Scientists immersed in the life-blood of the Northwest
What is considered perhaps the northwest’s most valuable natural resource will be the primary focus for hundreds of environmental science professionals as they convene for the Fourth Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry World Congress conference in Portland this November.
Among the events designed to exchange ideas and present research will be an Interactive Poster Session entitled, Investigations of the
A team of researchers have developed a new method of predicting the number of drug users in the population by looking at the number of recorded overdose deaths among drug users.
In research published today in the American Journal of Epidemiology a team of researchers from Imperial College London, the Health Protection Agency, Medical Research Council and GlaxoSmithKline analysed the numbers of opiate and injecting drug users who had overdoses, to see if it was possible to mode
The largest population study ever done into the risk of cancer in families that fulfil the criteria for BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation testing has confirmed that breast and ovarian cancers are the major concerns for geneticists and doctors counselling families. It has also verified that families eligible for BRCA1/2 mutation testing are at increased risk of pancreatic, prostate and stomach cancers.
One important conclusion of the study was that, in families with at least one woman with b
Research provides information on brain changes that affect breeding in birds
A bird’s song is music to our ears — and to the ears of his potential mates — and a warning to other males to stay out of his territory. To Ignacio Moore, assistant professor of biology at Virginia Tech, bird songs were a curiosity that made him want to find out why birds sang at some times and not at others, at some places and not elsewhere.
Moore and University of Washington, Seattl
Plantains, otherwise known as cooking bananas, are an important food crop in Tanzania and require fertile soil for a good harvest. For around four centuries now, banana-growing land has been enriched by supplements of manure from cattle grazing on nearby pastures. The strongly increasing population pressure in recent decades has led to a decrease in pastureland and, consequently, manure, causing a reduction in banana harvests. Green manure crops such as herbaceous legumes provide a solution em
The measurement of pH is one of the most common analytical measurements used the world over in applications from process control in the food industry, to research in the pharmaceutical industry, through to effluent monitoring in the environmental sector. In 2002, the total pH measurement instrumentation market, including replacement sensors revenue, was estimated to be on the order of $500m.
The technology currently used for measuring pH is more than seven decades old and suffers from
A new tool based on satellite data shows trends in the way Europeans use our landscape. Seen from the ground these changes appear gradual, but viewed from above they are often dramatic.
Each day new roads or buildings bury the equivalent of 240 football fields of German soil, around 120 hectares of land. This is just one example of the information available from a new virtual atlas of Europe’s landscape based on satellite data.
The European Environment Agency (EEA), assi
A team led by a researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine has developed vaccines that vastly reduce or eliminate dogs’ allergic reactions to three major food allergens: peanuts, milk and wheat. The vaccines’ benefits lasted at least three months.
The research, published in the Nov. 12 online edition of the journal Allergy and completed jointly with scientists at UC-San Francisco, UC-Davis and UC-Berkeley, is the first to reverse pre-existing food allergie
Recent experimental results threatened to overturn 100 years of scientific research into the mysterious nature of liquid water, but new experimental results say … not so fast! A team of scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, has shown that the energy required to “measurably distort” the molecular structure of liquid water is the same as the energy required to melt ice. This could explain why a study la
In a paper published online today in Science, a group of researchers led by David Awschalom, a professor of physics and electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, reports the observation of the spin Hall effect. This publication ends a 33-year long effort aimed at this discovery.
The Hall effect, named after American physicist Edwin Hall who discovered it in 1879, occurs when an electric current flows through a conductor in a magnetic field
In a Perspective article in the Nov. 11 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Fabio Cominelli, chief of the division of gastroenterology and hepatology at the University of Virginia Health System reports that a dysregulated response by the innate immune system- the body’s initial, non-specific response to infection- may have more to do with the development of Crohn’s than acquired immunity, currently thought by many to be the most likely suspect.
Patients, physicians
A vaccine that could reduce cervical cancer rates by 75 percent is safe and 95 percent effective, according to a study of 1,113 women in North America and Brazil.
The vaccine against the most common cancer-causing strains of human papillomavirus was 100 percent effective at preventing the persistent infections that cause cervical cancer, researchers report in the Nov. 13 issue of the British journal, The Lancet.
“This study provides objective evidence that this vaccine
As the scientific community is seeking alternatives to antibiotic treatment, periodontal researchers found that photodynamic therapy (PDT) is advantageous for suppressing anaerobic bacteria that lead to periodontal diseases according to a recent study in the Journal of Periodontology.
“Although this study is still in its early phase, with the recent number of reports about bacterial strains becoming resistant to frequent doses of antibiotics, PDT could be an alternative to conve
Discovery may one day lead to new ways to treat degenerative diseases
Scientists at Stanford University and Joslin Diabetes Center are providing new insights into how muscle cells regenerate — leading to powerful tools to help scientists better understand diseases such as muscular dystrophy. Skeletal muscle contains a complex array of cell types. Among its principal components are multi-nucleated muscle fibers and muscle satellite cells — cells located in close association with
Infarct size reduced 60%+ by three different measures
Long an under-studied yet widely-used over-the-counter medication, acetaminophen over the last few years is becoming recognized for a range of potential therapeutic uses beyond headache and pain.
One promising area is cardiology, where researchers decided to test the “common wisdom” that acetaminophen had no potential in treating heart disease. This position has been popular in the medical community despite that fact
In June, researchers from the University of Rochester announced they had located a potential planet around another star so young that it defied theorists’ explanations. Now a new team of Rochester planet-formation specialists are backing up the original conclusions, saying they’ve confirmed that the hole formed in the star’s dusty disk could very well have been formed by a new planet. The findings have implications for gaining insight into how our own solar system came to be, as well as finding
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