Thanks to the efforts of Argo Medical Technologies, paraplegics may soon be given the chance to know what it's like to stand up and walk again. Engineer Amit Goffer, founder of the Israeli high-tech company, developed an electronic exoskeleton called "ReWalk", which can help people paralyzed from the waist down to stand, walk, and even climb stairs.

General belief holds the Black Death as an indiscriminate killer that cut down anyone it took hold of regardless of sex, age, or health level. A new study by a pair of anthropologists have revealed, however, that the pandemic was actually more selective than previously thought. More in the full article.

Researchers from Harvard University and Pennsylvania State University are undertaking an ambitious project to beat the heat. They have currently invented a technology which will reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide caused by human emissions and help speed up nature's natural process of cleaning up greenhouse gases.

Read more about the proposed project after the jump!

Today's life-saving techniques could be killing potential survivors, a Dr. Lance Becker from Pennsylvania suggests, in an article written by Newsweek's own Jerry Adler. In an emergency room, in a desperate situation where paramedics are trying their hardest to get the flatlining patient's heartbeat back, they might be doing more harm than good.

First of all, how does someone 'die'? A conventional answer would be that one's cells had died, the lack of oxygen causing irreparable damage to his brain and heart, effectively grinding all activity into a halt - a process that begins four or five minutes after the moment of pulse flatlining.

If cardiopulmonary resuscitation isn't appropriated before that time limit is over, 'death' as we know it occurs. However, after recently inspecting heart cells that have been starved of oxygen, researchers have begun questioning not only the methods we now use to resuscitate dying patients, but our idea of death itself.

"After one hour, we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong," says Dr. Lance Becker, director of the Center of Resuscitation. It's to note that cells cut off from their blood supply die hours later, considerably much longer than the esteemed four-to-five minute window.

So what actually kills cells? Oxygen reperfusion, or the resumption of oxygen supply. When a cell is starved of oxygen for more than five minutes, it dies when its supply of oxygen is resumed immediately after. Becker blames apoptosis, a process controlled by mitochondria as the automatic 'kill switch' of abnormal cells, such as cancer. "It looks to us as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die."

With this revelation, Becker hopes to change emergency response procedures as we know them. Instead of paramedics forcing the heart to beat and pump oxygen-rich blood with defibrillators and epinephrine shots, they should be doing the exact opposite: reducing oxygen uptake, slowing the body's metabolism and adjusting the blood chemistry for gradual and safe reperfusion. This would slowly but surely get the cells the oxygen they've been starved of, but not so fast that the mitochondria mistakes them for cancer cells and shut everything down.

It's not the anti-death pill, but it'd certainly help. A better chance of survival, a second chance at life. Good news? Definitely.

The belief regarding how modern mammals came about has always been linked with the extinction of the dinosaurs. After the giant lizards were allegedly killed by a meteor crash, theorists claim that mammals smashed into the scene and took over the Earth.

A new study, however, seeks to challenge the established theory by attacking the spatial and chronological integrity of the theory. Scientists at the Texas A&M University and the Pennsylvania State University say that there may actually have been three installments on how everything came about after the monumental reptilian wipeout.

Contrary to popular belief, mammals did not diversify in species as a result of enjoying spatial and food opportunities after the dinosaurs vacated the lot. The researchers say that the fossils found closest in date to dinosaurs were unlikely to be the ancestors of modern furry critters. The mammals of that time were dead-ends in terms of evolution and died out in time like dinosaurs.

What actually happened was that a huge number of mammalian species burst into the scene about 85 million years ago, then some more 55 million years ago, then the most likely ancestors 35 million years ago.

The old theory still holds some water, but rather than one huge burst originally claimed, more and more scientists are realizing that the appearance of species took a serious amount of time. The updated family tree has been raised to 4,510 and paleontologists are working on securing more fossils to verify the new study.

You can read more about this exciting new study by clicking the read URL.

It has long been an accepted fact that nerves use electrical impulses to transmit signals from the brain to the point of action. This, however, may not be the case, if what Copenhagen University researcher Thomas Heimburg suggests is true.

According to him, there are certain inconsistencies with the electrical impulse-nerve theory, and foremost among these inconsistencies is that there are some laws of thermodynamics which are not followed. Heimburg notes that "The physical laws of thermodynamics tell us that electrical impulses must produce heat as they travel along the nerve, but experiments find that no such heat is produced."

Instead, he believes that the connection between our nerves and the rest of our bodies may be due to sound pulses. He explains that the the lipids in a nerve membrane (which is similar to olive oil) has a freezing point that is perfectly suited for the propagation of concentrated sound pulses, thereby allowing the pulses to travel without spreading and therefore it retaining its intensity when it reaches its destination.

Despite this fact though, his theory has been met with some skepticism.

Mr. Roderic Eckenhoff, a researcher in the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, said that an enormous burden of proof exists against Heimburg's theory, and there is a long way to go before they can debunk the impulse-nerve theory. He also adds that there is currently no obvious explanation on how sound can be generated on that level in the first place.

If Heimberg's theory proves true, then perhaps we have come a step closer to understanding how anesthesia works, since anesthesia (such as ether, laughing gas, chloroform and other anesthetics in proper doses) are all based on their solubility in olive oil. At the moment, scientists are still somewhat unsure of what exactly happens when a person is anesthesized, and they are hoping that if one of the two theories are ultimately proven, then better drug development can follow.