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Researchers have successfully stored a single data bit in only 12 atoms. Currently it takes about a million atoms to store a bit on a modern hard-disk, the researchers from IBM say. They believe this is the world's smallest magnetic memory bit. According to the researchers, the technique opens up the possibility of producing much denser forms of magnetic computer memory than today's hard disk drives and solid state memory chips. "Roughly every two years hard drives become denser," research lead author Sebastian Loth told the BBC. "The obvious question to ask is how long can we keep going. And...

LOS ANGELES (CBS) — New research suggests that pollution in Southern California may be harming our brains. We already know that pollution can do harm to our lungs, but research from the University of Southern California suggests that residents here are even worse off thanks to our traffic-polluted freeways. “It’s not like what you see in smog and the days when you don’t get to see the mountains,” says Todd Morgan a researcher with USC referring to the type of pollution investigated in the study. Researchers looked at the smallest of particles that are not visible to the naked eye....

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers working with mice have discovered that by removing a protein from the region of the brain responsible for recalling fear, they can permanently delete traumatic memories. Their report on a molecular means of erasing fear memories in rodents appears this week in Science Express. “When a traumatic event occurs, it creates a fearful memory that can last a lifetime and have a debilitating effect on a person’s life,” says Richard L. Huganir, Ph.D., professor and director of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “Our finding describing these...

VIENNA (AFP) – Prehistoric man enjoyed a primitive version of cinema, according to Austrian and British researchers, who are currently seeking to recreate these ancient visual displays. Rock engravings from the Copper Age found all over Europe in remote, hidden locations, indicate the artwork was more than mere images, researchers from Cambridge University and Sankt Poelten's university of applied sciences (FH) in Austria believe. "The cliff engravings... in our opinion are not just pictures but are part of an audiovisual performance," Frederick Baker of Cambridge University's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology said in a statement Tuesday. "There was still no...

A gene silencing approach can save monkeys from high doses of the most lethal strain of Ebola virus in what researchers call the most viable route yet to treating the deadly and frightening infection. They used small interfering RNAs or siRNAs, a new technology being developed by a number of companies, to hold the virus at bay for a week until the immune system could take over. Tests in four rhesus monkeys showed that seven daily injections cured 100 per cent of them. U.S. government researchers and a small Canadian biotech company, Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, worked together to develop the new...

LONDON – British researchers say there is little evidence Tamiflu stops complications in healthy people who catch the flu, though public health officials contend the swine flu drug reduces flu hospitalizations and deaths.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) - Two Purdue University math researchers have predicted the novel H1N1 flu will peak so early that planned vaccinations will not have a large effect on the number of people infected. Sherry Towers, from Purdue's statistics department, and Zhilan Feng, from Purdue's math department, used a mathematical model to predict the spread of the disease. They used data collected by the Centers for Disease Control in May, June, July and August. The result? The model predicted that H1N1 infections will reach their peak in either the week before or the week after Halloween. The researchers said...

BOSTON, Mass. (July 26, 2009) — High-throughput sequencing has turned biologists into voracious genome readers, enabling them to scan millions of DNA letters, or bases, per hour. When revising a genome, however, they struggle, suffering from serious writer's block, exacerbated by outdated cell programming technology. Labs get bogged down with particular DNA sentences, tinkering at times with subsections of a single gene ad nauseam before moving along to the next one. A team has finally overcome this obstacle by developing a new cell programming method called Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering (MAGE). Published online in Nature on July 26, the platform...

REDWOOD CITY -- A Capitola man has been sentenced to six months in jail for making threatening phone calls to two UCSF scientists who use animals for research, prosecutors said today. Justin Bhagat Thind, 33, repeatedly called the researchers at their homes in Belmont and San Mateo over a four-day span in September 2007, phoning as late as 1 a.m., said Steve Wagstaffe, San Mateo County's chief deputy district attorney. Thind made "vile threats," telling the scientists they would die the same way they made the animals suffer, Wagstaffe said. Investigators tracked the calls to Thind's cell phone. He faces...

Baltimore, MD - The results of a new study from a Johns Hopkins University research team claming that there is no link between abortions and mental health problems for women should come as no surprise. The authors of the study, which the mainstream media touted Thursday, are bankrolled by Planned Parenthood.

