These days, you may actually see surgeons-in-training tracing five-pointed stars on their TV screens with their Wiimotes. Why? Well, a study conducted by Arizona">Mark Marshall, director of simulation and training at the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Centre in Phoenix, Arizona, suggests that under certain conditions, gaming can improve the hand dexterity needed by surgeons.

If you want to know what we're talking about, head on over to the full article after the jump.

Arizona State University Physics Professor Kong-Thon Tsen and his son Shaw-Wei Tsen might be holding the key for curing, if not totally eliminating, deadly viruses such as hepatitis and HIV. They reportedly found out that viruses can be destroyed by using ultrashort-pulse lasers or USPs.

According to them, we must find a way to remove these viruses from our system because vaccinations are sometimes insufficient. In the study conducted by the father and son tandem, it was demonstrated that this laser technique was able to shatter the protein shell (capsid) of the tobacco mosaic virus.

What was left of the mosaic virus after the experimentation was just a "harmless mucus-like mash of molecules." Interestingly, the Tsens mentioned that the energy used to destroy the mosaic virus was 40 times lower than the threshold for human cells. Surpassing the limit would cause harm to the human T-cells.

We ran a report back in June of this year concerning USPs and the company Raydiance Inc., which is planning to fully-developed the technology to be used in other fields aside from physics such as medicine and biology. Hearing about the Tsens' accomplishment, Raydiance Inc. President Scott Davison had this to say:

The extreme brevity of these pulses is creating a physical effect that traditional lasers and other types of non-laser approaches can't do. What we see is a new wave of exploration and discovery in applying USP in a whole bunch of industries and applications.

Scientists from the Laboratory for Neural Computation and Cognition at the University of Arizona have found links to the learning behavior of humans and the genes associated with the neurotransmitter Dopamine.

So far, three genes have been pinpointed to affect the production of Dopamine in a person's brain. These genes defined the ability of an individual to learn from both positive and negative decisions they make.

Assistant professor of Psychology and the head of the research team behind the project Michael Frank noted:

When making these kinds of choices, you do not explicitly recall each individual positive and negative outcome of all of your previous such choices. Instead, you often go with your gut, which may involve a more implicit representation of the probability of rewarding outcomes based on past experience

Of the three genes being studied, DSRPP-32 and DRD2 were found to be responsible for the long-term learning and retention of knowledge. The third gene, COMT predicted how a person would change strategies after he or she got hurt by a wrong decision.

Frank further elaborated on the three genes and the reason for their focusing on it:

The reason we looked at these three individual genes in the first place, out of a huge number of possible genes, is that we have a computer model that examines how dopamine mediates these kinds of reinforcement processes in the striatum and prefrontal cortex.

The model makes specific predictions on how subtle changes in different aspects of dopamine function can affect behavior, and one way to get at this question is to test individual genes

Frank admitted that the findings need more research before it can be confirmed. Hopefully this will be further pursued because the findings will be useful not only in developing treatments for patients suffering from Parkinson's disease, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and schizophrenia but also to identify the type of instruction methods to be used on individuals for maximum effect.

Resident Evil 4 much? The Las Plagas virus from Capcom's zombie franchise might be a thing out of fiction, but it could have been based off of fact. And the fact is, our world is also home to a nasty amoeba that eats brains.

They're called Naegleria fowleri: microscopic amoebas that reside in warm lakes and other stagnant bodies of water. They make their way up a person's nose, latch on to the brain where they start feeding on brain cells, and eventually cause death within two weeks.

Two days ago, the Naegleria has claimed its latest victim. A boy from Arizona spent a day with his family in Lake Havasu to celebrate their father's birthday. They frolicked on the beach, splashed around, the works. A week later he started complaining about a headache that wouldn't go away. He was taken to the hospital and was diagnosed with what they thought was meningitis.

It wasn't only until later after the boy had passed away did they realize the real culprit. Doctors have speculated that the kid got infected by the Naegleria a few days before his death, coinciding with his time down at Lake Havasu.

It is indeed a sad story. On top of that though is the alarm that this news has brought to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). They've noticed a considerable spike in the number of deaths from the Naegleria. This year alone, there have been six victims already in North America. They speculate that, though these cases are rare, it could eventually rise in the future.

