science News SciGuru.com

Σάββατο 19 Οκτωβρίου 2013

Science News SciGuru.com

Atom-thick carbyne chains may be strongest material ever
Skid Row Cancer Study Has Implications for Treatment Today, Penn Researcher Says
Automatic speaker tracking in audio recordings
Gene influences success of nicotine replacement therapy in smokers
The link between depression and migraines
Neurons strengthen their synapses in order to remain active after loss of input

Atom-thick carbyne chains may be strongest material ever

Posted: 18 Oct 2013 12:18 PM PDT

Carbyne will be the strongest of a new class of microscopic materials if and when anyone can make it in bulk.

If they do, they’ll find carbyne nanorods or nanoropes have a host of remarkable and useful properties, as described in a new paper by Rice University theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his group. The paper appears this week in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.

Skid Row Cancer Study Has Implications for Treatment Today, Penn Researcher Says

Posted: 18 Oct 2013 12:07 PM PDT

An ethically dubious medical research study from the 1950s and 60s, known as the “Bowery series,” foreshadowed and shared commonalities with prostate cancer screening and treatment measures as they are carried out today, argues University of Pennsylvania physician and historian Robert Aronowitz in two new publications.

Automatic speaker tracking in audio recordings

Posted: 18 Oct 2013 11:40 AM PDT

A central topic in spoken-language-systems research is what’s called speaker diarization, or computationally determining how many speakers feature in a recording and which of them speaks when. Speaker diarization would be an essential function of any program that automatically annotated audio or video recordings.

Gene influences success of nicotine replacement therapy in smokers

Posted: 18 Oct 2013 11:32 AM PDT

A gene that controls how quickly smokers process nicotine also predicts whether people who try to kick the habit are likely to respond to nicotine replacement therapy, a new study shows.

The link between depression and migraines

Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:59 AM PDT

Depression is twice as likely in migraine sufferers, say researchers at the University of Toronto.

Both depression and suicidal ideation are much higher among individuals with migraine, their new study found, and the prevalence of depression among those with migraine is approximately twice as high as for those without the disease.

Neurons strengthen their synapses in order to remain active after loss of input

Posted: 18 Oct 2013 09:53 AM PDT

The brain is an extremely adaptable organ – but it is also very conservative according to scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried in collaboration with colleagues from the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel and the Ruhr Institute Bochum. The researchers succeeded in demonstrating that neurons in the brain regulate their own excitability so that the activity level in the network remains as constant as possible.