Study reveals function of glycosylating enzyme involved in muscular dystrophy, brain development and infection by arenaviruses such as Lassa fever; ability to assay enzyme activity could help screen potential muscular dystrophy therapies

Researchers at the University of Iowa have worked out the exact function of an enzyme that is critical for normal muscle structure and is involved in several muscular dystrophies. The findings, which were published Jan. 6 in the journal Science, could be used to develop rapid, large-scale testing of potential muscular dystrophy therapies.

New research suggests it may be possible to learn high-performance tasks with little or no conscious effort

New research published today in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It's the kind of thing seen in Hollywood's "Matrix" franchise.

LA JOLLA -- Taxanes are a family of compounds that includes one of the most important cancer drugs ever discovered, Taxol®, among other cancer treatments. But the difficulty producing these complex molecules in the lab has hampered or blocked exploration of the family for further drug leads. Now, a group of Scripps Research Institute scientists has successfully achieved a major step toward the goal of synthetically producing Taxol® and other complex taxanes on a quest to harness chemical reactions that could enable research on previously unavailable potential drugs.

New research, published Oct. 12 in the online journal PLoS ONE, finds that the lack of gestural information from both speaker and listener limits successful communication in virtual environments.

Participants in the study played a communication game, in which one partner had to describe a word's meaning to his partner so that the partner could guess the word.

"Determining whether an unfamiliar object is owned is very important because it shows us that young children can decide when they're allowed to take or handle something," said the study's lead author, psychologist Karen Neary, PhD, of Waterloo University in Canada. "This article provides the first evidence about how children judge the ownership of things based on whether those things are 'artificial' or 'natural.'"

Those are the results of a painstaking study conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University and colleagues in Belgium who are trying to discover what happens in the genes and brains of hyper-aggressive flies and how that differs from what takes place in more passive fly cousins.

After a left-sided stroke, many individuals suffer from serious speech disorders but are often able to sing complete texts relatively fluently. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, have now demonstrated that it is not singing itself that is the key. Instead, rhythm may be crucial. Moreover, highly familiar song lyrics and formulaic phrases were found to have a strong impact on articulation -- regardless of whether they were sung or spoken. The results may lead the way to new rehabilitative therapies for speech disorders.

Humans have an intuitive sense of number that allows them, for example, to readily identify which of two containers has more objects without counting. This ability is present at birth, and gradually improves throughout childhood. Although it's easier to compare quantities if the amounts differ greatly (such as 30 versus 15 objects), greater precision is needed when comparing items that are much closer in number.

Georgio Coricelli of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences led a multinational team of researchers that measured activity in the regions of the brain associated with rewards and with social reasoning while participants in the study entered in lotteries.

"By conducting this study, we hoped to show that people from different cultures think about facial expressions in different ways," said lead researcher Rachael E. Jack, PhD, of the University of Glasgow. "East Asians and Western Caucasians differ in terms of the features they think constitute an angry face or a happy face."