PhysOrg.com

Playing video games offers learning across life span, say studies
Certain types of video games can have beneficial effects, improving gamers' dexterity as well as their ability to problem-solve - attributes that have proven useful not only to students but to surgeons, according to research discussed Sunday at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association.

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Revolutionary materials reflect ancient forms
(PhysOrg.com) -- Although order is pleasing to the eye, it can quickly become boring. In Islamic architecture therefore, decoration often follows a strict yet aperiodic pattern. Similar structures also form in certain materials, called quasicrystals.

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Archaeologists trace early irrigation farming in ancient Yemen
In the remote desert highlands of southern Yemen, a team of archaeologists have discovered new evidence of ancient transitions from hunting and herding to irrigation agriculture 5,200 years ago.

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Tips on how to build a better home for biological parts
Researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) at Virginia Tech have compiled a series of guidelines that should help researchers in their efforts to design, develop and manage next-generation databases of biological parts. The stakes are high: the concept of biological parts is essential if methods developed in other fields of engineering are to be applied to biology.

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Study shows increased education on nanotech, human enhancement increases public concerns
Educating the public about nanotechnology and other complex but emerging technologies causes people to become more "worried and cautious" about the new technologies' prospective benefits, according to a recent study by researchers at North Carolina State University.

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Making the classroom a playground for learning
Playing computer games in school may sound like the kids rule the classroom. But European researchers have shown that such games can be used to boost learning. What`s more, the special computer games developed by the eMapps.com project could help build communities of creative, networking children across Europe, especially in the new Member States.

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Wikipedia opens online library on human genes
A group of US researchers laid out the foundations Monday for a new online library on human genetics stored within the existing framework of open-access encyclopedia Wikipedia.

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Crawling the Internet to track infectious disease outbreaks
Could Internet discussion forums, listservs, and online news outlets be an informative source of information on disease outbreaks? A team of researchers from Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School thinks so, and it has launched a real-time, automated data-gathering system called HealthMap to gather, organize and disseminate this online intelligence. They describe their project in this week's PLoS Medicine.

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Idle computers offer hope to solve cancer's mysteries through grid computing project
A biomedical engineering professor at The University of Texas at Austin is using a concept called "grid computing" to allow the average person to donate idle computer time in a global effort to fight cancer.

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Lost in translation: Language barrier adds confusion to prenatal testing
Many people struggle to understand the complexities of genetic problems in pregnancy and find medical language difficult to understand, particularly when faced with major decisions such as whether to terminate a pregnancy. A recent study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), investigated how Britain's Bangladeshi community understand the disorders, and make decisions about testing and screening in the light of health care and religious opinion.

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