Researchers at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience and Kanazawa University (Japan) have succeeded in imaging structural dynamics of living neurons with an unprecedented spatial resolution.

The Justice Department is at odds with Google and privacy groups over the government's push to make it easier to locate and hack into computers in criminal investigations, a simmering conflict with constitutional and policy implications.

A major Japanese machinery company said Friday that it has succeeded in transmitting energy wirelessly, marking a step toward making solar power generation in space a reality.

Welcome to your grocery-getting, cooking and eating future. You will want to get more familiar with phrases such as "vertical farming" and "controlled agriculture" to grasp what may be a growing force in how we produce and get our food. Dickson Despommier, Ph.D, respected Columbia professor of microbiology and public health and best teacher award-winner, has a website called The Vertical Farm and he has conveyed his belief that the world would be a much better place if we had vertical farming.

A sophisticated necklace developed by researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science can monitor food and drink intake, which could help wearers track and improve their dietary habits.

IBM Watson initially won fame as the artificially intelligent computer system that won $1 million for whipping former "Jeopardy!" champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on the televised game show in 2011.

A device designed to deliver low-speed obstacle avoidance for drones, working indoors and outdoors, is being proposed in the form of the Panoptes eBumper4 from Panoptes Systems. No question, drones are going places. Thing is, you don't want them flying blindly. You want the drone to sense obstacles and respond as necessary. The Panoptes team including Michael Humphrey, mechanical engineer, Eddy Jacinto, lead electronics engineer, Donnie Rogers, systems integration lead, Andrew Kehlenbeck lead GNC engineer and Fabrice Kunzi, chief technology officer, are out to promote their device, installed on a drone.

A team of Columbia Engineering researchers has invented a technology—full-duplex radio integrated circuits (ICs)—that can be implemented in nanoscale CMOS to enable simultaneous transmission and reception at the same frequency in a wireless radio. Up to now, this has been thought to be impossible: transmitters and receivers either work at different times or at the same time but at different frequencies. The Columbia team, led by Electrical Engineering Associate Professor Harish Krishnaswamy, is the first to demonstrate an IC that can accomplish this. The researchers presented their work at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco on February 25.

Call it a preview of the cross-country road trip of the future.

Telemedicine researchers at the University of Valladolid have proposed a series of recommendations to programmers to improve the security of health applications on mobile devices. According to these specialists, it is a rapidly growing area, but the insecure handling of clinical and medical data can be critical for users.

Access to routine information about you—like where you grew up and your relationship status—can help others manipulate you, according to a recent study by a University at Buffalo research team.

Onions, one of the biggest vegetable crops in Georgia, risk disease when they are harvested and stored. To solve this issue, University of Georgia researchers have developed new technologies, including a gas sensor and imaging methods, to detect diseases in onions.

The attacks were perfidious: In February this year, the Czech IT security company Avast declared that it had identified several malicious game apps for mobile phones in the Google Play Store – ones that would only become criminally active on the device after several weeks. Then the affected smartphones or tablet computers would suddenly take minutes, instead of seconds, to display all the usual settings in proper colors. Or a message would appear when unlocking the device, claiming that the memory was infected or full of pornographic data. Anyone following the instructions given there would be redirected to suspicious sites, which make users download even more malicious programs (malware).

Going online without understanding the basics of how the internet works is like getting behind the wheel without knowing the road rules: you might still get where you're going, but you could be a danger to yourself and those around you.

Consider the following two situations.

Apple's chief executive Tim Cook offered part of his liver for a transplant to Steve Jobs before the company co-founder died, but the offer was rejected, a new book states.

With the cognoscenti breathlessly occupied with the launch of the Apple Watch, we thought we'd check in with another distinguished group of users just drooling for the latest wearable technology: Dogs.

Deepinder Singh, a Minnesota entrepreneur born in India, met the girl he would marry on a school bus in Punjab Province about 30 years ago.

The early reviews of the Apple Watch are pointing in one direction: It should save users a minute here and there, but the fact that many functions require an iPhone to be nearby cuts down on its usefulness.

Imagine getting your Starbucks fix at rush hour without a long line - and your name on that to-go cup always properly spelled.

Early adopters, take note: Amazon.com has launched a store section called Amazon Exclusives that features new innovations from up-and-coming brands.

In the persistent quest to take all human effort out of basic tasks, manufacturers showcased several new "smart" products at the recent International Home and Housewares Show that tackle everything from pancake design to makeovers.

Anyone who has bought a security camera system knows they can be pricey and a pain to set up.

TiVo said Friday that it has received bankruptcy court approval to buy some assets of Aereo, an online startup that offered a cheaper alternative to cable TV.

Twitter said Friday it had purchased the maker of the video streaming app Periscope, amid what seems to be surging interest in live video sharing.

