A new research has found that people, who experience anxiety and inhibition, have more activity in the right side of their brain which makes them to walk in a leftward trajectory.

Lead researcher Dr. Mario Weick at the University of Kent has for the first time linked the activation of the brain's two hemispheres with lateral shifts in people's walking trajectories.

In a study aimed at establishing why individuals display a tendency to allocate attention unequally across space, people were blindfolded and asked to walk in a straight line across a room towards a previously seen target.

The researchers found evidence that blindfolded individuals who displayed inhibition or anxiety were prone to walk to the left, indicating greater activation in the right hemisphere of the brain.

The research indicated that the brain's two hemispheres are associated with different motivational systems. These relate on the right side to inhibition and on the left to approach.

The findings may have implications for the treatment of unilateral neglect, which is a condition caused by a lack of awareness of one side of space. In particular, individuals suffering from right-sided neglect may benefit from interventions to reduce anxiety.

The study is published in the journal Cognition.

Flavonoid-rich foods are associated with a reduced risk of erectile dysfunction, says a new study.

Eating foods rich in certain flavonoids trims down the risk of erectile dysfunction in men, especially in those under 70, reveals a collaborative study from the University of East Anglia (UEA) in UK and Harvard University in the US.

A combination of consuming flavonoid-rich foods with exercise can reduce the risk by 21 percent, the researchers said.

"This is the first study to look at the association between flavonoids and erectile dysfunction, which affects up to half of all middle-aged and older men," said Aedin Cassidy, a professor from UEA.

The research shows that of all the different flavonoids, anthocyanins (found in blueberries, cherries, blackberries, radishes and blackcurrants), flavanones and flavones (found in citrus fruits) were found to offer the greatest benefits.

"The top sources of anthocyanins, flavones and flavanones consumed in the US are strawberries, blueberries, red wine, apples, pears and citrus products," Cassidy said.

Eating a flavonoid-rich diet is as good for erectile function as briskly walking for up to five hours a week, the findings, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, showed.

More than 50,000 middle-aged men were included in this large population based study.

Dating back to 1986, they were asked about their ability to have and maintain an erection sufficient for intercourse.

In a first, German scientists have developed motorised "spermbots" that can deliver poor swimmers that are otherwise healthy to an egg.

Sperms that don't swim well rank high among the main causes of infertility.

To give these cells a boost, women trying to conceive can turn to artificial insemination or other assisted reproduction techniques but success can be elusive.

Now, building on previous work on micromotors, the researchers from the Institute for Integrative Nanosciences at IFW Dresden, Germany, constructed tiny metal helices just large enough to fit around the tail of a sperm.

Their movements can be controlled by a rotating magnetic field.

Lab testing showed that the motors can be directed to slip around a sperm cell, drive it to an egg for potential fertilisation and then release it.

According to Mariana Medina-Sainchez, Lukas Schwarz, Oliver G Schmidt and colleagues, although much more work needs to be done before their technique can reach clinical testing, the success of their initial demonstration is a promising start.

Artificial insemination is a relatively inexpensive and simple technique that involves introducing sperm to a woman's uterus with a medical instrument.

Overall, the success rate is on average under 30 percent, according to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority in Britain.

In vitro fertilisation can be more effective but it is a complicated and expensive process.

The report detailing the new finding appeared in ACS' journal Nano Letters.

Eating lots of potatoes -- especially chips or crisps -- is linked to a higher risk for women of developing a type of diabetes that occurs during pregnancy, a study said Wednesday.

So-called gestational diabetes can have long-term health consequences for both mother and child, including a higher chance of heart disease and other forms of diabetes.

Potatoes -- consumed massively across the globe -- contain important nutrients, including vitamin C and potassium. But compared to other vegetables and carbohydrates, they also contain extra starch, which is associated with a more rapid increase in blood sugar levels.

Generally speaking, diabetes occurs when the body is no longer able to make enough insulin, a hormone that prompts cells in the body to absorb sugar from the blood for energy and storage.

Up to now, the possible association between gestational diabetes and eating spuds had not been investigated. To see if there was a link, researchers led by Cuilin Zhang at the National Institutes of Health in Rockville, Maryland used data from the Nurses` Health Study II, which has monitored more than 115,000 women since 1989.

Zhang and colleagues looked at the records for 15,632 women with no history of gestational diabetes or chronic disease who became pregnant between 1991 and 2001. Of 21,693 single- foetus pregnancies, 854 -- some four percent -- developed gestational diabetes, according to the study published in the British Medical Journal.

The women were asked to report their potato consumption during the year previous to becoming pregnant, rating intake from "never or less than once a month" to "six portions per day".

This data was matched against medical records which showed whether they had developed gestational diabetes. After taking other factors such as age and family history of diabetes into account, the study found a strong link with taters, especially fried and baked.

"Higher total potato consumption was significantly associated with an increased risk of gestational diabetes," the researchers concluded. Doctors recommend changes in diet and exercise with the onset of gestational diabetes but in severe cases insulin treatment may be required.

The solution? Eat other vegetables and legumes -- a family including beans, peas and lentils -- instead of starchy spuds, the authors recommend. Substituting two servings of potatoes a week with other vegetables or whole grain foods yielded an approximately 10 percent reduction in risk, they reported.

Despite the statistical evidence, the researchers say that a direct cause-and-effect link between eating potatoes and gestational diabetes "cannot be assumed." But they noted that earlier studies have suggested that spuds can have a detrimental effect on blood sugar levels due to their high starch content.

Usually after a heart attack, the heart is unable to replace its dead cells and patients are often left with little option of another heart transplant or cell therapy that transplants heart cells into the patient's heart.

In far too many cases, however, the transplanted heart cells do not engraft well, resulting in poor recovery.

One reason for the engraftment problem is the quality of the heart cells. For a typical cell therapy, heart cells are made from different stem cells, but the quality of the heart cells will vary.

First author of the study that was conducted by Kyoto University, Dr. Shunsuke Funakoshi said that the cells of different maturation will be mixed and transplanted together.

During the research, Funakoshi took induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells that were reprogrammed from skin cells and made them into heart cells. Heart cells differentiated from iPS cells effectively go through all stages of development.

Currently, over a billion cells are needed for human heart cell therapies. Knowing which cells are best for the therapy should not only improve patient outcome, but also reduce the number of cells required, which would further reduce both the time of the preparation and invasiveness of the procedure.

The research is published in the journal Scientific Reports.