A new skin cream has shown promising results in the treatment of psoriasis and eczema. The cream contains fish enzymes and gelatine and is under development by researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim and the University of Bergen, Norway.
Enzymes from roe
An important ingredient in the product is the enzyme zonase, which is found in fish eggs. The enzyme can break down dead skin cells without harming living cells. Used in th
Mathematics is playing such an increasingly important role in crime scene investigations, helping forensic scientists work out a range of problems including the trajectories of bullets, fingerprint recognition and the speed of moving vehicles, that an understanding of the subject could be key for the next great detective.
Professor Christopher Budd from the University of Bath will explore this further when he delivers a lecture entitled Can maths catch criminals and bring them to j
The image, taken by the Advanced Moon Imaging Experiment (AMIE) on board ESA’s SMART-1 spacecraft, shows Crater De Gasparis on the Moon.
The AMIE camera obtained this image on 14 January 2006 from a distance of about 1090 kilometres with a ground resolution of approximately 100 metres per pixel.
Crater De Gasparis is located close to the Mare Humorum, at longitude 51.2° West and latitude 26.0° South, on the lower left quarter of the Moon’s Earth-facing side. It has a
According to the UN, safe drinking water remains inaccessible for about 1.1 billion people in the world. To address this global dilemma, the UN Millennium Development pledged at the World Summit in Johannesburg in 2002 to reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015.
Meeting this goal will demand reliable, current data and information about how much water is stored in large lakes, rivers and reservoirs around the world – which radar altimetry can
Although an overwhelming 98% of cancer patients wanted to know the results of the clinical trial they took part in, there is currently no standard way of conveying the information. The onus is usually placed on the patient to find out the results from their doctor. Over 1,400 people with cancer took part in a new study to determine the best way of telling patients about their clinical trial results, the findings of which were announced today at the 5th European Breast Cancer Conference (EBCC-5).
The environmental impacts of a new dam project on the Nile River in Sudan were not assessed properly. Such billion dollar projects should be evaluated independently in order to guarantee that their design and operation will be based on the best available scientific knowledge. This is the main conclusion in a recent report by researchers of Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology in Switzerland, on the Merowe Dam Project – a new impoundment upstream of the Aswan High D
A cargo ship is set to provide oceanographers with vital data on the oceans’ ability to slow the build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Scientists from the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton will be working with the Swire group using one of its cargo vessels, the MV Indotrans Celebes, to gain access to remote areas of the globe where the oceans’ interaction with the atmosphere is largely unknown. Instruments installed on the MV Indotrans Celebes will record chang
Researchers at Uppsala University have made the surprising discovery that the smallest possible mutation in a detoxification enzyme can alter what type of chemical reaction it will catalyse. The results has been published online by the respected journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS.
In all living organisms, molecules are transformed into new chemical substances through processes which are catalysed by enzymes. Enzymes are proteins whose catalysing cap
The customer is cash, not king. Instead of investing more in customer relations we have to choose which relations we should invest in and which we should not invest in, suggests Fred Selnes, Professor in Marketing.
For ages now, marketing consultants have been pushing the slogan: the customer is king. That is why firms have invested considerable sums in developing good customer relations in order to keep them. Much of this is wasted effort, claims Fred Selnes, who wants to pull t
The Scientific Advisory Committee of the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM) has approved six new alternative testing methods that will reduce the need for certain drugs and chemicals to be tested on animals. The new tests use cell cultures rather than animals to establish the toxicity of cancer drugs and identify contaminated drugs. The tests approved today will not only reduce the number of animals needed for testing, but will also increase the accuracy of the tes
Results from a large, randomised clinical trial for patients with breast cancer show that those who received bevacizumab (Avastin) in combination with paclitaxel (Taxol) survived without the disease getting worse for almost twice as long as patients who received paclitaxel alone. The results were announced today at the 5th European Breast Cancer Conference (EBCC-5).
A total of 722 patients with locally recurrent or metastatic breast cancer were enrolled in the study. Patients were random
Very Cool Brown Dwarf Discovered Around Star in the Solar Neighbourhood
Using Eso’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, an international team of researchers [1] discovered a brown dwarf belonging to the 24th closest stellar system to the Sun. Brown dwarfs are intermediate objects that are neither stars nor planets. This object is the third closest brown dwarf to the Earth yet discovered, and one of the coolest, having a temperature of about 750 degrees Centigrade. It orbits a very sma
This document has just been released by the PerX Project (a project funded by JISC, as part of the UK Digital Repositories Programme).
It is an advocacy document, aimed at content providers of various kinds (for example – journal publishers, professional societies and database providers and owners) who may have descriptive data (metadata) available for the actual content they produce. It introduces the various benefits of sharing metadata, in standardised and reusable ways, with
A recent study from Scandinavia shows that the well-known differences between individuals in the efficiency of converting energy stored in food to work done by muscles are related to muscle fibre type composition and to the content of specific molecules in muscle.
When muscles contract they use energy that is derived from food. It is a two-step process. The first step occurs in mitochondria, where the energy from molecules like glucose or fats is locked away in ATP (adenosine triph
A new experiment has shed more light on the multi-decade debate about how the brain knows where limbs are without looking at them.
You don’t have to watch your legs and feet when you walk. Your brain knows where they are. For decades scientists have debated two options for how the brain achieves this:
(1) the outflow hypothesis says that the brain monitors signals it sends to the muscles telling them how strongly to contract, and uses this to predict where the limb has m
Increasing age does not necessarily cause a reduction in the quality of life, and in some cases, can even improve it.
Research published online this month in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, describes how researchers looked at indicators of the quality of life, and found that in England it is above average between the ages of 50 and 84, and in some cases increases compared with earlier years.
The researchers from Imperial College London, Karolinska Insti
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