Will next week's partial solar eclipse turn off the lights in Germany?

It started as a classroom project at Stanford University. The idea: An app for sending photos that would disappear seconds later.

Two San Francisco federal judges say juries will have to decide whether drivers for Uber and Lyft were independent contractors, or employees of the ride-hailing companies with all of the protections and benefits the state affords regular workers.

A calculating schemer burning with resentment and with a thirst for a quick buck or an innocent victim of sickening sexual discrimination?

A man accused of faking an ownership stake in Facebook to justify a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against its founder Mark Zuckerberg has vanished.

Miami International Airport used to be famous for the hours-long lines passengers waited in when they arrived from other countries.

Shopping for laptops can be maddening. There are hundreds of laptops from many different manufacturers, and they're mostly fine. But remember, you get what you pay for. It's pretty easy to find a Windows laptop that costs as little as $400 or as much as $2,500.

An FDA-approved drug for high blood pressure, guanabenz, prevents myelin loss and alleviates clinical symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS) in animal models, according to a new study. The drug appears to enhance an innate cellular mechanism that protects myelin-producing cells against inflammatory stress. These findings point to promising avenues for the development of new therapeutics against MS, report scientists from the University of Chicago in Nature Communications on March 13.

Melbourne researchers have developed a new genome editing technology that can target and kill blood cancer cells with high accuracy.

Even worms have free will. If offered a delicious smell, for example, a roundworm will usually stop its wandering to investigate the source, but sometimes it won't. Just as with humans, the same stimulus does not always provoke the same response, even from the same individual. New research at Rockefeller University, published online today in Cell, offers a new neurological explanation for this variability, derived by studying a simple three-cell network within the roundworm brain.

An EPFL study has shown that tetracycline-based antibiotics have an unexpected effect on the development of many organisms. In addition to pointing out the issue of soil pollution by these antibiotics, which are widely administrated to livestock, the scientists call upon colleagues to explore the consequences of using them in experiments that modulate gene expression.

Researchers at the University of Arizona have discovered what causes and regulates collective cell migration, one of the most universal but least understood biological processes in all living organisms.

There may be a fundamental bias in the way people prefer to see moving items depicted in pictures according to research.

Almost all patients with a group of blood cancers called B-cell malignancies have two prominent "fingerprints" on the surface of leukemia and lymphoma cancers, called CD22 and CD19, Vallera explained. To develop the drug, Vallera and colleagues chose two antibody fragments that each selectively bind to CD19 and CD22. They used genetic engineering to attach these two antibodies to a potent toxin, the bacterial diphtheria toxin. When the antibody fragments bind to the two targets on the cancer cell, the entire drug enters the cell, and the toxin kills the cell.

Today at the 93rd General Session and Exhibition of the International Association for Dental Research, researcher Aderonke A. Akinkugbe, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, will present a study titled "Environmental Tobacco Smoke is Associated With Periodontitis in U.S. Non-smokers." The IADR General Session is being held in conjunction with the 44th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research and the 39th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research.

Today at the 93rd General Session and Exhibition of the International Association for Dental Research, researcher Bertha A. Chavez Gonzalez, Universidade de Minas Gerias, Lima, San Borja, Peru, will present a study titled "Birth Weight and Pregnancy Complications Associated With the Enamel Defects." The IADR General Session is being held in conjunction with the 44th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research and the 39th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research.

Leading public health researchers today call for the sale of tobacco to be phased out by 2040, showing that with sufficient political support and stronger evidence-based action against the tobacco industry, a tobacco-free world - where less than 5% of adults use tobacco - could be possible in less than three decades.

Smoker numbers are declining in many parts of the world, but upward trends in African and Mediterranean countries mean the global total will not change much over the next 10 years, researchers said Friday.

UCLA transplant researchers have developed a novel method to more accurately calculate the risk of disease recurring in people with liver cancer who have undergone a liver transplant. The approach gives physicians a new tool to help make treatment and surveillance decisions.

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) has today (12 March) published a major report on powdered cocaine and its impact on British society which was authored by a group led by a University of Manchester academic.

A new website is launched today that will help bridge the communication gap between healthcare professionals and patients diagnosed with mild chronic kidney disease (CKD) after research revealed a disparity between what GP's explain and what patients understand about the condition. The resource has been developed by University of Bristol academics.

A vaccination campaign that almost didn't happen was widely effective in reducing transmission of cholera in the midst of an ongoing outbreak of the disease in rural Haiti.

It was a phone call that changed everything. Two years ago, while Allison Warman was driving from Edmonton to her house in Calgary, she became confused and disoriented to the point that she couldn't remember the way home.

