Duke University Medical Center researchers have found that joints whose cartilage lacks a specific type of collagen will develop osteoarthritis – the so-called “wear-and-tear” form of the disease – at a greatly accelerated rate.
The results of their experiments with mice provide new insights that could lead to potential treatments for a disease that afflicts more than 40 million Americans, said the researchers.
The researchers found that mice lacking the gene that cont
Findings could help with design of combination products that are not compromised by adverse host responses
Medical devices are traditionally thought of as fairly simple implants such as stents and hip replacements – pieces of plastic or metal that are placed in the body to handle a very specific function. But biomedical devices now on the drawing board are considerably more sophisticated and represent an unprecedented melding of man and machine.
Combination products, dev
Volcanic eruptions in Siberia 251 million years ago may have started a cascade of events leading to high hydrogen sulfide levels in the oceans and atmosphere and precipitating the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history, according to a Penn State geoscientist.
“The recent dating of the Siberian trap volcanoes to be contemporaneous with the end-Permian extinction suggests that they were the trigger for the environmental events that caused the extinctions,” says Dr. Lee R.
A team of scientists led by biophysicist Stuart Lindsay from the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University have created the first reproducible single molecule negative differential resistor and in the process have developed a groundbreaking experimental technique that provides a “roadmap” for designing single molecule devices based on biochemistry.
The findings will be discussed in a presentation by Lindsay on February 18 at the American Association for the Advancement of S
Business as usual threatens future of fish – Scientists call on managers to incorporate new scientific understanding into fishery plans
In a scientific double whammy, researchers report that fishing pressure is causing fish to evolve to smaller sizes, just as new studies show that larger fish are critical to sustaining populations. In species such as Pacific rockfish, the big, old females not only produce exponentially more eggs than younger, smaller females, but their hearty larv
A Canadian seismologist is arguing that our understanding of the structure of the Earth’s interior is based on the equivalent of fuzzy ultrasound images that leave room for improvement.
Once seismic images are fine-tuned to remove background noise, they may tell a very different story of the world below, says Dr. Felix Herrmann, a seismologist at the University of British Columbia. And oil companies are already lining up to cash in on his clearer view of the Earth’s un
Scientists find undersea mountains, discover new species, and spy on fish
Scientists can now visualize the ocean floor in remote areas of the Arctic, observe rockfish hideouts, and see live images of coral cities thousands of meters under the sea’s surface. Soon their robots will be able to “live” on the bottom of the ocean – monitoring everything from signs of tsunamis to the effects of deep sea drilling. “We have very complex problems in the ocean, but we’ve been looking at
Navy’sundersea microphones — but sound pollution threatens
Why do whales in the North Atlantic Ocean seem to be moving together and coherently? What is impelling them forward. How do they communicate with each other, seemingly over thousands of miles of ocean? And how can this acoustical habitat be protected?
For nearly nine years Cornell University researcher Christopher Clark — together with former U.S. Navy acoustics experts Chuck Gagnon and Paula Loveday — has b
Advanced technologies reveal new knowledge about the lives and deaths of whales
Using genetics, Navy sonar, deep-sea submersibles, and toxicology, scientists are peering into the lives of whales – past and present – in ways never before possible. At a 3:00 PM press conference on February 19th at the annual meeting of AAAS, Steve Palumbi of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, Christopher W. Clark of Cornell University, Craig Smith of the University of Hawaii and Roger Payne of the Oc
Harvard researcher to report at AAAS meeting on projected decline in cleansing summer winds
While science’s conventional wisdom holds that pollution feeds global warming, new research suggests that the reverse could also occur: A warming globe could stifle summer’s cleansing winds over the Northeast and Midwest over the next 50 years, significantly worsening air pollution in these regions.
Loretta J. Mickley, a research associate at Harvard University’s Divi
Steve Palumbi is no stranger to controversy. A marine biologist at Stanford University, Palumbi incurred the wrath of the Japanese whaling industry more than a decade ago by conducting the first genetic study of whale meat sold in Tokyo food markets.
Japan harvests more than 300 Antarctic minke whales every year for scientific research. The Japanese government, arguing that minke whales are relatively abundant, allows the slaughtered giants to be sold as food.
In the earl
A group led by astronomers from Ohio State University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have measured the mass of a unique black hole, and determined that it is the smallest found so far.
Early results indicate that the black hole weighs in at less than a million times the mass of our sun -– which would make it as much as 100 times smaller than others of its type. To get their measurement, astronomers used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and a technique similar to Doppl
Biologists speaking at a symposium in Washington, D.C., this week warn that fundamental assumptions underlying current fisheries management practices may be wrong, resulting in management decisions that threaten the future supply of fish and the long-term survival of some fish populations. The symposium, organized by Steven Berkeley of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Larry Crowder of Duke University Marine Laboratory, is part of the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Association f
A new security approach could improve safeguarding of credit card numbers, bank passwords and other sensitive information for those who surf the Internet using wireless connections, researchers told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)on Saturday.
The same protocol could be employed in many computer networks in which two computers, hand-held communication devices or network nodes need to simultaneously verify the identity of each o
The profusion of wireless communications in homes, in coffee shops and even on battlefields presents us with fantastic new conveniences — but also new security problems. Indiana University computer scientist Markus Jakobsson will discuss “stealth” attacks over wireless networks, which can disrupt communications and endanger personal information. One such attack is “denial of service,” in which devices are overloaded with so much incoming information they cease functioning properly.
Earth is showered constantly by particles called muons that are created by cosmic rays, and clever scientists are finding ways to use them as probes of dense objects, including a massive pyramid in Mexico and volcanoes in Japan. American researchers also have proposed using the energetic particles to detect smuggled nuclear materials in vehicles and cargo containers.
Muons are formed when cosmic rays from deep space interact with the atmosphere. The particles, which strike earth
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