Foreign affairs and WCS offer a ’one world, one health’ solution
The threat of potential pandemics such as Ebola, SARS, and avian influenza demands a more holistic approach to disease control, one that prevents diseases from crossing the divide between humans, their livestock, and wildlife, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in the most recent issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. This “One World, One Health” concept, as described by WCS veterinary st
Results of latest survey show tiger numbers in Russia stable
Results of the latest full range survey indicate that tiger numbers in Russia appear to be stable, say the coordinators of a 2005 winter effort to count the animals, led by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society. After a massive winter endeavor to determine distribution and abundance of tigers in the Russian Far East, the last stronghold of Siberian tigers, researchers report that approximately 334-417 adult t
The re-entry module of the Foton-M2 spacecraft, which has been in low-Earth orbit for the last 16 days made a successful landing today in an uninhabited area 140 km south-east of the town of Kostanay in Kazakhstan, close to the Russian border at 09:37 Central European Time, 13:37 local time.
The unmanned Foton-M spacecraft, which was launched on 31 May from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, carried a European payload of 385 kg covering 39 experiments in fluid physics, biolo
University of California scientists working at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed a novel method for controlling and measuring electron spins in semiconductor crystals of GaAs (gallium arsenide). The work suggests an alternative–and perhaps even superior–method of spin manipulation for future generations of “semiconductor spintronic” devices.
In research published in today’s issue of the scientific journal Physical Review Letters, Scott Crooker and Darryl Smith
Could Earth have had an even more violent infancy than previously imagined? New isotope data suggest that the Earth not only had a very violent beginning but also point to new information about our planet’s chemical evolution.
New and precise measurements of a neodymium isotope ratio (142Nd/144Nd) led Maud Boyet and Rick Carlson of Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism to the discovery that all terrestrial rocks have an excess of 142Nd compared
For and against: Aspirin for everyone over 50? BMJ Volume 330, pp 1440-3
Experts go head to head in this week’s BMJ over whether everyone over 50 should take a daily aspirin to reduce their risk of heart attacks and strokes. Peter Elwood and colleagues at Cardiff University believe that the evidence now supports more widespread use of aspirin, and there needs to be a strategy to inform the public and enable older people to make their own decision.
As a general rul
The most common form of lung cancer may begin in a group of newly isolated lung stem cells, according to researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Working in a mouse model, the researchers isolated a novel type of lung cell that can divide into fresh copies of itself and into the two more specialized kinds of cells deep in the lung. Their experiments show that at the earliest stage of tumor development, the stem cell appears to be the first lung cells that respond to
Study underscores the importance of non-coding DNA in disease determination
Today a team of scientists provides convincing evidence that the deletion of a large non-coding DNA segment on human chromosome 17 is responsible for Van Buchem disease. This genetic mutation is one of only a few disease-associated mutations discovered to date that alters a long-range transcriptional regulatory element. The study appears online in the journal Genome Research.
“Our study addre
Warmer oceans, more moisture in the atmosphere, and other factors suggest that human-induced climate change will increase hurricane intensity and rainfall, according to climate expert Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. His paper, “Uncertainty in Hurricanes and Global Warming,” appears in the Perspectives section of the June 17 issue of Science.
“Trends in human-influenced environmental changes are now evident in hurricane regions,” says Trenberth. “Th
By using DNA molecules as scaffolds, scientists have created superconducting nanodevices that demonstrate a new type of quantum interference and could be used to measure magnetic fields and map regions of superconductivity.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have fabricated and studied nanostructures consisting of pairs of suspended superconducting wires as tiny as 3 to 4 molecular diameters (typically 5 to 15 nanometers) in width. The team consisted of p
A study of fossils from the Paleozoic Era, collected across the world, reveals that ancient brachiopods were little bothered by predators. However, the rare predation traces left on brachiopod shells by unknown assailants coupled with a subtle increase in their frequency through time may be the shadows on the wall that show killers were in the room and their numbers increased with time.
From 550 million years ago until 250 million years ago, brachiopods, or “lampshells,” were pl
Rising dust storms a health problem, even continents away; infant mortality worst in drylands: Report
Growing desertification worldwide threatens to swell by millions the number of poor forced to seek new homes and livelihoods. And a rising number of large, intense dust storms plaguing many areas menace the health of people even continents away, international experts warn in a new report.
Thick storms rising out of the Gobi Desert affect much of China, Korea and Japan and
South America has the most biodiversity of any major region today and according to an international team of researchers, that biodiversity began at least 52 million years ago.
“What defines terrestrial ecology is plant insect interactions,” says Dr. Peter Wilf, assistant professor of geosciences and the John T. Ryan Jr. Faculty Fellow. “But there is very little information about the history of insects eating plants in South America, despite the tremendous number of plant and an
Nature is a seemingly endless storehouse of interesting – and potentially life-saving – biological molecules. But tracking down and harvesting those chemicals in their natural form can be time-consuming, expensive and unreliable.
Now Salk scientists have discovered a new way of bringing “bio-prospecting” out of the rainforest and into the lab. Their findings are published in the June 16th edition of the journal Nature.
Stéphane Richard, Joseph Noel and Tomohisa Kuzuyama i
New findings from a Dartmouth Medical School collaboration in Tanzania may alter assumptions about the diagnosis of tuberculosis in HIV-infected people, and prompt a major change in way TB testing is routinely done in the developing world.
Writing in the journal, “Clinical Infectious Diseases,” researchers found that while the co-existence of HIV and TB is well-known, traditional screening methods for TB are allowing significant number of cases of subclinical, active tuberculosis
The emergence of acupuncture is allowing some patients to relieve or significantly reduce dry mouth’s debilitating effects, according to a report in the May/June 2005 issue of General Dentistry, the Academy of General Dentistry’s (AGD) clinical, peer-reviewed journal.
Dry mouth (also known as xerostomia) is a painful condition caused by a decrease in the amount of saliva in the mouth when salivary glands do not work properly. Saliva is a natural defense for teeth and p
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