Michael Beach of the CDC said that "This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better. In future decades, as temperatures rise, we'd expect to see more cases." He also warns the public to not panic about it. Nose clips can reduce the chances of the Naegleria from getting into your head. To begin with, the amoeba has to be sprayed way up your nose for it to latch on. Which means, don't be too boisterous when playing in warm water and try to be more careful when you're doing somersaults.

Some lab tests have been able to stop the amoeba though, but Beach remains that there is little chance of survival once a person gets infected.

A veritable Death Star for virus scum? A joint-research study by various universities have developed a new procedure utilizing a low-powered laser to kill viruses.

The procedure uses the laser to emit a pulse of light over target biological samples, creating mechanical vibrations in the virus shell, or capsid. This causes the shell to disintegrate, which in turn destroys the virus.

The laser's power setting for the tests was at 50 megawatts per square centimeter. This is reportedly too low to harm any nearby human tissue and blood, and is further too low to cause the target microbe to mutate.

The latter effect was a detected problem with standard UV treatment; The radiation from this procedure sometimes caused the virus to mutate and develop a resistance, while the UV light also risked damaging the surrounding tissue's DNA. Microwave treatment also didn't appear to work that well, as the surrounding moisture in the tissue diffuses the energy too much for it to affect the virus.

Light pulse tests were conducted on M13 bacteriophages, where it was found that a single light pulse destroyed the target.

Kong-Thon Tsen  of the Arizona State University indicates that this new procedure could be used to help disinfect blood and biological samples in hospitals. We imagine first on the list is disinfecting blood packs. Tsen further added that the procedure could also be used as a new means to treat patients carrying blood-borne disease.

For example blood dialysis allows us to irradiate a patient's blood outside the body and potentially cleanse it of infectious virus particles before reintroducing it into the patient. In this way, we could reduce mortality associated with diseases like hepatitis C and AIDS.

For the moment, Tsen and his team are planning to test the procedure on deadly diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C. They also plan to confirm if the procedure will have any considerable side-effects on mammalian test subjects. This study was conducted in coordination with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the Uniformed Services University of The Health Sciences.

 

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE team led by Cushing has released a set of images from their expedition. In some of the photographs, there is a mysterious black hole that is said to be one of the possible entrances to a subterranean network of caves underneath the surface of the red planet.

So far there are seven possible entrances to this labyrinth of caves beneath Mars. This newly discovered one appears to be a really deep hole due to the fact that the magnification of the image shows nothing except darkness.

Seven entrances( NASA / JPL / U. Arizona / G. Cushing et al. 2007):

• Dena (-6.084 N, 239.061 E)
• Chloe (-4.926 N, 239.193 E)
• Wendy (-8.099 N, 240.242 E)
• Annie (-6.267 N, 240.005 E)
• Abbey & Nikki (-8.498 N, 240.349 E)
• Jeanne (-5.636 N, 241.259 E)

This might potentially be the break that we've been waiting for in looking for life on other planets. The subterranean caves could house more than simple stalagmites or stalactites. What would even be creepier though, is to find the holes completely empty with neatly cut holes. A discovery that may suggest something greater than simple life-forms at work. If you want to read more on this be sure to click on our read link to go straight to the Planetary Societies homepage.

We all knew twins to be of two kinds: fraternal or identical. Fraternal twins come to being when an egg cell is fertilized by two different sperm cells simultaneously. Meanwhile, identical twins are from a singular fertilized egg, which split into two embryos. That's all the kind of twins we

Apparently, we knew wrong. There's another kind of twins, and they are deemed to be under the semi-identical category. This kind of twins are identical only one side of the parental equation (for example, the mothers), while sharing only half of their genes from the other parent.

This came to the attention of geneticist Vivienne Souter of the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center of Phoenix, Arizona, when she saw that one of the twins had ambiguous genitalia. This makes the child a "true hermaphrodite", having both ovarian and testicular tissue. The other twin is confirmed to be anatomically male.

"Their similarity is somewhere between identical and fraternal twins. It makes me wonder whether the current classification of twins is an oversimplification," muses Souter.

The full findings are reported in the Journal of Human Genetics, which can be accessed through news@nature.com, the online site of the journal Nature.