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    Children use Both Brain Hemispheres to Understand Language, Unlike Adults

    September 8, 2020, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    Children use both brain hemispheres to understand language, unlike adults
    Examples of individual activation maps in each of the age groups. Strong activation in right-hemisphere homologs of the left-hemispher

    Infants and young children have brains with a superpower, of sorts, say Georgetown University Medical Center neuroscientists. Whereas adults process most discrete neural tasks in specific areas in one or the other of their brain’s two hemispheres, youngsters use both the right and left hemispheres to do the same task. The finding suggests a possible reason why children appear to recover from neural injury much easier than adults.

    The study published Sept. 7, 2020 in PNAS focuses on one task, language, and finds that to understand language (more specifically, processing spoken sentences), children use both hemispheres...

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    Wool-like Material can Remember and Change Shape

    September 8, 2020, Categories  Physics, Chemistry/Nanotechnology

    image of keratin sheet changing from a tube to a star

    Material could be used in smart textiles, medical devices and more. Researchers have developed a biocompatible material that can be 3D-printed into any shape and pre-programmed with reversible shape memory. The material is made using keratin, a fibrous protein found in hair, nails and shells, extracted from leftover Agora wool used in textile manufacturing. It could be used in anything from self-fitting bras to actuating textiles for medical therapeutics and could help reduce waste in the fashion industry.

    As anyone who has ever straightened their hair knows, water is the enemy. Hair painstakingly straightened by heat will bounce back into curls the minute it touches water. Why? Because hair has shape memory...

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    Peculiar Planetary System Architecture around 3 Orion Stars explained

    September 8, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    New observations of GW Orionis, a triple star system with a peculiar inner region, revealed that this object has a warped planet-forming disk with a misaligned ring. The image on the right is from the SPHERE instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, which allowed astronomers to see, for the first time, the shows this ring casts on the rest of the disk. This helped the researchers figure out the 3D shape of the ring and the overall disk. The left panel shows an artistic impression of the disk’s inner region, including the ring, which is based on the 3D shape reconstructed by the team. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada, Exeter/Kraus et al.

    The discovery that our galaxy is teeming with exoplanets has also revealed the vast diversity of planetary systems out there a...

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    Common Class of Drugs linked to increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease

    September 5, 2020, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    Common anticholinergic drugs like Benadryl linked to increased dementia risk - Harvard Health Blog - Harvard Health Publishing

    A team of scientists, led by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, report that a class of drugs used for a broad array of conditions, from allergies and colds to hypertension and urinary incontinence, may be associated with an increased risk of cognitive decline, particularly in older adults at greater risk for Alzheimer’s disease (AD).

    The findings were published in the September 2, 2020 online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

    Anticholinergic drugs are widely used for dozens of conditions, minor and major. Some of these medications require a prescription, while others can be purchased over the counter...

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