People with the most common form of diabetes can take the new drug Alogliptin without concern for an increased risk of heart failure or cardiovascular disease, according to research by a UConn cardiologist just published in the British medical journal The Lancet.

Metastatic melanoma is the leading cause of skin cancer deaths in the United States; once melanoma has spread (metastasized), life expectancy for patients can be dramatically shortened. At present, the reference therapy for patients diagnosed with metastatic melanoma is Dacarbazine (DTIC), which is associated with poor patient outcomes.

Ten more people have died in Saudi Arabia from the MERS virus since last week, health ministry data showed on Friday, adding to a surge in cases over the past month.

A work group of physicians from leading academic medical centers across the country, including NYU Langone Medical Center, has developed new quality measures for the detection and treatment of childhood obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a potentially morbid, life-altering condition that affects hundreds of thousands of children and adolescents nationwide. The measures, commissioned and endorsed by the American Association of Sleep Medicine (AASM), are published on March 15 in a special section of The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

Although listening to music is common in all societies, the biological determinants of listening to music are largely unknown. According to a latest study, listening to classical music enhanced the activity of genes involved in dopamine secretion and transport, synaptic neurotransmission, learning and memory, and down-regulated the genes mediating neurodegeneration. Several of the up-regulated genes were known to be responsible for song learning and singing in songbirds, suggesting a common evolutionary background of sound perception across species.

Tablet use has rocketed. Last year in the US, for example, 42% of under 18's owned one and more than half of 35-49 year olds used them regularly. This figure seems unlikely to decrease and yet only limited guidance is available on minimising health risks. Tablet use requires significant head and neck flexion and has implications for potential neck injury to users. In this article in Ergonomics, researchers from Washington State University evaluate the head-neck biomechanics during tablet use, the implications for the neck musculature and future ergonomics recommendations.

A legal scholar and tobacco control expert says he has developed a research-based roadmap that allows for the immediate regulation of e-cigarettes.

(HealthDay)—A lot of excitement surrounded the announcement from Apple that its new watch will be able to monitor blood sugar levels. Has Apple figured out a way for folks with diabetes to check their blood sugar without the dreaded finger stick?

Elliott Royce estimates that he has fallen down at least 15,000 times over the past 10 years.

On New Year's Eve, singer Kim Archer was scheduled to perform at a party. The problem was she had an asthma attack early in the day and didn't have any medicine.

After killing at least 9,936 people and infecting more than 24,202, the Ebola epidemic appears to be running out of steam. And for some medical researchers, this hard-won progress poses a problem.

A study led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators suggests that bariatric surgery can significantly reduce the risk of asthma attacks - also called exacerbations - in obese patients with asthma. Their report, published online in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, is the first to find that significant weight reduction can reduce serious asthma-associated events.

Case Western Reserve researchers are part of an international team that has discovered that a common herpes drug reduces HIV-1 levels—even when patients do not have herpes.

South African doctors announced Friday that they had performed the world's first successful penis transplant, three months after the ground-breaking operation.

People exposed to prolonged periods of shortened sleep have significant increases in blood pressure during nighttime hours, Mayo Clinic researchers report in a small study of eight participants.

Healthy young adults who don't consume caffeine regularly experienced greater rise in resting blood pressure after consumption of a commercially available energy drink—compared to a placebo drink—thus raising the concern that energy drinks may increase the risk of cardiac events, Mayo Clinic researchers found.

A flu vaccine given just under the surface of the skin that includes four strains of inactivated influenza could be more protective than a similar flu vaccine containing only three strains, Saint Louis University research found.

The first study to examine the use of cannabis in the context of daily life among people with Bipolar Disorder has shown how the drug is linked to increases in both manic and depressive symptoms.

Today the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) published new quality measures for five common sleep disorders, which represents a landmark achievement in the promotion of high quality, patient-centered care in the medical subspecialty of sleep medicine.

Treating respiratory disease is often difficult because drugs have to cross biological barriers such as respiratory tissue and mucosa, and must therefore be given in large quantities in order for an effective amount to reach the target. Now researchers from Germany, Brazil and France have shown that the use of nanoparticles to carry antibiotics across biological barriers can be effective in treating lung infections. Doing so allows better delivery of the drug to the site of infection, and hence prevents the development of antibiotic resistance which may be caused by too large and continued doses of antibiotic. Additionally, such a strategy might help to overcome the rapid metabolism and excretion of the antibiotic from the body, which happens when it is administered by traditional routes, either orally or intravenously.

Exhausted by four years of war and economic hardship, Syrians are suffering from an epidemic of mental illness, from suicidal adults to children plagued by recurring nightmares.

South Korea has developed smartphone apps to help bring down its high student suicide rate by warning parents when their children might be at risk, the education ministry said Friday.

