Despite the issues confronting stem cell research, both Rutgers University and private company BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics have collaborated to further the research and eventually find ways in curing spinal cord injuries.

In the United States alone, the total number of people suffering from the said injury amounts between 10,000 to 12,000 in one year alone. Read the full story after the jump!

In case you're among the guys who had the misfortune of experiencing World of Warcraft's Corrupted Blood plague of 2005, you'll be happy to know that your experience has gone into a research paper that's come into light.

The paper, as strange as it may sound, delves into analyzing the unpredictable human factors that go into a real-life pandemics and is authored by Eric Lofgren of Rutgers University and Nina Fefferman of Tufts University.

For first-time readers not too familiar with the Corrupted Blood Plague, it's actually a debuff caused by Hakkar the Soulflayer, the final boss of the Zul'Gurub instance. The debuff could be passed on to other players who were standing close to the infected person.

While it was supposedly confined to the Zul'Gurub area, a then-existing bug allowed it to be spread to the outside population via hunter pets. As soon as hunters left their pets at the stables, the Corrupted Blood plague also infected the NPCs, who in turn infected everybody who passed by.  

Lofgren and Fefferman's research paper examined how quickly the plague spread within the realms, and how players reacted to the resulting "outbreak".

Other realities that were reflected in WoW's plague were the issues of the failure of quarantine measures, and disease transmission by either the owner's pets, or immune carriers (in WoW's case, the NPCs). Professor Fefferman had this to say regarding the study:

If, God forbid, a disease broke out in London, you could see what would happen if people were told immediately of the risk. Would there be panic and chaos, or would it allow them to psychologically accept the danger and act accordingly? What would happen if we made people feel too reassured?

These are all things that have a great impact on the number of people who would be affected. They are also things we just don’t know, so [virtual games] could be of great value in helping us understand what their true emotional responses would be.

The study is expected to be printed in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal for next month.

If you're naturally prone to forgetting, then you should all the more stay away from Marijuana. That's because scientists may have already found the reason why weed impairs memory.

With the help of them ever-friendly lab rats, Neuroscientists at Rutgers University have found that the weed's active ingredient, THC, actually disrupts the hippocampus activity, that brain area linked to memory. Putting the rats under a standard memory test where they had to go through a maze in order to get water, with THC injected in them, they apparently became more prone to and actually committed more mistakes. Although there was no difference on how often the cells fired nerve impulses, it was the timing that was affected, as it got erratic.

Dr. Gyorgy Buzsaki compared it to having an orchestra where the musicians are deafened and perhaps blindfolded. While they could still play their own pieces, it was without any feedback from the other instruments played by other musicians or the conductor. "What is missing is the temporal coordination."

What this suggests is that memory formation is crucially dependent on synchronized brain cell activity. Furthermore, THC impairs memory precisely by disrupting this set synchronized activity.

On the brighter side of things, however, there's also the suggestion that the way THC disrupts the synchronized brain cell activity could help fight epileptic seizures. The thing with seizures is that the brain activity becomes abnormally synchronized. So therefore, the idea is that THC's disruptive effect might actually temper down this abnormally synchronized activity. Then again, further studies still have to be conducted in order for that theory to be conclusive.

If you want to see the report on the findings, check out the December issue of the journal of Nature Neuroscience.

Err...what's the findings about again?

The Hudson Canyon, a sub-sea landscape 100 miles of the New Jersey-New York coast, has now been fully mapped. A four-year study has produced detailed readings of the undersea region the size of Connecticut, and well, to state the obvious, it's huge folks. It's like a state-sized undersea Grand Canyon.

According to scientists, the maps will allow them to confirm many things, including whether or not methane gas trapped in frozen sediment below the sea floor is escaping and contributing to global warming.

Others are also looking into possibilities for tapping into the methane deposits. Harvesting the methane and turning it into a potential energy source. The scientists are also also interested in finding out if sudden methane gas releases from deposits in the canyon could spark undersea landslides and cause a tsunami to hit New York-New Jersey coast. Though that is a pretty extreme effect that a canyon landslide could produce, a more likely cause for concern is that the landslides could destroy the undersea phone cables that handle most of the outside communication of the US.

Peter Rona, the Rutgers University Professor who led the team that made the maps had this to say: "This region, the Hudson Canyon, is on the doorstep of one of the largest metropolitan areas of the world, and it is an exploration frontier."

Sea-lab 2021 anyone?

Now this is a great way to mod something for a purpose other than gaming and homebrew.

Engineers over at Rutgers University in New Jersey have modded an XBox and a control glove to help rehabilitate patients who've suffered a stroke. Specifically, they've modded an Essential Reality P5 control glove and the original Xbox to play a couple of exercises using the glove, allowing those being rehabilitated to remaster the use and coordination of their hand.

One of the exercises on this virtual rehabilitation system is a bit like the Eyetoy, minus the camera, in that players will try and clean off a four-paneled window (with a nice picture behind all that grime) by flexing their fingers. The results of their exercise will show directly on the game, giving direct feedback and rewards to the glove user for doing their best to better themselves.

It's a great way to use gaming for beneficial purposes, and it might just be a very great hope for those of us who spend so much time playing games and not exercising that we actually GET a stroke.

Best of all, it costs less than other sorts of virtual rehabilitation systems. According to Grigore Burdea, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and an inventor of virtual rehab technology,

“Virtual reality is showing significant promise for promoting faster and more complete rehabilitation, but the cost of many systems is still prohibitive for widespread deployment in outpatient clinics or patients’ homes. While it’s essential to keep pursuing breakthrough technologies that will initially be costly, it’s just as important that we find ways to make innovative treatments accessible to the many patients who need them.” 

Three cheers for medical mods!