Asthma medicine has positive side effects, a study from the University of Bergen shows. Copyright: Colourbox

Using data gathered from 100 million Norwegian prescriptions, researchers have found that asthma medicine can halve a patient’s risk of developing Parkinson´s disease. Researchers at the Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care (IGS) at the University of Bergen (UiB) have completed a large study that included data from the Norwegian Prescription Database, in cooperation with researchers at Harvard University.

“Our analysis of data from the whole Norwegian population has been decisive for the conclusion in this study,” says Professor Trond Riise at IGS. He leads the registery study in Norway...

Nischarin Inhibition Alters Energy Metabolism by Activating AMP-Activated Protein Kinase. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 2017; jbc.M117.784256 DOI: 10.1074/jbc.M117.784256

Research has demonstrate protein Nischarin may treat or prevent metabolic diseases including obesity and diabetes. Nischarin is a novel protein discovered by the Alahari lab. The research team demonstrated that it functions as a molecular scaffold that holds and interacts with several protein partners in a number of biological processes. The lab’s earlier research found that Nischarin acts as a tumor suppressor that may inhibit the spread, or metastasis, of breast and other cancers.

The current research project, conducted in a knockout mouse model, found that Nischarin interacts with and controls the activity of a gen...

ComText allows robots to understand contextual commands such as, “Pick up the box I put down.” Credit: Tom Buehler/MIT CSAIL

ComText, from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, allows robots to understand contextual commands. Computer scientists have developed an Alexa-like system that allows robots to understand a wide range of commands that require contextual knowledge about objects and their environments. They’ve dubbed the system ‘ComText,’ for ‘commands in context.’ Despite what you might see in movies, today’s robots are still very limited in what they can do. They can be great for many repetitive tasks, but their inability to understand the nuances of human language makes them mostly useless for more complicated requests.

For example, if you put a specif...

Researchers from CSAIL have devised a new system for data center caching that uses flash memory. In addition to costing less and consuming less power, a flash caching system could dramatically reduce the number of cache servers required by a data center. Credit: MIT News

Flash-memory system could reduce power consumption of data center ‘caches’ by 90%. Researchers have developed a new system for data center caching that uses flash memory, the kind of memory used in most smartphones. Most modern websites store data in databases, and since database queries are relatively slow, most sites also maintain so-called cache servers, which list the results of common queries for faster access...