The charming meanderings of butterflies are not as random as they appear, according to new research1. Scientists at Rothamsted Research,2 a research institute sponsored by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) in Hertfordshire, have found that their seemingly irresolute flutterings are in fact decisive flight paths. The harmonic radar has been used before to track the flights of bumblebees and honeybees. Now it has been shown to work for butterflies too, opening a n
Circulation article describes Viagra’s ability to stabilize
Virginia Commonwealth University researchers have found that the popular impotence drug Viagra prevents damage to the heart from a potent chemotherapeutic agent frequently used in the treatment of breast cancer, leukemia and sarcomas.
In the April 5 issue of Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, researchers demonstrated for the first time that administration of clinically relevant doses
Oil spills from tankers or simply your local garage could soon be cleaned up using specially-selected bacteria, according to research presented today (Wednesday, 06 April 2005) at the Society for General Microbiology’s 156th Meeting at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.
Millions of gallons of crude oil and its derivates used by the plastics and chemical industries are transported vast distances around the world every day, and inevitably some of it gets spilled. Scientists fro
For the last five years, a team of astronomers at the University of Cambridge and the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney, Australia, has been building a special instrument to search for the most distant galaxies in the Universe.
Known as DAZLE (Dark Age Redshift Lyman Explorer), the 21st century “time machine” will be able to look back 12,800 million years to the end of the Dark Ages, when the very first stars were appearing from the gloom that dominated the Universe shortly aft
Ares Research Technology, a new start-up company which will design and assemble scientific equipment that works at ultra-high vacuum, was launched today at CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory. The company will supply advanced instruments for use on X-ray sources in laboratories and at synchrotron light sources around the world.
Company founder Dr Dave Teehan said, “There’s a rapidly expanding global market for vacuum instruments, which already play a key role in research into the developm
The School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton is the first university department to deploy IPv6 in production on its network. Now a team at the School has worked on the technology with Virgin Radio to vastly increase its listening capacity online.
IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) provides 340 undecillion addresses (3.4 x 10Ë38) compared to the four billion addresses possible with the current 20-year-old IPv4. Virgin is the first commercial
A small ceremony took place yesterday at the site of Snecma Moteurs in Vernon, France, to mark the beginning of industrial production of the Vulcain 2 engine, designed for the new Ariane 5 ECA and Ariane 5 ES ATV launchers.
Present at the ceremony was Patrick Devedjian, the French Minister for Industry and Jean-Paul Béchat, Chairman of the Executive Board of Sagem-Snecma. ESA was represented by Antonio Fabrizi, Director of Launchers and Robert Lainé, Head of the Ariane Department.
Intense light pulses can kill 99.999% of food poisoning bugs in just six bursts, say researchers from Strathclyde University today (Wednesday, 06 April 2005) presenting at the Society for General Microbiology’s 156th Meeting at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.
The dangerous food poisoning bacteria Listeria monocytogenes can be effectively cleared from contaminated kitchen surfaces, water treatment plants, hospital operating theatres, and even from the air by using puls
Nylon strips, beads and hospital stitching thread covered in viruses could be an effective weapon against the hospital acquired superbug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA, according to research presented today (Tuesday, 05 April 2005) at the Society for General Microbiology’s 156th Meeting at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.
Scientists from the University of Strathclyde have developed a method of chemically bonding a type of virus called a bacteriop
Rabies, HIV, cancer and malaria could all be prevented with pills in the future, if a new technique using specially modified viruses to deliver vaccines is adopted, according to scientists speaking today (Tuesday, 05 April 2005) at the Society for General Microbiology’s 156th Meeting at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.
“We can take a special type of virus which only infects bacteria, called a bacteriophage, and replace some of its DNA with vaccine DNA, and then use the p
At the request of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA), a series of surveys on the labour market and the informal sector were performed in 2001 – 2003, in seven countries of this region. They were conducted by the national statistical institutes under the joint guidance of experts from AFRISTAT and IRD economists (1 ). The first results provide accurate, original and homogeneous figures on the employment market and the informal sector in the capital city of each country. While
Erosion and human activities are inducing large amounts of terrigenous sediment input to the southwest lagoon of New Caledonia. Such deposits can pose a threat to the lagoon’s ecological balance and biological richness. Scientists from the IRD’s Noumea centre have for several years been applying modelling techniques in order to unravel the system of current circulation and sediment transport (1). Satellite remote sensing provides reliable quantified data on the concentration of suspended matter
A meningitis epidemic hits West Africa every year, affecting 25 000 to 200 000 people. It has long been known that the timing of this epidemic and its spatial distribution within the “Meningitis Belt”, situated between 10° and 15° North, are closely linked to climatic conditions. Involved in the AMMA programme ( 1 ), IRD and University of Paris-VII researchers ( 2) produced the first quantified description of this relationship using statistical methods. They linked up the annual changes in atmo
The warm El Niño episodes are generally accepted to be harmful to the development of cold-water anchovy populations, but favourable for abundant populations of sardine, adapted to warmer waters. IRD researchers and their Peruvian partners (1) have been studying fluctuations in pelagic fish populations in the world’s richest oceanic ecosystems for fish, the Peru-Humboldt Current system, off Peru. They showed that the traditional explanation does not always hold true. During the 1997-98 El Niño ev
An international team of researchers, including scientists from the University of Dundee have announced that cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) found throughout the world may produce a toxin linked to certain types of neurological disease.
Researchers have previously proposed a link between beta-methyl-amino-alanine (BMAA), a neurotoxic amino acid found in cyanobacteria and an Alzheimer’s-like neurodegenerative disease suffered by the Chamorro people on Guam in the Pacific. The Cha
A specialist of the Vavilov Institute of Natural History and Engineering, Russian Academy of Sciences, A.G. Nazarov has considered Vernadsky’s famous concept on biosphere transmutation into noosphere (“sphere of human thought”) from the ecological point of view and has come to the conclusion that noospheric reconstruction of biosphere has no prospects and is unreal.
V.I.Vernadsky had no time to develop himself an integral doctrine about noosphere. In the 20s of the last century he
Feedback
