Daily Research

Male pick-up lines tend to be of two kinds: bad and worse.  "You're hot, can I have your number?" "Can you recommend a good drink?" "Can I get a picture of you so I can show Santa what I want for Christmas?”  These are just a few of the gems in the male pick-up line repertoire. But what about females? Do women use pick-up lines as well? If so, do they work, and are they any more clever than what the male species has to offer? New research forthcoming in the journal  Personality  and Individual Differences  explored these questions in the context of an online experiment. Specifically, a team of psychologists led by Maryanne Fisher of Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Canada tested which of three forms of female pick-up lines—direct, flippant, and innocuous—were most effective in piquing the interest of a potential male suitor.  Interestingly, they found that directness was the most s...

In a new study, scans of people who had a brain hemisphere removed as children show how the organ adapted. In severe cases of epilepsy, a patient’s seizures can become so incessant, and other treatments so ineffective, that doctors will remove half of the brain during childhood to stop them. It's a procedure known as a hemispherectomy. Yet, incredibly, these patients still have intact motor, language and thinking skills. In a study published  Tuesday in  Cell Reports ,  scientists studied six of these patients to see how the human brain rewires itself to adapt after major surgery. After performing brain scans on the patients, the researchers found that the remaining hemisphere formed even stronger connections between different brain networks — regions that control things like walking, talking and memory — than in healthy control subjects. And the researchers suggest that these connections enable the brain, essentially, to function as if it were still whole. S...

A new VCU study identifies “a distinctly American phenomenon” as mortality among 25 to 64 year-olds increases and U.S. life expectancy continues to fall. Mortality rates among working-age Americans continue to climb, causing a decrease in U.S. life expectancy that is severely impacting certain regions of the United States, according to a  Virginia Commonwealth University  study set to publish Tuesday in JAMA. The report, “ Life Expectancy and Mortality Rates in the United States, 1959-2017, ” is one of the most comprehensive 50-state analyses of U.S. mortality. Deaths among Americans ages 25 to 64 are increasing, particularly in Rust Belt states and Appalachia. These deaths, which have fueled a decline in U.S. life expectancy since 2014, are linked to several major causes of death. Compared to the 1990s, working-age adults are now more likely to die before age 65 from drug overdoses, alcohol abuse and suicides — sometimes referred to as “deaths of despair”— but also f...

Researchers traced neural connections in a newly discovered brain region of mantis shrimp, gaining new insights into how the fierce predators are able to make sense of a breathtaking amount of visual input. A study involving scientists at the University of Arizona and the University of Queensland provides new insight into how the small brains of mantis shrimp - fierce predators with keen vision that are among the fastest strikers in the animal kingdom - are able to make sense of a breathtaking amount of visual input. The researchers examined the neuronal organization of mantis shrimp, which are among the top predatory animals of coral reefs and other shallow warm water environments. The research team discovered a region of the mantis shrimp brain they called the reniform ("kidney-shaped") body. The discovery sheds new light on how the crustaceans may process and integrate visual information with other sensory input. Mantis shrimp sport the most complex visual syst...

El Ninos have become more intense in the industrial age, which stands to worsen storms, drought, and coral bleaching in El Nino years. A new study has found compelling evidence in the Pacific Ocean that the stronger El Ninos are part of a climate pattern that is new and strange. It is the first known time that enough physical evidence spanning millennia has come together to allow researchers to say definitively that: El Ninos, La Ninas, and the climate phenomenon that drives them have become more extreme in the times of human-induced climate change. "What we're seeing in the last 50 years is outside any natural variability. It leaps off the baseline. Actually, we even see this for the entire period of the industrial age," said Kim Cobb, the study's principal investigator and professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "There were three extremely strong El Nino-La Nina events in the 50-year period, but i...

Vaccinated rabbits produce antibodies to at least two vulnerable sites on HIV. LA JOLLA, CA –  An experimental HIV vaccine developed by scientists at  Scripps Research  and the nonprofit vaccine research organization  IAVI  has reached an important milestone by eliciting antibodies that can neutralize a wide variety of HIV strains. The tests, in rabbits, showed that these “broadly neutralizing” antibodies, or bnAbs, targeted at least two critical sites on the virus. Researchers widely assume that a vaccine must elicit bnAbs to multiple sites on HIV if it is to provide robust protection against this ever-changing virus. The promising results,  which appear in  Immunity , suggest that researchers are one step closer  to developing an effective HIV vaccine—a major goal of medical science ever since the virus was identified in 1983. “It’s an initial proof of principle but an important one, and we’re now working to optimize this vaccine de...