The Chemical Industries Association (CIA) today gave a cautious welcome to the Government’s allocation plan for Phase 2 of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) but highlighted concerns over increasing indirect cost impacts and long term prospects for direct costs.
The Association is relieved to note that the plan proposes to allocate emissions allowances to manufacturing industry according to projected need after accounting for existing reduction requirements under other poli
Scientists with NASA’s Cassini mission have found evidence that a new class of small moonlets resides within Saturn’s rings. There may be as many as 10 million of these objects within one of Saturn’s rings alone. The research is published in Nature today (March 30th).
The moonlets’ existence could help answer the question of whether Saturn’s rings were formed through the break-up of a larger body or are the remnants of the disk of material from which Saturn and
Talking about sex and fertility can be just as embarrassing for medical staff as for adolescent cancer patients, the 4th International Conference on Teenage and Young Adult Cancer Medicine heard today (Thursday 30 March).
However, Drs Allan Pacey and Adam Glaser warned the conference, organised by Teenage Cancer Trust, that if doctors failed to discuss the effect that the cancer or its treatment could have on their future fertility with their young patients, the patients would h
Police, magistrates and Youth Offending Teams feel that they have little choice than to hand out harsher punishments for young offenders despite the government’s emphasis on tackling the underlying causes of their criminal behaviour, new research has revealed.
A senior police officer has told researchers from the University of Bath that parts of the youth justice system work against each other in ways that disadvantage young offenders and keep them on the path to re-offending.
It has been known for some time that silver is highly toxic to a wide range of bacteria, and silver-based compounds have been used extensively in bactericidal applications. This property of silver has caused great interest especially as new resistant strains of bacteria have become a serious problem in public health.
For example MRSA bacteria kill 5,000 hospital patients a year in the UK alone and any method of attacking them, not involving normal antibiotics, is becoming increasing
Scientists from around the world joined this Greek island’s 250 residents and countless visitors Wednesday in cheering the drama of the Moon totally blocking the Sun, revealing the dancing glow of its corona.
“It was even more fabulous than we expected,” said Jay Pasachoff, professor of astronomy at Williams College (in Williamstown, Mass.) who observed his 42nd solar eclipse. “All the technical equipment worked perfectly, the corona shone brightly, and the activity aroun
A new study of melted rock ejected far from the Yucatan’s Chicxulub impact crater bolsters the idea that the famed impact was too early to have caused the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
A careful geochemical fingerprinting of glass spherules found in multiple layers of sediments from northeast Mexico, Texas, Guatemala, Belize and Haiti all point back to Chicxulub as their source. But the analysis places the impact at about 300,000 years
Mesoporous nanospheres focus of Ames Laboratory research
Delivering a dose of chemotherapy drugs to specific cancer cells without the risk of side affects to healthy cells may one day be possible thanks to a nanoscale drug delivery system being explored by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory.
Using tiny silica particles call mesoporous nanospheres to carry drugs inside living cells, Ames Laboratory chemist Victor Lin is studying different metho
Oxygen depletion in the world’s oceans, primarily caused by agricultural run-off and pollution, could spark the development of far more male fish than female, thereby threatening some species with extinction, according to a study published today on the Web site of the American Chemical Society journal, Environmental Science & Technology. The study is scheduled to appear in the May 1 print issue of the journal.
The finding, by Rudolf Wu, Ph.D., and colleagues at the City University of Ho
A pain–killing medication appears to halt the production of an enzyme that is key to a common form of breast cancer, a new study using tissue cultures suggests.
The drug is called nimesulide. In laboratory experiments on breast cancer cells, scientists found that derivatives of nimesulide stopped the production of aromatase, the enzyme implicated in estrogen-dependent breast cancer. This form of breast cancer is the most common kind of breast cancer in postmenopausal women.
The first gene therapy human trial in the United States for a form of muscular dystrophy is under way.
The clinical trial for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) tests the safety and effectiveness of a therapy that was developed over two decades by scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Medicine and the University of Pittsburgh.
The trial was launched March 28, at Columbus Children’s Hospital in Ohio, an affiliate of Ohio State Universit
Scientists at the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) have identified a previously unknown gene variant that doubles an individual’s risk for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The new functional variant, or allele, is a component of the serotonin transporter gene (SERT), site of action for the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) that are today’s mainstay medications for OCD, other anxiety disorders, and
As ministers meet at the Eighth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP-8), the United Nations University (UNU) urges governments to incorporate the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) findings in national planning processes and poverty reduction strategies to promote ecosystem services that may help reduce the extreme effects of natural disasters.
In a special address delivered at the high level ministerial meeting this week,
Finding may also shed light on cause of autism
Researchers from the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and the Clinic for Special Children (CSC) in Strasburg, PA, have described a new childhood-onset disorder characterized by severe epilepsy and autistic traits, and identified its genetic basis.
Epilepsies are a biologically complex group of disorders comprising many discrete genetic entities, and the majority of recurrent seizure syndromes remain unexplained. M
The less a child sleeps, the more likely he or she is to become overweight, according to researchers from Université Laval’s Faculty of Medicine in an article published in the latest edition of the International Journal of Obesity. The risk of becoming overweight is 3.5 times higher in children who get less sleep than in those who sleep a lot, according to researchers Jean-Philippe Chaput, Marc Brunet, and Angelo Tremblay.
These results come from data collected among 422 grade school
Data shows condom use and awareness programs are helping to slow infection rates
A University of Toronto Indo-Canadian study reports a remarkable one-third decline in new HIV infections in the worst hit regions of India, indicating that with condom use and awareness programs, the country’s AIDS epidemic is far from hopeless.
The study, which appears online in the Lancet’s March 30 issue, tracked HIV prevalence among young women attending pregnancy or antena
Feedback
