Photo credit: Olivia CarterIn an unusual but fruitful collaboration between Tibetan Buddhist monks and neuroscientists, researchers have uncovered clues to how mental states--and their underlying neural mechanisms--can impact conscious visual experience. In their study, reported in the June 7 issue of Current Biology, the researchers found evidence that the skills developed by Tibetan Buddhist monks in their practice of a certain type of meditation can strongly influence their experience of a phenomenon, termed "perceptual rivalry," that deals with attention and consciousness.

A new study has found that the allergenicity of peanut products could be significantly reduced by a special fermentation process. Researchers from North Carolina A&T University report their findings today at the 105th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

Although morphine is well known as a highly effective analgesic, its clinical utility is severely limited by the development of drug tolerance, the requirement for increasing doses to maintain analgesic effect, and the development of physical dependence. In the June 7 issue of Current Biology, researchers report a new study showing that the administration of a drug cocktail containing morphine along with small doses of two versions of methadone, a related opioid drug, significantly reduced both tolerance and dependence in test animals.

Experts at Cardiff University, UK, have designed world-first technology to investigate sustainable energy sources from the ocean bed by isolating ancient high-pressure bacteria from deep sediments.

Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) have discovered a quick new way that mosquitoes can pass West Nile virus to each other. The new study challenges fundamental assumptions about the virus' transmission cycle and may help explain why it spread so rapidly across North America despite experts' predictions that it would progress more slowly or even die out.

Monkeys can match the number of voices they hear to the number of faces they expect to see, Duke University scientists have found. The finding indicates that numerical perception is truly an abstract concept and not just a function of a particular sense, said the researchers. The experimental approach also will lead to further studies exploring whether human infants, before they have a verbal capacity, understand similar abstract numerical concepts, they said.

Gene therapy for arthritis and other non-terminal, debilitating conditions and diseases is both feasible and safe, report researchers who conducted the world's first such test on the approach in patients with advanced rheumatoid arthritis. The results, published in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), indicate that introducing a new gene has the potential to block the destructive inflammation process that takes place within arthritic joints. At a time when setbacks have cast doubt on the future of gene therapy, the results also provide assurance that it can be performed without causing undue harm to patients.

Nitrogen oxides produced by huge fires and fossil fuel combustion are a major component of air pollution. They are the primary ingredients in ground-level ozone, a pollutant harmful to human health and vegetation.