Tag: "performance" at biology news

Modeling the restless brain

...em tie neural activity to cognitive and behavioral performance and ask questions about differences in the brains of individual persons. Sporns said this research could lead to clinical applications, offering new diagnostic tools for brain disorders such as Alzheimer's disease that are known to affect the bra...

College students who pull 'all-nighters' and get no sleep more likely to have a lower GPA

... As sleep quality and quantity decrease, academic performance worsens. The data collected in this study indicate that the use of a single night of total sleep deprivation is not an effective practice for achieving academic goals," said Pamela Thacher, PhD, of St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, who au...

Nurtured chimps rake it in

...,” The authors conclude that the differences in performance between the three groups are directly attributable to the significant effect of level of enculturation. They add that “enculturated chimpanzees may be better at learning within a highly social, interactive context because they have heightened attent...

Ants show us how to make super-highways

...ormed by a minority of ant workers can improve the performance of the majority, resulting in a clear benefit for ...sation by a minority can significantly improve the performance of a majority to benefit the group as a whole. It also suggests that these benefits are a consequenc...

'Virtual Patient' to simulate real-time organ motions for radiation therapy

...fective radiation therapy, physics-based real-time performance offers the ultimate solution." The key challenge in this project is to develop the algorithms that will make the virtual lungs and adjacent tissues move in real time according to realistic tissue biomechanical properties, De said. Xu expects th...

NASA-funded robotic sub finds bottom of world's deepest sinkhole

...e cenote’s walls. "We’re very pleased about the performance of the DEPTHX system," said David Wettergreen, an associate research professor who headed Carnegie Mellon’s contingent of the research team. "We hit our technical objectives in creating a system that could explore and map autonomously." In additio...

Hearts of male and female rainbow trout are different

...ing activity. Previous studies of trout cardiac performance and energy metabolism have been conducted under hy... fishes, and finds that sex differences in cardiac performance and metabolism exist in rainbow trout. These differences occur at a young age and are only realized ...

How the brain's backup system compensates for stroke

...es to the left PMd briefly disrupted the subjects' performance on the task, but that performance quickly recovered. The fMRI scans revealed that during this behavioral recovery, the right PMd and o...

100 percent of pregnant women have at least one kind of pesticide in their placenta

... (i.e., pesticides which interfere with the proper performance of the hormonal system). The results showed that the most frequent pesticides present in the placenta tissue are DDE (92.7%), lindane (74.8%), endosulfan diol (62.1%) y endosulfan-I (54.2%). Among these, the most prevalent was endosulfan-diol, with a...

Dinosaur hearing, listening to muscle noise, quieter cubicles

...isual feedback that helps students see their vocal performance and produce better results. ...

Whiteflies and plant viruses can help each other to speed up biological invasion

...fected and healthy tobacco plants. Compared to its performance on healthy plants, the invasive B whitefly had higher fecundity and longevity by 12 and 6 fold when feeding on plants infected by one virus, and by 18 and 7 fold when feeding on plants infected by another virus. Population density of the B whitefly o...

Mutation improves memory, may lead to memory-enhancing pill

...y a defective version of this gene showed improved performance in classical behavioral memory tests, they show. M...at increases eIF2a's phosphorylation led to poorer performance on the memory tests. “These data strengthen the idea that eIF2a phosphorylation is a key, bidirec...

Individual differences in a clock gene predict decline of performance during sleep deprivation

...ional finding was that the effects of this gene on performance may be mediated by its effects on sleep. When the ...cture, and the influence these genes might have on performance by unrested individuals. ...

Male reindeer inflate a large air sac in the neck region to emit their hoarse rutting calls

..., allowing to conserve energy. Simultaneously, the performance serves to attract female mating partners. Males vocalize almost exclusively during the autumn rutting season whereas females are mostly silent during that period. Instead, vocal communication of females tends to mainly occur with their young, in t...

Fighting influenza & co. with 40,000 blood samples

...approaches on the animals in order to coax maximum performance from the immune system of older animals. If the immune system begins to flag with age, this could also be due to a long-forgotten infection. A suspected culprit is the virus causing Pfeiffer's glandular fever, for example. Due to the age group tha...

Common gene version optimizes thinking -- but with a possible downside

...vation, structural and functional connectivity and performance on thinking tasks, likely by increasing gene expression. In 257 affected families, people with schizophrenia were more likely to have this common version of the DARPP-32 gene. ...

Trusting your instincts leads you to the right answer

...cious mind. Participants would have improved their performance if they had been able to switch off their higher-level cognition by, for example, acting quickly." Tracking participants' eye movements, the team controlled the time allotted to each individual's search for their target. The visual display screen w...

Sleep disturbances affect classroom performance

...bad sleep can have an adverse effect on an adult’s performance at work the next day, an insufficient amount of rest can also have a negative impact on how well middle or high school students perform in the classroom. A study published in the February 15th issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine (JCSM) f...

Surgeons with video game skill appear to perform better in simulated surgery skills course

...eir video game–playing habits, then assessed their performance at the Rosser Top Gun Laparoscopic Skills and Suturing Program, a one-and-a-half day course that scores surgeons on time and errors during simulated surgery drills. During the study, conducted from May through August, 2002, the surgeons also played ...

Neural bottleneck found that thwarts multi-tasking

...loring what is happening in the bottleneck to slow performance and believe the work may have future implications for people performing complex tasks. "It may be possible to look to the sort of tasks people are going to have to do in a very complex environment, such as flying a plane, and find out under what ...

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