Scientists for years have intentionally removed potentially explosive words and phrases from research grant applications in an attempt to disguise their work and prevent opposition from critics, according to a Rutgers University study. This type of self-censorship may be having a "chilling" effect on research, the study found, even leading some scientists to abandon their work and pursue other careers. "One researcher told me, 'You will never see me publish another paper about sexual behavior,'" said Joanna Kempner, an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers, whose study was based on responses from 82 academic researchers nationwide. The study is published...

Researchers study hidden homicide trend Gun-related homicide among young men rose sharply in the United States in recent years even though the nation's overall homicide rate remained flat, according to a study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Between 1999 and 2005, homicide involving firearms increased 31 percent among black men ages 25 to 44 and 12 percent among white men of the same age. The study is published in Online First edition of the Journal of Urban Health. "The recent flatness of the U.S. homicide rate obscures the large increases in firearm death among...

TROY, N.Y. - Edd Hifeng barely merits a second glance in "Second Life." A steel-gray robot with lanky limbs and linebacker shoulders, he looks like a typical avatar in the popular virtual world. But Edd is different. His actions are animated not by a person at a keyboard but by a computer. Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason. It turns out "Second Life" is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It's also a frontier...

The patient was blind. Maguire's hair-thin needle traveled through the "white" of his eye, all the way back to his badly scarred retina, where it would deliver billions of genetically modified viruses. Each virus carried a single gene: the recipe to produce a crucial enzyme that his eye was unable to make on its own. Within weeks, beyond what anyone had predicted, the experiment worked. The young man and two other patients began to regain some vision. The results, reported online today by the New England Journal of Medicine, represent a dramatic advance in the field known as gene therapy,...

Spartans did not throw deformed babies away: researchers Mon Dec 10, 1:22 PM ETAFP/File Photo: The statue of King Leonidas of ancient Sparta stands over the battlefield of Thermopylae, some... ATHENS (AFP) - The Greek myth that ancient Spartans threw their stunted and sickly newborns off a cliff was not corroborated by archaeological digs in the area, researchers said Monday. After more than five years of analysis of human remains culled from the pit, also called an apothetes, researchers found only the remains of adolescents and adults between the ages of 18 and 35, Athens Faculty of Medicine Anthropologist Theodoros...

Researchers say Italy's 5,000-year-old Iceman died from head trauma, not arrow The Associated PressPublished: August 28, 2007 ROME, Italy: Researchers studying Iceman, the 5,000-year-old mummy found frozen in the Italian Alps, have come up with a new theory for how he died, saying he died from head trauma, not by bleeding to death from an arrow. Just two months ago, researchers in Switzerland published an article in the Journal of Archaeological Science saying the mummy — also known as Oetzi — had died after the arrow tore a hole in an artery beneath his left collarbone, leading to massive loss...

Source: Iowa State University Date: August 6, 2007 Researchers Work To Track North American Climate Change Science Daily — Gene Takle begins talks about climate change with some strong statements. This image shows how much daily summer high temperatures are expected to increase from the 1990s to the 2040s, according to a climate model prepared by the Iowa State University Regional Climate Modeling Laboratory. The model suggests summers will be warmer across the U.S., but the central part of the country will warm less than the rest of the country. (Credit: Image courtesy of Iowa State University) "There is no...

Researchers divulge details about mummy 7/28/2007, 4:13 p.m. CDT The Associated Press BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — He was probably a redhead, tall and in good shape when he died of an unidentified cause by age 30. That's according to researchers, who used X-rays and a computerized topography scan to learn more about the 2,300-year-old mummy housed at the Louisiana Art and Science Museum. The release of their findings coincided with the unveiling of a major renovation of the museum's ancient Egypt gallery. The research also provided answers to questions left unresolved after X-rays done in the 1980s, and more...

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - An ice sheet in Antarctica that is the world's largest — with enough water to raise global sea levels by 200 feet — is relatively stable and poses no immediate threat, according to new research. While studies of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets show they are both at risk from global warming, the East Antarctic ice sheet will "need quite a bit of warming" to be affected, Andrew Mackintosh, a senior lecturer at Victoria University, said Wednesday. The air over the East Antarctic ice sheet, an ice mass more than 1,875 miles across and...

Tel Aviv University anthropologists say they have disproven the theory that "Lucy" - the world-famous 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis skeleton found in Ethiopia 33 years ago - is the last ancestor common to humans and another branch of the great apes family known as the "Robust hominids." The jaw bone of Lucy and the jaw bone of Australopithecus afarensis.