Peering back in time more than 7 billion years, a team of astronomers using a powerful new spectrograph at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii has obtained the first maps showing the distribution of galaxies in the early universe. The maps show the clustering of galaxies into a variety of large-scale structures, including long filaments, empty voids, and dense groups and clusters.

These maps are among the first results from the DEEP2 Redshift Survey, an ongoing three-year project d

Bigger and brighter isn’t better, at least not when trying to view moving objects.

That is the counter-intuitive result of a study performed by a team of Vanderbilt psychologists which sheds new light on one of the most sophisticated processes performed by the brain: identifying and tracking moving objects.

“The bigger an object, the easier it is to see. But it is actually harder for people to determine the motion of objects larger than a tennis ball held at arms length than

Discovery may lead to targeted therapies to interrupt cancer development

(Philadelphia, PA) – Researchers at the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania have determined that a key enzyme, Pim-2, is responsible for the survival of cancer cells. The finding – which will appear in the August 1 edition of the journal Genes & Development – represents an important advance in understanding why cancer cells survive in the body (working against the body&#146

New insight is important step forward in personalized cancer care

A new Canadian-led study in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine shows that a simple genetic test can determine if chemotherapy will be effective in treating a patient’s colon cancer, the second leading cause of cancer deaths in North America.
The study, led by doctors and researchers from Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital and Mount Sinai Hospital, examined 570 tissue samples from colon cance

A UCSF-led team has demonstrated that the cerebral cortex, the site of higher cognitive functions, not only perceives pain, but plays a role in regulating pain, and that it does so in part through the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA, suggesting a possible target for therapy.

The finding, published in the July 17 issue of Nature, provides some of the first neuroanatomical evidence that the cerebral cortex not only receives pain signals from nerve cells in lower regions of the brain,

Abnormally high calcium levels spurred on by a mutated gene may lead to the death of neurons associated with Huntington’s disease, an inherited genetic disorder, characterized by mental and physical deterioration, for which there is no known cure.

This discovery by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, published in the current issue of Neuron, sheds new light on the process that causes the selective death of neurons in the region of the brain called the striatu