Should we start being genetically tested for Parkinson’s disease (PD)? According to research just published in the December issue of the “journal Movement Disorders” this might be a possibility in the future if you belong to a family affected by G2019S, a genetic mutation responsible for some PD cases.
Parkinson disease results from the death or loss of function of the nervous cells (neurons) in a brain area called substancia nigra, which is involved in the regulation of moveme
Patients with mental health problems may not be receiving the appropriate screening or treatments for illnesses including heart disease and stroke, a report from The University of Nottingham has shown.
The research, led by Professor Julia Hippisley-Cox in the University’s Division of General Practice and commissioned by the Disability Rights Commission, found some evidence that patients with mental health problems, such as schizophrenia, were also more likely to suffer fr
Scientists at the John Innes Centre(JIC), Norwich, UK [1] today report a discovery that explains how plants control the size and development of their cells. Published on-line by the international journal PNAS [2] the report describes how a gene (called RHL1)[3] affects a plant cell’s ability to make multiple copies of its DNA, in turn affecting cell growth and overall plant development.
“Unlike the cells of animals, plant cells typically expand to up to 1,000 times their orig
New Version of SSML to include Internationalization features; VoiceXML 3.0 to incorporate Speaker verification
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced new work on extensions to components of the Speech Interface Framework which will both extend Speech Synthesis Markup Language functionality to Asian and other languages, and include speaker verification features into the next version of VoiceXML, version 3.0. Addressing both areas expands both the reach and functionality
Last week the historic fortified town of Campeche, in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, was the centre for a Conference on the use of space technologies to conserve the world’s natural and cultural heritage, including UNESCO biosphere reserves.
Experts representing more than 30 countries attended this international conference on the ’Use of Space Technologies for the Conservation of Natural and Cultural Heritage’, organised by the National Institute of Anthropology and Historia (
A group of investigators of the University of Bologna (Giovanni Fava, Chiara Ruini and Chiara Rafanelli) have published an article on a novel approach to treatment of depression and anxiety in the November issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
Administration of treatments in a sequential order is a common practice in clinical medicine, but has received insufficient attention in psychiatry. The aim of this article was to survey the literature concerned with a sequential use o
UK scientists are returning to Mars with the news that the UK is to be a major player in the first phase of the European Space Agency’s robotic space exploration programme – Aurora – which will set the agenda for Europe’s robotic exploration of space for the next 10 years. The announcement was made at the conclusion of ESA’s Ministerial Meeting held in Berlin (5-6 December).
The UK is to invest 108.1 million Euros (approximately £74.4 million) into Aurora, making the UK second la
Product and system prototyping can be as sophisticated and complex as the final products they seek to model. But to model the capabilities of advanced factories and sophisticated vehicles calls for the tools developed by European researchers.
The FLEXICON project addressed the need to reduce the timescales required for producing open and distributed fault-tolerant control and monitoring systems. It developed two integrated suites of tools to support the different development p
DEISA, the European supercomputing grid infrastructure, and TeraGrid, the US supercomputing cyberinfrastructure, and have been linked, for the purposes of a technology demonstration, by a common, scalable, wide-area global file system spanning two continents.
The bridging of communities in the old and the new world were showcased during the Supercomputing Conference SC05 at Seattle. It was shown that any scientist, accessing TeraGrid from any of the participating sites in the U
Seeking to bring clarity to the debate on mobile phone use, researchers from the University of Essex have published the results of an investigation into the effects of mobiles on attention.
Arising from recent concerns over the physical effects of mobile phone use, the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme awarded an Essex team funding to investigate if radio frequency electromagnetic fields emitted by phones have a significant effect on attention performance.
The Coral Reef Research Unit (CRRU) at the University of Essex has been awarded a grant to explore unknown coral reefs around an un-explored island in the Seychelles.
The research, funded by the EarthWatch Institute and Mitsubishi, will start in July 2006.
Dr David Smith, Director of the CRRU, recently returned from the annual EarthWatch PI conference where he presented a paper about the research: ’Scientists from all over the world met to discuss their research an
People who gain less protection from cancer by eating broccoli may be able to compensate for the difference in their genetic make-up by eating ‘super broccoli’, a variety with higher levels of the active plant chemical sulforaphane, or by eating larger portions.
Lead scientist on the new research, Professor Richard Mithen of the Institute of Food Research (IFR), said: “Eating a few portions of broccoli each week may help to reduce the risk of cancer. Some individuals, who lack a ge
In the December 6 issue of Nature Biotechnology, scientists from 14 different organizations around the world, including the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, propose a new quality standard for biochemical models. MIRIAM (for Minimum information requested in the annotation of biochemical models) will help researchers to reuse, modify and combine computer models of biochemical processes to gain a fuller understanding of life at the molecular and cellular level.
Biologists are making a
By the early 20th century, loggers had harvested more than 90 percent of the forests covering the upper Great Lakes region. The legacy of that destruction continues to have a substantial impact on the environment, researchers say.
Nearly 70 years after this major disturbance, experimental forested plots in the current study have not returned to a point where they store as much carbon as the original stands. And researchers aren’t sure just how long it might take to return to
Time evolution of the thermal properties during dehydration of sol-gel titania emulsions
Nanostructured titania (TiO2) has been extensively studied as a very promising material for applications in sensors, photocatalysis, solar energy conversion and optical coatings. As the properties of titania are determined by its different phases (i.e. rutile and anatase) and these phases depend upon the synthesis method employed, it is important to understand the change in properties that oc
“While our research reaffirmed the risk of stroke among patients with heart disease, the surprise was that the risk was so high in the month after a heart attack,” says Veronique Roger, M.D., M.P.H., the Mayo Clinic cardiologist who led the study.
“A lot of patients survive heart attacks today, which is why this study is so relevant,” she says. “It emphasizes the importance of worrying about other things that can happen beyond heart attacks, stroke being one of them.”
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