A new venture, Bio Life Technical, including leading researchers within Nanotechnology and Personalized Healthcare, such as Professor Chris Toumazou and Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub of Imperial College, London, is being launched in London, UK providing independent due diligence services to investors, globally. Bio Life Technical is structured to aid venture capital groups, investment banks, business angels and institutional investors by providing a single contact point and managing the technical du
Scientists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that the human brain favours familiar-looking faces when choosing a potential partner.
The research team found that people find familiar faces more attractive than unfamiliar ones. They also found that the human brain holds separate images of both male and female faces and reacts to them differently depending on how familiar it is with their facial features.
Dr Anthony Little, from the University’s School of Biologi
The vision of global applications is a step closer with the development of tools to create software that can work on any device.
The DEGAS project initially defined the key elements of a software program that are common to all devices, like security, and then separated those device-specific functions.
“Essentially, we wanted to address the problem caused by heterogeneous networks, because currently content and software cannot be used on any device or operating system,”
Seated on the University of Leicester’s Space Research Centre rooftop, the novel instrument captures the sun’s rays and uses them to build up a daily picture, in 3-D, of the city’s air pollution. Just the size of a suitcase, the instrument has nine telescopes that protrude out and point in different directions across the city, collecting the sunlight every minute of every day. The trapped sunlight is bounced by mirrors inside the instrument straight into the mouth of a device that measures i
The UK government proposals to make public places and workplaces smokefree in England would not apply to nearly half of all pubs and bars in the North West of England, because they do not serve food. The largest and most comprehensive study to date of the likely impact of the government White Paper ’Choosing Health’ is published today in the open access journal BMC Public Health. In the most deprived areas, nearly two-thirds of all pubs and bars would be exempt, which researchers claim would wor
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have combined the world’s hardest known material – diamond – with the world’s strongest structural form – carbon nanotubes. This new process for “growing” diamond and carbon nanotubes together opens the way for its use in a number of energy-related applications.
The technique is the first successful synthesis of a diamond-nanotube nanocomposite, which means for the first time this specialized
Analysis of several different satellite records and surface monitoring instruments indicates that the ozone layer is no longer declining, according to a study by scientists working with the Center for Integrating Statistical and Environmental Science (CISES) at the University of Chicago.
In some parts of the world, the ozone layer has increased a small amount in the past few years, although it still well below normal levels.
The results will be published Aug. 31 in
Evidence is mounting that the atmosphere of Enceladus, first detected by the Cassini Magnetometer instrument, is the result of venting from ground fractures close to the moon’s south pole. New findings from the close flyby of Enceladus by Cassini this past July add to the emerging picture of a small icy body, unusual in its past and present level of activity, and very different from all other icy Saturnian moons.
Within a minute of closest approach to Enceladus on July 14th, 2005,
Largest-known group ever photographed in Asia
Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) scientists, working in conjunction with Iran’s Department of Environment (DOE) in an isolated region in the Dar-e Anjir Wildlife Refuge, recently discovered that a remote camera set out to survey wildlife had photographed an entire family of extremely rare Asiatic cheetahs. The pictures show an adult female and her four youngsters resting in the shade of a tree, marking the largest-known group of
A study published in the latest issue of Restoration Ecology finds that in coastal Louisiana, oyster reefs help to deter erosion. Oyster reefs are self-sustaining, and are additionally attractive because they use native materials, have the potential for long-term growth, and contribute to overall ecosystem stability and quality. Oyster larvae move in groups and water-borne chemicals stimulate the oysters’ settlement; reefs are therefore able to maintain themselves as new recruits settle and grow
Supercomputers excel at highly calculation-intensive tasks, such as molecular modeling and large-scale simulations, and have enabled significant scientific breakthroughs.
Yet supercomputers themselves are subject to technological advancements and redesigns that allow them to keep pace with the science they support.
The current vision of future supercomputers calls for them to be very heterogeneous–for example, rather than a central processing unit (CPU) with memory, disk
It has been identified by the World Health Organization as the most dangerous infectious disease, causing more deaths — more than 2 million a year — than any other single infection. Approximately one-third of the world’s population is already infected. “It” is Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
A Kansas State University chemistry professor is seeking to stem the tide in the war against TB. According to the WHO, no new antituberculosis drugs have been marketed during the last 30 ye
Altered protein could help deliver drugs and shape the growth of engineered tissue
Collagen often pops up in beauty products and supermodel lips. But by mating collagen with a molecular hitchhiker, materials scientists at Johns Hopkins hope to create some important medical advances. The researchers have found a simple new way to modify collagen, paving the way for better infection-fighting bandages and a treatment to block the formation of unwanted scar tissue. In addition, tiss
The amount of blood flowing into the brain may play a larger role in the development of dementia than previously believed, according to a study in the September issue of the journal Radiology.
Researchers from Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to examine the brains of elderly patients with and without dementia related to Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. As expected, MR images showed that the patients with late-on
25 years after the initial discovery of p53, Dr. David Lane and colleagues at the University of Dundee have discovered multiple isoforms of the p53 tumor suppressor protein.
Their paper, which will be released online ahead of print in Genes & Development, establishes that, like the other p53 family members p63 and p73, p53 exists in human cells in at least six different isoforms. Dr. Lane and colleagues identified a heretofore unrecognized internal promoter and alternative splic
Dr. Bjorn Vennstrom and colleagues in Spain and at the Karolinska Institute (Sweden) have identified novel neural functions of thyroid hormone (TH), revealing that it is required during discrete periods of brain development to confer “normal” behavior.
The scientists used transgenic mice heterozygous for a mutant form of the thyroid hormone receptor alpha1 that has about a ten-fold reduced affinity for its natural ligand, TH. They observed that reduced TH signaling during developm
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