NEWS IN BRIEF 3-D printed material resembles body tissue in form and perhaps function 04.05.13 | more >>

NEWS IN BRIEF Neighbors unnecessary for recovery 04.04.13 | more >>

View the video A computer can decode the stuff of dreams. By comparing brain activity during sleep with activity patterns collected while study participants looked at certain objects, a computer learned to identify some contents of people’s unconscious reveries. 04.04.13 | more >>

Rats that will go to great lengths to get a cocaine fix might blame a group of sluggish neurons. Controlling the problem may come down to a flick of a light switch: Stimulating those brain cells with lasers reduces the addicted rats’ cocaine use, researchers report in the April 4 Nature. 04.04.13 | more >>

Tiny components of amyloid plaques, the notorious protein clumps found littering the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, might fight inflammation. Researchers report that several of these sticky protein fragments, or peptides, glom onto inflammatory compounds and reverse paralysis in mice that have a condition similar to multiple sclerosis. A fragment of tau protein, which shows up in ... 04.03.13 | more >>

A $2-billion experiment on the International Space Station has released the first data from its unprecedented census of the charged subatomic particles whizzing by Earth. Although the results, presented April 3 at a seminar at CERN in Geneva, largely confirm previous observations, researchers hope they will lead to discovering the identity of dark matter, an invisible form of matter that ... 04.03.13 | more >>

The building of western North America wasn’t a simple construction job. Multiple sections of seafloor slid beneath the continent and each other like conveyor belts, researchers suggest, bringing islands in from different directions and pasting them to the western edge of North America in a jumble of rugged terrain. 04.03.13 | more >>

President Barack Obama has unveiled a long-term neuroscience research initiative that will develop new tools and technologies to study human and animal brains on larger scales than currently possible. Announced April 2, the BRAIN Initiative could ultimately help researchers better understand human behavior and thought and develop new ways to diagnose, treat and cure neurological and ... 04.02.13 | more >>

Save the clunky tricorders for Star Trek. One day, tiny biological computers with DNA-based circuitry could diagnose diseases. 04.02.13 | more >>

Cholesterol-lowering eye drops may one day help preserve sight in people with a common cause of age-related vision loss, a new study suggests. 04.02.13 | more >>

NEWS IN BRIEF Successful reading of photon beam sent from airplane may one day lead to encrypted satellite communications 04.01.13 | more >>

Babies take a critical step toward learning to speak before they can say a word or even babble. By 3 months of age, infants flexibly use three types of sounds — squeals, growls and vowel-like utterances — to express a range of emotions, from positive to neutral to negative, researchers say. 04.01.13 | more >>

NEWS IN BRIEF H7N9 influenza observed for the first time in humans 04.01.13 | more >>

Melting may not be the destroyer of all ice. Melting ice shelves may actually spur the growth of sea ice in Antarctica.

While Arctic sea ice has dwindled, the extent of Antarctic sea ice has expanded by nearly 2 percent per decade since 1985. As the oceans have warmed in the same time period, deep ocean currents have carried heat to the deep waters surrounding Antarctica. The warmth may be melting the base of ice shelves, sections of Antarctica’s ice sheet that float over the ocean. 03.29.13 | more >>

A simple plastic shell has cloaked a three-dimensional object from sound waves for the first time. With some improvements, a similar cloak could eventually be used to reduce noise pollution and to allow ships and submarines to evade enemy detection. The experiments appear March 20 in Physical Review Letters. 03.29.13 | more >>

Sequestration may be questionable fiscal policy, but it means good news in the context of carbon cycles. Vast underground networks of fungi may sequester heaps of carbon in boreal forest soil, a study suggests. By holding onto the element, the fungi do the environment a favor by preventing carbon dioxide from escaping into the atmosphere and warming the planet. 03.28.13 | more >>

NEWS IN BRIEF Underground insect engineers create water traps, allowing rings of green grasses in the sand 03.28.13 | more >>

The Permian period was hot, hot, hot: Around 270 million years ago, air temperatures near the equator may have soared to almost 74º Celsius or 165º Fahrenheit, scientists report March 18 in Geology. That’s far hotter than anywhere on Earth today. 03.28.13 | more >>

No matter what medications doctors throw at hepatitis C, it continues to defy treatment in some patients. But a new compound offers an approach quite apart from the rest: It assaults a kind of RNA that is implicated in allowing the virus to gain a foothold. 03.27.13 | more >>

Blind fish that spend their lives in dark, underwater caves have lost a huge chunk of their ability to hear, scientists report in the March 27 Biology Letters. Two of the fish species studied could not hear high-pitched sounds. 03.27.13 | more >>

Intestinal bacteria may be responsible for at least part of the fat-shedding effects of a popular weight-loss surgery, a new study in mice suggests. Those naturally occurring bacteria not only trim the tummies of mice that have had the surgery but, when transplanted into mice that have not had surgery, cause them to lose weight as well. 03.27.13 | more >>