Science, Research | featured news

Researchers might have found the Holy Grail in the war against cancer, a miracle drug that has killed every kind of cancer tumor it has come in contact with, the New York Post reported. The drug works by blocking a protein called CD47 that is essentially a "do not eat" signal to the body's immune system, according to Science Magazine.

President Obama on Tuesday will announce a broad new research initiative, starting with $100 million in 2014, to invent and refine new technologies to understand the human brain, senior administration officials said Monday.

Researchers at Brown University have succeeded in creating the first wireless, implantable, rechargeable, long-term brain-computer interface. The wireless BCIs have been implanted in pigs and monkeys for over 13 months without issue, and human subjects are next.

Two rats — one in North Carolina, the other in Brazil — worked together on a task by communicating telepathically, thanks to implants in their brain. Electrical signals from a "leader" rat’s brain were collected, encoded and then zapped into the "follower" rat’s cortex in the form of an electrical signal. The follower rat then pressed one of two levers based on a light visible only to the leader rat. The Duke University experiment is the first time two animals have collaborated through such an artificial link, and shows that the mammal brain can be trained to act on electrical signals from another animal.

...It turns out that extreme excitement and extreme anger look very similar. We believe we distinguish these feelings by gazing at people’s faces, reading them for subtle changes in emotion. But researchers recently found that people more accurately understand mood when they examine body language.

Scientists have identified four regions of DNA that play a major role in controlling animal behavior: telling a mouse how long a burrow to dig and whether to add an escape tunnel.

It may not look like a character from the Transformer franchise, but a tiny robot made in the US is able to change shape. Built at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), it uses magnets to mimic molecules that fold themselves into complex shapes.

The fact that bones have curves has now thrown a curveball into calculations of dinosaur weight, researchers say. New estimates suggest dinosaurs may have been lighter than once thought, scientists explain.

Boys left infertile by childhood cancer treatment may one day be able to produce healthy sperm by using stored stem cells, monkey research suggests.

More than a decade of research hinting that magnesium supplements might boost your brain power is finally being put to the test in a small clinical trial. The research, led by biopharmaceutical company Magceutics of Hayward, California, began testing the ability of its product Magtein to boost magnesium ion (Mg2+) levels in the brain earlier this month. The trial will track whether the ions can decrease anxiety and improve sleep quality, as well as following changes in the memory and cognitive ability of participants. But critics caution that the trial in just 50 people is too small to draw definitive conclusions.