Despite a Los Angeles city ordinance that voters approved in 2013 to limit the number of registered medical marijuana businesses to no more than 135 that have been in continuous operation since September 2007, UCLA researchers found that more than three times that number were operating in the city of Los Angeles as of 2014.

Superfruits and super seeds fit the bill for consumers' desire for natural, minimally processed, or unprocessed foods. Although there is no universal standard definition of a super seed or superfruit, they are often described as providing a number of nutrients and possessing a nutritional halo with their reported health benefits that go beyond their nutritional profiles.

An American healthcare worker who contracted Ebola while volunteering in a Sierra Leone treatment unit arrived safely at the National Institutes of Health's hospital in Maryland, officials announced early Friday.

Being the best at something doesn't necessarily mean there is no more room for improvement. Take Europe's healthcare systems: with most national schemes being ranked among the World Health Report's top 30, you would think our patients are the happiest in the world. But is this really the case?

Preventable deaths caused by acute kidney injury (AKI) could be nearly eliminated in just 10 years, according to leading medical experts. This often forgotten condition - which affects around 13 million people every year and contributes to 1.7 million deaths annually - is preventable and can be treated for as little as $US150 per patient.

New estimates published in The Lancet indicate that at best only half of people worldwide needing kidney dialysis or transplantation to treat kidney failure in 2010 received it. This suggests that at least 2.3 million people may have died prematurely from kidney failure because they could not access this life-saving treatment.

Expanding blood pressure screenings to non-primary care settings can help identify more patients with high blood pressure, commonly called hypertension, and could contribute to better hypertension control and management, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published today in The Journal of Clinical Hypertension.

An American healthcare worker who tested positive for Ebola in Sierra Leone was in serious condition Friday after being admitted to a specialized hospital near the US capital for treatment, officials said.

Several American healthcare workers who may have come in contact with a US volunteer who tested positive for Ebola in Sierra Leone are being monitored for signs of illness, officials said Friday.

The accidental release of dangerous bacteria at a Louisiana research center probably occurred because workers were lax about how they wore protective garments in the lab where the germ was kept, federal officials said Friday.

In a rare show of unity, top House Republicans and Democrats are working toward a $200 billion agreement revamping how doctors are paid for treating Medicare patients, a package that would be largely financed by adding to the federal deficit, lobbyists said Friday.

The pistons in your car engine rub up against their cylinder walls thousands of times a minute; without lubrication in the form of motor oil, they and other parts of the engine would quickly wear away, causing engine failure. Motor oil contains chemical additives that extend how long engines can run without failure, but, despite decades of ubiquity, how such additives actually work to prevent this damage have remained a mystery.

As with magnets and alternating current, positively charged molecules never aim for one another. Indeed, similarly charged poles are repelled. Nevertheless, a team from the University of Copenhagen's Department of Chemistry has managed to become the first to bond positively charged phosphorus atoms with positively charged hydrogen ones. Their insight may prove pivotal to understanding how biologically important molecules such as DNA and proteins form properly.

Vanderbilt University researchers have achieved the first "image fusion" of mass spectrometry and microscopy—a technical tour de force that could, among other things, dramatically improve the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

In nacre, layer lattices of inorganic calcium carbonate alternate with layers of organic material. Chitin, collagen and various proteins ensure that the calcium carbonate grows in these defined layers. What role the proteins play during growth had not previously been explained, but the assumption was that several proteins acted together to control the structure of the calcium carbonate lattice as well as forming part of the nacreous layers. However, Ingrid Weiss of the INM – Leibniz Institute for New Materials in Saarbrücken and her colleague Boaz Pokroy at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology have now shown that the crystal lattice of calcium carbonate can be altered using just a single protein species.

AZTI's Food Research Unit has managed to obtain a series of food prototypes using whey produced by cheese-making dairies, which allows a commercial outlet to be provided for an organic product that is routinely treated as waste and which could end up causing pollution if it is not properly disposed of. The NEIKER R&D centre has likewise produced various animal feed prototypes which contain between 6% and 12% of whey in their composition. This research comes within the framework of the 'Valorlact' project funded by the European Commission's Life+ Programme. This programme aims to stop the whey produced in cheese-making dairies being regarded as a waste product and to encourage its incorporation into the food chain, which means a new business opportunity for the cheese-making and foodstuff production sectors.

Toyohashi Tech researchers in Japan show electrochemical Li insertion and deinsertion property of Ti-Nb mixed oxide Ti2Nb10O29 (TNO) at high current rate is greatly improved by vacuum annealing. This is mainly attributed to enhancement of intrinsic electronic conductivity of TNO by introducing oxygen vacancy. Vacuum-annealed TNO is promising negative electrode material of high power and high safety Li-ion battery for large scale application.