A team of ophthalmologists at the University of Liverpool has become the first in the world to image geodesic structures – called CLANs – inside the human body.
Professor Ian Grierson and his colleagues have found that the shape of each CLAN is similar to the design of the framework forming the roofs over the Eden Project and the courtyard at the British Museum.
CLANs is an acronym for Cross-linked Action Networks. They are formed from the components which maintain the str
How and why do young people become criminals? Why do they become criminals? What can we do to change their lives? These are the vital, socially relevant questions that two major research programmes funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) aim to address. Through supporting such work, the ESRC underlines its commitment to social science and to informing policy frameworks.
Pathways into and out of Crime: Risk, Resilience and Diversity, is a network of six universities
At the Institut Curie, an Inserm team has just identified the molecular mechanism long suspected to account for the formation of malignant cells in the most frequent leukemia – acute myeloid leukemia. For a cell to become leukemic, it must not only proliferate but also no longer become specialized. Mutations in its gene confer autonomous activity on the Kit receptor, thereby allowing cells to proliferate in the absence any external signal.This study was published in the 12 December 2005 issue
Tuberculosis is an extremely insidious disease. The pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis can rest undetected many years in the human body, and infected people show no symptoms – until the disease suddenly breaks out. Worldwide, the number of deaths related to tuberculosis amounts to 2 million per year, eight million new infections occur annually. Dangerous centers of infection are, for instance, third-world countries or prisons in countries of the former Soviet Union. In some of the prisons, one hu
Scientists have identified 570 genes that act abnormally during the development of Parkinson’s Disease, a finding which could help doctors predict the likelihood of it developing, and provide targets for new treatments.
The research published in Neurogenetics, by the team from Imperial College London and the University of Liege, Belgium, uses microarrays to analyse brains from Parkinson’s patients. Microarrays are laboratory chips able to pick out which genes are active when diffe
An international team worked on the verge of the Sahara to gather data on the ground and in the air, to be compared with imagery of the same region acquired by ESA satellites. The results will be used in support of an ambitious project to apply satellite remote sensing to improve monitoring and management of vast water aquifers concealed beneath the desert.
High-resolution radar as well as hyperspectral optical imagery was acquired during flights across two test areas in southern Tunis
An international working group coordinated by scientists at the Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) Institute of Zoology (IoZ) have made the remarkable recommendation to reclassify the Mongolian Przewalski’s horses, previously categorised as ‘extinct’ in the wild, to ‘endangered’ on the IUCN red list of threatened species; a move which highlights the success of recent captive breeding and reintroduction programmes.
The working group of over 60 mammal specialists was managed by IoZ scie
A team of researchers has just discovered a new macroscopic physical phenomenon governed by a quantum law: quantum magnetic deflagration. The discovery, published in November in the American journal Physical Review Letters, was made by a team led by Javier Tejada, Professor of Fundamental Physics at the UB, and Paul Santos, a researcher at the Paul Drude Institute in Berlin.
Javier Tejada says that “to understand the idea a parallel could be drawn between chemical combustion a
In recent years horizontal, or lateral, gene transfer has been seen frequently in prokaryotes and also occasionally in eukaryotes. This lateral transfer involves the movement of genetic material between species as opposed to the vertical transfer of genes from parent to progeny. Horizontal transfer has been observed between the mitochondrial DNA of different plant species. Until now, however, no one had found evidence for horizontal transfer in the nuclear DNA of plants.
In a new
Monumental measurement of mortality
The world’s largest prospective study on mortality, in which a staff of a thousand are monitoring 14 million people in 2.4 million representative households, is currently underway in India. As described in the open access journal PLoS Medicine, the study will ascertain the causes of one million deaths expected to occur among these people in the period between 1998 and 2014. Three quarters of the 9.5 million annual deaths in India occur in the ho
Regional Governments May be Reluctant to Report Outbreaks
Federal countries distribute power across central and regional governments, and this division of power can hinder national and international efforts to control infectious disease outbreaks, says a team of researchers in the open access journal PLoS Medicine.
“Canada’s experience with SARS outlines the challenges of such constitutional division of powers when it comes to managing public health crises,” says the team,
Neuroscientist Takes Issue with Antidepressants for Children
The question of whether SSRI antidepressants, such as fluoxetine (Prozac), are safe and more effective than dummy pills for treating child and adolescent depression (CAD) remains highly contentious, says Dr Amir Raz, Assistant Professor of Clinical Neuroscience in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Columbia University and Research Scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, in New York City.
Researchers have developed a new computerized system to easily monitor the levels of glucose in the blood of patients in intensive care. A study published today in the open access journal BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making reports that GRIP, a computer software that assists in the monitoring of glucose levels in critically ill patients, saves nurses time and effort and is more efficient than the paper-based method currently used in many intensive care units (ICUs). Monitoring blood glucos
Sangamo BioSciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: SGMO) today announced that data from its program to develop a ZFP Therapeutic(TM) for HIV/AIDS were presented at the 45th Annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) in Washington, DC. The study represents the first demonstration that cells can be made resistant to HIV infection by treatment with Sangamo’s proprietary zinc finger DNA-binding protein nucleases (ZFNTM) designed to specifically disrupt the CCR5 gene.
Findings suggest need to expand targets of new treatments
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill scientists have demonstrated in a living organism that cancers may cause surrounding supportive cells to evolve and ultimately promote cancer growth.
The new research offers what is believed to be the first evidence that mutations within cancer cells can signal surrounding tissue cells to alter their molecular composition in ways that promote tumor growth and proliferatio
The deep-sea scientific drilling vessel CHIKYU, owned by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) and provided to the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program–jointly funded by Japan and the United States–has recently undergone successful testing operations, according to JAMSTEC-CDEX Director-General Asahiko Taira. Successful performance results are now available for the Blow Out Preventer (BOP) handling System Integration Test (SIT). Dr. Taira also reported successful pist
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