The discovery could lead to developing a drug that can trigger regrowth of damaged nerves.

Spinal cord injuries are currently irreparable. Most people who suffer from such an injury never fully recover, and many end up with partial or even full paralysis. Although we’ve made great strides in understanding how spinal injuries damage nerves and how we might fix the spinal cord in the future, and even how those patients can cope in the meantime, we still don’t know how to repair the nerves themselves when such an injury occurs. However, scientists at Imperial College London have recently discovered a mechanism that allows them to repair, and even regenerate, nerves in the central nervous system after a spinal cord injury.

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Electric ‘thinking cap’

Cram sessions that are fueled by caffeine are routine occurrences on any college campus. But what if there was a better, safer way to learn new or difficult material more quickly? What if “thinking caps” were real?

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Phthalate levels correlated with infertility in men.

Federal researchers recently spent four years tracking 501 couples as they tried to have children in a study on the impact of everyday chemicals on fertility. One of the findings stood out: while both men and women were exposed to known toxic chemicals, men seemed much more likely to suffer fertility problems as a result.

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Researchers embedded carbon nanotubes in the chloroplasts of the plants to create “artificial antennae.”

Plants make life possible. Chloroplasts are the tiny organelles with a plant’s leaves. The chloroplasts use incoming sunlight to split water molecules and then knit together the energy-rich carbon and hydrogen compounds found in everything from food to fossil fuels. The leftover “waste” is the oxygen that we and the rest of the animal kingdom depend on to survive and thrive.
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Will 10,000 hours of practice make you an expert?

Can you become an expert at anything with 10,000 hours of practice? The widely touted theory, highlighted in a 1993 psychology paper and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, says that anyone can master a skill with 10,000 hours of practice. There’s even a Macklemore song about it, so that makes it real.

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Simple test of logic produces surprising win for 4 and 5-year-olds over college students.

A new study published in the journal, Cognition, finds that preschoolers can outsmart college students because they are less biased and more flexible than adults. The study put 170 college undergrads up against 106 four and five-year-olds in a test of learning and reasoning. (Video)

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The discovery of cannabinoid receptors may help explain why marijuana users say they take the drug mainly to reduce anxiety.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University have found cannabinoid receptors, through which marijuana exerts its effects, in a key emotional hub in the brain involved in regulating anxiety and the flight-or-fight response.

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You may want to avoid using any jargon when you are talking tech with Americans. Many Americans are lost when it comes to tech-related terms, with 11% saying that they thought HTML — a language that is used to create websites — was a sexually transmitted disease, according to a recent study.

Boulder, Colorado

Boulder County has more tech startups per capita than any U.S. metropolitan area, and it’s no wonder – the brightest minds flock to Boulder to work with companies that define innovation on a daily basis. And not only do startups thrive, seasoned technology companies and professionals find that being in this vibrant community is a large contributing factor to their long-term success.

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Stem cell therapy could be used to help older patients recover from muscular injuries.

People become less able to bounce back from injuries as they age. This is a problem that adds risk to many of the common medical procedures the elderly face. At the same time, stem cells’ greatest promise is to allow people to produce new, healthy tissue to recover from illness or injury. But because stem cell therapies remain cutting edge, they have largely been used to target life-threatening problems such as heart failure.

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