A student from St John’s High School, Dundee, scooped one of the top prizes at the prestigious national BA CREST Science Fair in London. The fair, held at the Royal Society on 28 February, showcases science and technology projects from students aged 11-18 across the UK.
Gurjit Singh Sidhu was awarded the International Science and Engineering Fair Prize 2005 for his project testing equipment to measure the dose of radiation that cancer cells received during radiotherapy. He has
Spring starts early this year in Norway’s fjords and coastal waters, with sunny weather awakening a colourful bloom of marine phytoplankton. ESA’s Envisat spacecraft is being used to monitor its development.
Microscopic phytoplankton have been called ’the grass of the sea’ – they are the basic food on which all other marine life depends. Provided with sufficient light planktonic algae multiply by absorbing mineral nutrients and converting solar energy into o
Cholesterol, often stigmatized for its role in heart disease, has long been known to be essential for the health of the fat-laden membranes that surround individual cells. New findings by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center highlight a novel role for cholesterol inside the cell itself – anchoring a signaling pathway linked to cell division and cancer.
These findings appear in the March 4 issue of Science and are available online. “Cell signals have to be tightly control
Jupiter’s formation linked to that of primitive meteorites
The process that formed the giant planet Jupiter may also have spawned some of the tiniest and oldest members of our solar system — millimeter-sized spheres called chondrules, the major part of the most primitive meteorites. As witnesses to the early history of the solar system, chondrules may provide important clues to how the planets formed.
A report of this research result, by theorists Alan P. Boss of th
Mayo Clinic researchers have discovered a genetic marker that may pave the way for a fast, inexpensive blood test to predict one type of deadly stroke that strikes 30,000 people in the United States annually.
The article and an editorial appear in the March edition of the Journal of Neurosurgery, http://www.thejns-net.org/jns/issues/toc_pre.html. The Mayo Clinic researchers report that people with key variations in a gene that affects the ability of blood vessels to relax are 10 ti
A few years ago, NASA researcher Watson Gregg published a study showing that tiny free-floating ocean plants called phytoplankton had declined in abundance globally by 6 percent between the 1980s and 1990s. A new study by Gregg and his co-authors suggests that trend may not be continuing, and new patterns are taking place.
Why is this important? Well, the tiny ocean plants help regulate our atmosphere and the health of our oceans. Phytoplankton produce half of the oxygen generate
An international team of medical scientists has made an important advance in our understanding of the second most fatal form of cancer in the industrialized world. Professor Jeremy R. Jass, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Gastrointestinal Pathology at McGill University in Montreal, and colleagues in Australia and Japan have shown that in some cases colorectal cancer can be inherited.
The new syndrome is characterized by distinctive clinical, pathological and molecular featur
Discovery gives clinicians new targets for making existing therapies more effective and developing drugs to inhibit the growth of cancers
A team of researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute in Toronto have discovered how a key enzyme involved in repairing DNA is put together and how it works–a development that opens up new therapies for making cancer cells more vulnerable to attack. The team has crystallized–or characterized
More breast cancer patients with large palpable tumors are now undergoing chemotherapy before surgery in an effort to reduce the size of their tumor, and MRI is the best way to predict if the chemotherapy is working, preliminary results of a study show. If the chemotherapy is successful, then the woman may be able to undergo breast-conservation surgery rather than a mastectomy.
Currently, it is standard practice for the physician to do a breast examination to non-invasively asses
Gap-toothed youngsters may not be the only ones who are a little sore when they leave the orthodontist’s office. While they sport tight braces on their teeth, their doctors may be nursing tight, aching backs, according to a study from the University of Alberta.
A study of graduate orthodontic students at the university and a practising orthodontist–who’d been working for 18 years–showed that long hours of bending low and working in patients’ mouths put heavy strain
A computer-aided detection system (CAD) can effectively detect breast cancers a radiologist is more apt to initially miss, a new study shows.
Small lesions are very challenging for the radiologist to detect, said Rachel F. Brem, MD, director of breast imaging at George Washington University in Washington, DC, and lead author of the study. The study of 201 women found that CAD was “highly effective in detecting even the smallest lesions, with a sensitivity of 92% for lesions of 5 mm
The human brain is like a general in a bunker. Floating in its bubble of cerebrospinal fluid, it has no direct window to the outside world, so the only way for the brain to observe, comprehend, and order the body into action is to rely on information it receives. This information comes to it through a sophisticated system of sensory neurons that connect the brain to organs like the eye, ear, nose, and mouth.
In recent years, biologists and neuroscientists have been trying
Reactive oxygen species (ROS), or ’oxygen radicals’, have been identified as major contributors to signs of premature aging, increased cancer prevalence linked to inflammation-associated syndromes and a variety of human diseases. Now scientists at the University of California, San Diego Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR) have identified a key network of DNA repair and cell cycle control genes in yeast that prevents the deleterious effects of ROS.
Discovery offers hope for treatment of dyslexia
A gene which is likely to be one of the causes of dyslexia in children has been discovered by researchers at Cardiff University.
They believe the major finding will give researchers a better understanding of what causes the brain disorder which disrupts reading and writing skills.
It is now hoped that follow-up research will also lead to the discovery of treatments which could help children susceptible to dyslexia. The
The hydrothermal vents were miles from where anyone could have imagined. One massive seafloor vent was an unheard of 18 stories tall. And all were creamy white and gray, suggesting a very different composition than vent systems studied since the 1970s.
Scientists who named the spot Lost City knew they were looking at something never seen before when the field was serendipitously discovered in December 2000 during a National Science Foundation expedition to the mid-Atlantic.
Many patients with liver diseases often encounter difficulties with therapy and ultimately require liver transplant to survive. Since many acute and chronic liver diseases are driven by immune-mediated mechanisms, there is a necessity to find new therapies that can inhibit these immune-based triggers and block liver damage. In a study appearing online on March 3 in advance of publication in the April 1 print edition of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Christian Trautwein, Christian Klein,
Feedback
