Tag: "walk" at biology news

Math that powers spam filters used to understand how brain learns to move our muscles

... fine tune new movements, whether babies trying to walk or stroke patients re-connecting brain-body muscle links. In their report this week in Nature Neuroscience, the team says their new tool could make it possible to predict the best ways to teach new movements and help design physical therapy regim...

Lessons from the orangutans: Upright walking may have begun in the trees

... style to incorporate hanging. They only tended to walk on all fours when navigating the largest branches, the researchers found. Hand-assisted bipedalism may have offered several advantages that allowed our arboreal ancestors to venture onto thin branches. They could have gripped multiple branches wit...

First clinical trial of gene therapy for childhood blindness

... was restored to the extent that they were able to walk through a maze without difficulty; something they could not do before the treatment. As this trial is the first to treat an eye disease using administration of gene therapy vectors to human retinas, the team have carried out extensive pre-clinical te...

Robotic exoskeleton replaces muscle work

...in movement science at U-M. "For patients that can walk slowly, a brace like this may help them walk faster and more effectively." Ferris and former U-M doctoral student Keith Gordon, who is now a...

Cancer researchers add spice to research against rare neuromuscular disease

...ene that causes the disease. The mice were able to walk much more normally, their muscles were much stronger, and they had near-normal levels of a vital molecule crucial for keeping nerve cells healthy. While a great deal more research needs to be done to see if the compound could be developed into a d...

On automatic pilot

...es by injecting a neurotoxin. The rat's ability to walk was scarcely altered but there was a strong decrease in its ability to respond quickly to obstacles in a reflexive manner. This revealed that specific modules of the cerebellum mainly regulate reflex functions during walking and match these to the si...

How ants find their way

...is is a slow way of travelling as the ant needs to walk with its antennae to the ground. However, this initial route forms the basis of an efficient learning strategy. On the first trip ants store images of the route as they travel and on later trips to the food site will navigate using a combination of l...

Trotting with emus to walk with dinosaurs

...ern Wyoming. Because they are about the same size, walk on two legs and have similar feet, emus turn out to be the best modern version of the enigmatic reptiles that once trotted along a long-lost coastline in the Middle Jurassic. "We don't have any documented dinosaur bones and teeth from that period in...

Dopamine drug leads to new neurons and recovery of function in rat model of Parkinson's

...receiving the treatment to see how well they could walk and reach to retrieve food pellets with their paws. A subset of the rats was tested again 2 and 4 months following the treatment. Rats treated with 7-OH-DPAT had more than twice as many proliferating cells in the substantia nigra as rats that were...

Biological motors sort molecules one by one on a chip

...ecular bio-motors, such as the enzyme kinesin, can walk in small steps (of 8 nanometers) with a load of material along these microtubule-networks and thus provide transport within the cell. Fascinated by these biological motors, the researchers at Delft University of Technology's Kavli Institute of Nan...

Federal testing for mad cow disease a failure, law review editor says

...e animal loses all muscle control and is unable to walk or eat. No treatment is available. Enforcement of cattle-feed restrictions was placed in the hands of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rather than the USDA, which has caused various bureaucratic snarls, including a lack of communication betwe...

WWF captures first-ever photo of wild rhino on Borneo

...motely activated by infrared triggers when animals walk by. "These are very shy animals that are almost never seen alive in the wild," said Matthew Lewis, Program Officer for WWF's Species Conservation Program. "The photos we get from the camera traps will eventually give us a better idea of the populati...

Some people would give life or limb not to be fat

...rs between 15% and 30% also said they would rather walk away from their marriage, give up the possibility of having children, be depressed, or become alcoholic rather than be obese. Five percent and four percent, respectively, said they would rather lose a limb or be blind than be overweight. "We were su...

Stanford doctors advance in bid to turn mice stem cells into blood vessels

...iences in everyday life when you simply get up and walk around the block." The computer-controlled bioreactor was developed to help create a standardized process for differentiating stem cells in laboratories that could be used around the world. "The idea behind it is that you can control various conditi...

NASA technology helping injured US troops

...ording to Messier, SAM allows patients to stand or walk bearing various amounts of their own weight whether they have a sense of balance or not. "It allows them to stand without having three or four therapists helping them," explained Messier. "So it gets the patient up sooner in the rehabilitation proces...

In-home sensors spot dementia signs in elderly

...ire to perform well during doctor visits make them walk faster than their normal daily paces, masking changes that may be clinically relevant, researchers say. Hayes and her colleagues predict that as healthy elders begin to develop cognitive impairment, they become more variable day to day or even hour...

Chocolate, wine, spicy foods may be OK for heartburn, Stanford study finds

...t will make it go away. Many of Gerson's patients walk into her clinic upset, having been advised elsewhe... patients with milder heartburn symptoms who never walk into the doctor's office for advice." The cause of the conundrum lies in the nature of the studies ...

Epidemic of unneeded amputations

...n below his left knee. As a result, Sevante had to walk his daughter down the aisle on her wedding day with a walker and a prosthetic limb. Six months after his first amputation, he experienced similar symptoms in his right leg and decided to aggressively pursue amputation alternatives to avoid having to...

Scientists discover dozens of new species in 'Lost World' of western New Guinea

...that game was hunted in abundance within an hour's walk of the village. Such abundance of food and other resources means the mountain range's interior ?more than 300,000 hectares of old growth tropical forest ?remains untouched by humans, and the entire Foja forest tract of more than 1 million hectares ...

Penguins waddle but they don't fall down, UH researchers say

...d in developing a way to teach those people how to walk more efficiently despite their side-to-side motion... "bodies" to keep them from tipping over when they walk and run. His research can be used to build smaller computers for such robots that will become incre...

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