“Harmless” bacteria in the digestive tracts of dairy cows, may not be so harmless after all. They may be a reservoir for antibiotic resistance genes that can be transferred to more harmful, disease-causing bacteria, according to research presented today at the 106th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Orlando, Florida.
“There is concern that veterinary therapeutic usage of antibiotics in animals is responsible for the emergence of drug-resistant Salmonella.
New findings in nerve communication
If the chemistry is right … you might remember this
A young Australian scientist has made an important discovery about how brain cells communicate. This finding is central to understanding all brain function – from laying down memory to being able to walk
The groundbreaking research has been published in the latest edition of world-leading journal Nature Neuroscience.
Victor Anggono, a PhD student at the Children
It doesn’t take John Wayne’s deliberate, pigeon-toed swagger or Marilyn Monroe’s famously wiggly sway to judge a person’s gender based on the way they move. People are astonishingly accurate when asked to judge the gender of walking human figures, even when they are represented by 15 small dots of light attached to major joints of the body.
And not only that, when human observers watched the walking motion of a male so-called “point light walker,” they were more sensitive t
In a recent study, genetically modified cassava plants produced roots that were more than two-and-a-half times the size of normal cassava roots.
The findings could help ease hunger in many countries where people rely heavily on the cassava plant (Manihot esculenta) as a primary food source, said Richard Sayre, the study’s lead author and a professor of plant cellular and molecular biology at Ohio State University.
The researchers used a gene from the bacterium E. c
Hydrogen has been called “the fuel of the future.” But the gas is invisible, odorless and explosive at high concentrations, posing a safety problem for hydrogen-powered cars, filling stations and other aspects of the so-called hydrogen economy.
Now, a team of more than a dozen University of Florida engineering faculty and graduate students has found a way to jump that hurdle: a tiny, inexpensive sensor device that can detect hydrogen leaks and sound the alarm by wireless com
From a soft drink in a mega-size cup to a jumbo order of fries, many fast food restaurants let you upsize your meal for pennies — seemingly a great value.
But there’s a hidden cost to those larger portions, even beyond the health consequences of gaining weight. A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison nutritional scientists has calculated how much money a single bout of overeating can cost over the following year, according to a study to be published in June 2006 in the Journ
Opentrad the automatic translation project will be made public at a press conference which will take place on 30 May at 11.30 in the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Barcelona).
Opentrad is an automatic translation project based on open-coded syntactic transference and which is valid for Spanish, Galician, Catalan/Valencian and Basque. Opentrad enables the translation of texts or documents as well as the navigation on webpages while translating at the same time. The language p
These two images, taken by the advanced Moon Imaging Experiment (AMIE) on board ESA’s SMART-1 spacecraft, show the difference between lunar highlands and a mare area from close by.
The first image, showing highlands, was obtained by AMIE on 22 January 2006, from a distance of about 1112 kilometres from the surface, with a ground resolution of 100 metres per pixel. The imaged area is centred at a latitude of 26º South and at a longitude of 157º West.
The second image,
If Earth’s past cycles of warming and cooling are any indication, temperatures by the end of the century will be even hotter than current climate models predict, according to a report by University of California, Berkeley, researchers.
The scientists based their conclusion on a study of Antarctic ice cores containing a 360,000-year record of global temperature and levels of carbon dioxide and methane – two of the major greenhouse gases implicated in global warming. They f
Using NASA’s advanced Earth-observing satellites, scientists have discovered a new opportunity to build early detection systems that might protect thousands from floods and landslides.
This potential breakthrough in disaster monitoring and warning links satellite observations of soil type, vegetation and land slope with observations of rainfall, rivers and topography.
“Flood and landslides are the most widespread natural hazards on Earth, responsible for thousands
Ames Laboratory researchers detect secret files lurking within digital images
Keeping computer files private requires only the use of a simple encryption program. For criminals or terrorists wanting to conceal their activities, however, attaching an encrypted file to an e-mail message is sure to raise suspicion with law enforcement or government agents monitoring e-mail traffic.
But what if files could be hidden within the complex digital code of a photographic image? A
A new study from the University of Michigan found that traffic metering systems that incorporate new algorithms for merging could reduce the seriousness of traffic slowdowns that originate near freeway on-ramps.
Craig Davis, a retired Ford Motor Co. research scientist and current adjunct professor at U-M, studied highway merging to see how current on-ramp traffic meter systems could be made more effective. Currently, meter systems try to improve traffic flow by letting a certain
When used indoors under certain conditions, many common household cleaners and air fresheners emit toxic pollutants at levels that may lead to health risks, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Exposure levels to some of the pollutants – and to the secondary pollutants formed when some of the products mix with ozone – may exceed regulatory guidelines when a large surface is cleaned in a sma
Doctor Harry Holthöfer, M.D., Ph.D, at the University of Helsinki, Finland, coordinates a new EU-funded project, which aims to develop new diagnostic approaches for early identification of patients at high risk of rapid loss of kidney function. The project links together researchers from Finland, the Netherlands and Switzerland and four SMEs from Finland, the Netherlands and Italy. The EU has granted 4.4 million euro funding for this project.
Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is an increasing
Today, for many, computer networks are an indispensable infrastructure that interconnects people, places and organisations. But increasingly they are beginning to creak as their complexity grows. Biological systems through years of evolution can offer clues on how to cope, as a research project has demonstrated.
“Even a minor perturbation on a network can cause major problems,” says Dr Ozalp Babaoglu at the University of Bologna. “Simply adding a computer or installing an operating system
When planning a summer wedding, it does not really help to hear that “the probability of showers is increasing”. A precision weather forecast will predict when the sun comes out or when the rain stops – or foretells if there is fog on the road or shipping lane.
Helsinki Testbed is a project designed to develop precision weather services. It consists of two parallel projects: a wide-ranging research project launched by the Finnish Meteorological Institute in 2005 that focuses on prov
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