The secret to a longer life

The hypothalamus is a small structure located deep within the brain. It plays a critical role in controlling growth, reproduction and metabolism - but now it could hold the key to ageing too.

A team of scientists in the US looked at this region of the brain in mice. They found that blocking a chemical in this area increased the animals' lifespan. Healthy mice typically live for between 600 to 1000 days.

But the rodents in the study were living about a fifth longer without suffering problems that are common in old age, such as muscle loss or...

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Advances in technology and medicine continue to improve our quality of life. They also increase our life expectancy, that is how long we are expected to live. What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages to this trend?

New research seeks to determine what dreams mean

Science is on the road to helping you understand all those cryptic dreams that you've had.

In a new study recently published in "Science," researchers at Brown University were able to describe the images dreamers saw by reading MRI scans of their brain activity.

Though this work is still in the earliest stages, it could lead the way to better understanding of not just what we dream about, but also why we dream at all.

Masako Tamaki, a research associate in Brown University’s Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences who is a part of the study, says the dreamers were monitored via MRI, and then awoken shortly after the dream ends and...

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Do you ever wonder what your dreams mean? Scientists are conducting research in an effort to answer that question. However, one of the researchers says they are far from understanding the purpose of dreams.

Genetically modified cows

Babies are often allergic to cows' milk. A scientific breakthrough means that may no longer be the case.

But is it right for humans to play with nature to such an extent. And could there be some hidden danger ahead?

In this week's 6 Minute English, Jen and Neil discuss genetically modified cows.

This week's question:

In what year was the first genetically modified food sold on the market. Was it?

a) 1984
b) 1994
c) 2004

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Do you agree with the idea of modifying the genetic make-up of animals? It is a controversial issue with positives and negatives. How would you explain your opinion about it?

Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka wins Nobel prize

Shinya Yamanaka of Japan has won the Nobel Medicine Prize for his "groundbreaking" work on stem cells.

But even as the country's industries exploded in the 1970s, his father told him he should not follow the traditional Japanese path and take over the family business, but become a doctor.

Half a century later and after a stint as an orthopaedic surgeon, he is a leading authority on how cells work.

Kyoto University-based Yamanaka was being celebrated Monday for his work, alongside Briton John Gurdon, on how cells can be reprogrammed.

So-called "nuclear reprogramming" uses a fully-developed adult cell to create a...

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Big news for Japan. A professor at Kyoto University has been awarded a Nobel Prize for a controversial technology.

Jurassic bugs

High in the Dolomites of northeastern Italy, Italian researchers chipping away at rocks formed more than 200 million years ago found two miniscule mites and a fly preserved in tiny drops of amber. Highly-magnified photographs of the creatures show the mites, in particular, to be perfectly preserved. At 230 million years old, they're about 100 million years older than the oldest previous find of their kind.

The bugs probably fed off the leaves of the tree in whose resin they were eventually preserved. Researchers say the discovery shows the mites' ability to adapt to changing evolutionary conditions. For film lovers, though, it has striking echoes of the Stephen Spielberg blockbuster, Jurassic Park, in which a team of scientists use the DNA of a mosquito preserved in amber to recreate dinosaurs with predictably terrifying results.

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Kitchen chemistry: the science of herbs and spices

Yes. I am feeling hungry too. Yummy!

Astronomers detect cries of a dying star

For the first time astronomers have detected the last gasps of a star being torn apart by a previously dormant giant black hole.

The signals, which came from a galaxy 3.9 billion light years away, were x-rays generated by matter heated to millions of degrees and torn apart as material from the star crosses the black hole's event horizon.

Known as quasi-periodic oscillations, they are a characteristic feature of stellar black holes, which have about 10 times the mass of the Sun.

Dr Rubens Reis from the University of Michigan is the...

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Study predicts slowdown, halt in Greenland ice melting

Despite warnings by climate scientists that the massive Greenland ice sheet is melting rapidly into the sea, researchers in Denmark say that scenario is far from certain. Their new study of Greenland’s glacial ice sheet reports that twice in the past 30 years, major melting events have been followed by periods when melting stopped and the ice sheet stabilized.

The authors say the rapid melting that has made headlines in recent weeks also is likely to slow or stop. Their conclusion also contradicts widely-reported predictions that the accelerating ice melt will trigger a significant rise in global sea levels.

The Danish study, published this week in the journal Science, documents changes in the Greenland ice sheet before the year 2000 by combining contemporary satellite data with old aerial photographs. Co-author Shfaqat Abbas Khan, an earth scientist at Denmark Technical University, said his team is the first to show recent periods of ice sheet loss that slowed and then stopped, rather than continuing or speeding up.

The researchers say a longer and...

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Are sleep problems a growing epidemic?

New research shows that a lack of sleep is a growing health problem around the world. Sleeplessness has been linked to such chronic illnesses as cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Lack of sleep is not just a problem in developed nations. It’s getting just as bad in developing countries as well.

Researchers at the University of Warwick Medical School in Coventry, England conducted the study. “Our purpose was to look at the existing data from eight different countries from both Africa and Asia. We came to estimate the prevalence of self-reported sleep problems across eight different populations. And also we tried to examine potential correlates of sleep problems in these populations,” said lead author Dr. Saverio Stranges.

The research was conducted in...

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Project Mercury: The American space program begins

That announcement was made May fifth, nineteen sixty-one. It was the first manned flight of project Mercury. Today, Tony Riggs and Larry West tell about the beginning of the United States space program that carried humans into space.

TONY RIGGS: The United States entered the Space Age in nineteen forty-five, at the end of World War Two. German rocket scientists, with the support of the German government, had spent fifteen years developing rockets as weapons. Near the end of the war, Germany began firing huge rocket bombs at Britain.

Called V-2 rockets, the German weapons carried a ton of explosives three hundred twenty kilometers. They flew as high as eighty kilometers.

When the war ended, American forces found the...

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The science games

Behind every elite athlete is an army of scientists helping them shave seconds off world records. Stephen Pincock looks at how science helps athletes get faster, higher and stronger.

Kenneth Graham is feeling optimistic about the 2012 Olympic Games.

As the principal scientist at the NSW Institute of Sport, he's been working with Australian swimming star James Magnussen for a couple of years now. When the 100-metre freestyle final comes around, he reckons 'The Missile' has a good chance of taking gold.

More than that, says Graham, he'll challenge the...

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Researchers cure mouse deafness with gene therapy

Researchers have for the first time used gene therapy to restore normal hearing to mice that were born deaf.  The findings could lead to a successful therapy for people with congenital hearing loss.

Congenital hearing loss or deafness from birth is one of the most common sensory deficits. It is often the result of genetic defects that affect the proper functioning of hair cells inside the inner ear. The hair cells, which move in response to sound vibration, transmit auditory signals to the brain. Experts believe there may be as many as 100 genes whose mutation can cause some form of hearing loss.

Researchers created a mouse model of congenital deafness in humans by breeding rodents that lacked the gene that makes vesicular glutamate transporter-3, or VGLUT3 for short - an essential protein that enables hair cells in the ear to receive and send auditory signals. People with a defective copy of the VGLUT-3 gene suffer diminished hearing over time. Because the experimental mice didn’t have the gene at all, their deafness was profound.

 Lawrence Lustig, an otolaryngologist or hearing specialist at the University of California San Francisco, says researchers used a virus that...

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