Humans show a natural tendency to discount bad news while incorporating good news into beliefs (the "good news-bad news effect"), an effect that may help explain seemingly irrational risk taking. Understanding how this bias develops with age is important because adolescents are prone to engage in risky behavior; thus, educating them about danger is crucial. We reveal a striking valence-dependen...

DNA polymerase eta (Poleta) functions in error-free replication of UV-damaged DNA, and in vitro it efficiently bypasses a cis-syn T-T dimer by incorporating two adenines opposite the lesion. Steady state kinetic studies have shown that both yeast and human Poleta are low-fidelity enzymes, and they misincorporate nucleotides with a frequency of 10(-2)-10(-3) on both undamaged and T-T dimer-conta...

Compared with notable successes in the genetics of basic sensory transduction, progress on the genetics of higher level perception and cognition has been limited. We propose that investigating specific cognitive abilities with well-defined neural substrates, such as face recognition, may yield additional insights. In a twin study of face recognition, we found that the correlation of scores betw...

The present paper investigates the motion dependence of human impedance perception ability, especially in the stiffness perception through experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that the desirable hand displacement changes according to the robot stiffness, and that the deep somatic sensation has an important role in the stiffness perception. A preliminary training test is conducted for d...

Photoreceptors constitute the first stage in the processing of color information; many more stages are required before humans can consciously report whether two stimuli are perceived as chromatically equal or not. Therefore, although photoreceptor absorption properties are expected to influence the accuracy of conscious discriminability, there is no reason to believe that they should suffice to...

stem cell therapy is a powerful technique for the treatment of a number of diseases. stem cells are derived from different tissue sources, the most important of which are the bone marrow (bm), umbilical cord (uc) blood and liver. human uc mesenchymal stem cells (huc-mscs) are multipotent, non-hematopoietic stem cells that have the ability to self-renew and differentiate into other cells and tis...

Although clinical benefit can be achieved after cardiac transplantation of adult c-kit+ or cardiosphere-derived cells for myocardial repair, these stem cells lack the regenerative capacity unique to neonatal cardiovascular stem cells. Unraveling the molecular basis for this age-related discrepancy in function could potentially transform cardiovascular stem cell transplantation. In this report, ...