Poor Mojo's Newswire

The roughly 40% increase in attention problems among "heavy" TV viewers was observed in both boys and girls, and was independent of whether a diagnosis of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder was made prior to adolescence.

"Those who watched more than two hours, and particularly those who watched more than three hours, of television per day during childhood had above-average symptoms of attention problems in adolescence," Erik Landhuis of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, wrote in his report, published in Pediatrics on Tuesday.

Symptoms of attention problems included short attention span, poor concentration, and being easily distracted. The findings could not be explained by early-life attention difficulties, socio-economic factors, or intelligence, says the team.

Now researchers working in Gabon have found the virus in a cave-dwelling African fruit bat. This is the first time it has been found outside humans or other primates, and the first time it has been found in Gabon, suggesting that Marburg may be more widespread than previously thought. Meanwhile a team of scientists is testing bats in a mine in Uganda for Marburg, after two miners there contracted the disease last month and one died.

Shenassa said the findings, published in the American Journal of Public Health, came as a complete surprise. In fact, after a few U.K. studies published in the last decade had suggested a link, Shenassa and his skeptical team set out to debunk the notion that any link existed.

“We thought that once we statistically accounted for factors that could clearly contribute to depression – things like employment status and crowding – we would see any link vanish,” said Shenassa, the lead author of the study and an associate professor in the Department of Community Health at Brown. “But the opposite was true. We found a solid association between depression and living in a damp, moldy home.”

The suit would use a similar principle used by geckos and spiders, which possess millions of tiny hairs on their limbs allowing them to stick to surfaces.

It is generally accepted that the microscopic hairs adhere to the surfaces, not by gripping in the traditional sense, but by using intermolecular phenomena called van der Waal forces, which are the same that allow an atom's protons not to burst apart.

Adhesion strength drops exponentially as the surface area and weight increases, so creating the same effect in a human-sized subject has been considered impossible.

However, Professor Nicola Pugno has calculated how sufficient stickiness could be generated in the same way to support an adult human's bodyweight.

This would be achieved by creating gloves and shoes coated in an hierarchical structure of carbon nanotubes to provide the same effect.

The grip of the gloves could be released with little effort by a peeling motion, which would break the adhesion little by little.