A revolutionary approach to angiogenesis[1] by a team of Belgian researchers could make cancer treatment more effective at killing tumours.
Dr. Olivier Feron and his team from the University of Louvain Medical School in Brussels have turned the whole concept of targeting tumour blood vessels on its head. Instead of the conventional approach of trying to starve tumour cells of the blood supply they need to grow, they are doing the opposite – opening up the tumour blood supply to allow
The electrons of a perfect metallic surface move like free waves in a plane. Nevertheless, if atomic barriers are inserted, this may restrict their movement in one dimension, forming stationary waves such as those on the water surface in a bucket.
The stationary or free behaviour of electron waves is, nevertheless, still something very intriguing, given that the barriers of atoms are very close to each other, there is no confinement, and that the electron recovers its free movement
A team of researchers at the University of Georgia has discovered a new way that genetic entities called transposable elements (TEs) can promote evolutionary change in plants.
The research, published Sept. 30 in the journal Nature, was led by Dr. Susan Wessler, a Distinguished Research Professor of plant biology at UGA. The Wessler lab studies TEs, which are pieces of DNA that make copies of themselves that can then be inserted throughout the genome. The process can be highly effici
Technique could ease discovery of countless reactions by linking organic fragments to DNA strands
Scientists have developed a powerful way of mining the chemical universe for new reactions by piggybacking collections of different small organic molecules onto short strands of DNA, which then gives the reactants the opportunity to react by zipping together. Their work draws upon an innovative technique, known as “DNA-templated synthesis,” that uses DNA to code not for RNA or proteins
A new study shows that a history of smoking affects survival in patients with cancer of the head and neck. Patients who had smoked fewer than 100 cigarettes in their lifetime were three times more likely to have better overall survival, disease-specific survival, and recurrence-free survival compared with patients who had a current or previous history of regular smoking. There are approximately 38,000 new cases of head and neck cancer cases in the U.S. each year, the vast majority of which occur
Scientists from the UK and the USA have successfully demonstrated a new technique that could help to shrink the size and cost of future particle accelerators for fundamental physics experiments and applications in materials and biomedicine.
Using the huge electric fields in laser-produced plasmas, they have accelerated beams of electrons close to the speed of light, in an important step towards the development of a working laser electron accelerator that could sit on a table top.
A team of UK scientists has used, for the first time, an extremely short-pulse laser to accelerate high-energy electrons over an incredibly short distance. Current accelerators can be hundreds of metres long, this is just a millimetre long.
Earlier laser-driven accelerators were inefficient, accelerating the electrons to a wide range of energies. But scientists who wish to use these electron beams to research materials science – such as the structure of viruses and moon rock – nee
Despite Government efforts to promote ‘lifelong learning’ and a more equitable and inclusive ‘learning society’ there is little special or new about adult learning in the digital age, according to research at Cardiff University.
The Adult Learning@Home project, which was funded by ESRC, concluded that ICT has not increased participation and achievement rates in adult education. Instead, e-learning tends to be associated with the same factors that determine school-leaving age, such as
Scientists from the Sainsbury Laboratory (SL), Norwich report in the journal Nature that important plant diseases previously thought only to infect plants through their leaves may also enter through the plant’s roots. They report that the rice leaf blast fungus is able to use very different routes and means of attacking the rice plant by switching between two completely different programmes of developmental events; one programme is characteristic of leaf-infecting fungi and the other characteristic
Genetic predictive test clears way for targeted drug treatment
An international team of scientists and cancer specialists has identified which patients with the deadly form of brain tumours called glioblastomas are likely to live longer if they are treated with temozolomide, and which patients are likely to get only marginal, if any, benefit. The genetic predictive test on tumour biopsies to identify who will benefit from the drug could be carried out fairly easily in any genetics la
If you missed your morning coffee and now you have a headache and difficulty concentrating, you might be able to blame it on caffeine withdrawal. In general, the more caffeine consumed, the more severe withdrawal symptoms are likely to be, but as little as one standard cup of coffee a day can produce caffeine addiction, according to a Johns Hopkins study that reviewed over 170 years of caffeine withdrawal research.
Results of the Johns Hopkins study should result in caffeine withdraw
Patients now living insulin free and off dialysis
Due to refined surgical techniques and advances in anti-rejection therapy, transplant surgeons at the University of Pittsburgh’s Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute (STI) are able to successfully perform a higher volume of kidney-pancreas transplants – more than 22 kidney-pancreas transplants in the past three months – which yields a shorter wait time on the transplant list, a better graft survival and quicker recovery. “Pe
Arsenic trioxide – a highly poisonous substance best known as an effective weed killer or pesticide and notorious for being a favourite ’weapon’ of choice in murder mystery novels, is being re-invented as a treatment for a rare type of leukaemia.
It is already licensed as an orphan drug (the term for drugs intended to treat rare conditions) for patients who have relapsed after initial therapy for acute promyeloctytic leukaemia (APL).
But now, a research team led by Dr.
While most of us watched this summer’s violent and destructive storms on TV from the comfort of our sofas, a team of researchers from across the UK, including University of Leeds scientists Alan Blyth, Barbara Brooks and Lindsay Bennett, took to the skies in specially equipped planes to study their origins.
The convective storm which caused flooding in Boscastle with 75mm of rain in two hours, is recognisable as bubbly cumulous cloud often seen in the UK. The research team from the
Today, September 29, 2004, is undisputedly the Day of Toutatis, the famous “doomsday” asteroid.
Not since the year 1353 did this impressive “space rock” pass so close by the Earth as it does today. Visible as a fast-moving faint point of light in the southern skies, it approaches the Earth to within 1,550,000 km, or just four times the distance of the Moon. Closely watched by astronomers since its discovery in January 1989, this asteroid has been found to move in an orbit that bring
The scientist who identified the target for several drugs used to treat sleeping sickness and Chagas’ disease has just discovered that antimonial drugs used to treat Leishmaniasis attack the same target.
And, he is “highly optimistic” that research on the parasite molecule “trypanothione”, and enzymes that use trypanothione, will lead to a drug that will cure all three tropical diseases.
Professor Alan Fairlamb at the University of Dundee has worked out how the sulphur
Feedback
