Despite a backdrop of declining rates, a new study concludes cervical cancer continues to be a more serious threat to women with low incomes and educational levels.
The study, published July 26, 2004 in the online edition of CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, finds incidence and death rates for cervical cancer increased with increasing poverty and decreasing education levels.
While previous studies have linked socioeconomic status (SES) to the progno
The gene therapy was able to perform in all muscles in the mouse, and would not necessarily have to carry the dystrophy gene
Researchers have found a delivery method for gene therapy that reaches all the voluntary muscles of a mouse – including heart, diaphragm and limbs – and reverses the process of muscle-wasting found in muscular dystrophy.
“We have a clear ’proof of principle’ that it is possible to deliver new genes body-wide to all the striated muscles of an
At his presentation at the annual meeting of the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) here July 24, 2004, Arizona State University Professor Charles J. Arntzen explained the newest advances in his research on plant-producing vaccines.
The development and introduction of new vaccines to improve global public health faces many challenges, Arntzen noted. The vaccines must address the need for lower costs, oral-administration (needle-free), heat stability, and they must include c
US National Academy of Sciences member and Stanford Professor Winslow R. Briggs will speak at the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) annual meeting July 24, 2004 in Orlando, Florida about findings in his studies of how plants sense the direction of light.
Most casual observers have likely noticed that seedlings on a windowsill will grow toward the light. This phenomenon, known as phototropism, is a manifestation of a sensitive system plants have for detecting light. This light sens
New research may lead to better catalysts for hydrogen fuel cells
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and the New Jersey Institute of Technology have taken steps toward understanding how a titanium compound reacts with a hydrogen-storage material to catalyze the release and re-absorption of hydrogen. Their results, appearing in the July 19, 2004, issue of Applied Physics Letters, may help scientists learn how similar catalysts work, improve
The incidence of first stroke in children with sickle cell disease in California has taken a nose-dive since 1998 and the likely reason is a program developed at the Medical College of Georgia to identify and treat kids at risk, a new study says.
The study by the University of California, San Francisco published in the current issue of Blood, looked at nearly two-thirds of the state’s children at high risk for stroke. Researchers found better than an 80 percent reduction in first s
Johns Hopkins researchers report that once a growing nerve “tastes” a certain protein, it loses its “appetite” for other proteins and follows the tasty crumbs to reach its final destination. The finding in mice, reported in the July 23 issue of Cell, appears to help explain how nerves connect to their targets and stop growing once there, a process important for the normal development of mouse and man.
During prenatal development, a nerve connects to its proper targets in part by obeying pr
A light-sensitive probe is being developed to help doctors spot breast cancer in some of the 70,000 American women each year whose malignancies fail to show up in needle biopsies.
The technology also holds the potential of minimizing the trauma associated with the procedure, in which a hollow needle the width of a pencil is used to collect small tissue samples for testing.
Doctors now rely on X-rays or ultrasound images to guide the needle to the area in question. They may
Research led by Anna Marie Pyle, professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University reveals how a protein from Hepatitis C (HCV) unwinds RNA, potentially allowing it to be copied.
The work published in the journal Nature focuses on an enzyme, helicase NS3, that unwinds the RNA virus for replication inside cells. NS3 is one member of an extensive family of helicases and is used as a model for studying unwinding activities of motor proteins.
Their finding
Researchers have found a family of molecules that play a key role in the formation of synapses, the junctions that link brain cells, called neurons, to each other. The molecules initiate the development of these connections, forming the circuitry of the mammalian nervous system.
Scientists from Harvard University and Washington University in St. Louis describe the findings in the July 23 issue of the journal Cell.
“This is very basic work, far from any clinical applications at
Grace and George, a pair of socially skilled robots developed by a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the Naval Research Laboratory and Swarthmore College, will participate in the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) annual Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition July 27-29, at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, Calif.
Grace and George are six-foot-tall, socially adept, autonomous talking robots with digitally animated faces. The robots will wor
Fish and mammal teeth are not created equal. Sometime after the move from spineless to having a backbone, the family of genes that controls tissue mineralization evolved to produce mammalian tooth enamel, bones and dentine, but fish enameloid developed from different genes, according to Penn State researchers.
“We also suggest that mammalian enamel is distinct from fish enameloid,” the researchers reported in this week’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sc
Invitation to a press conference for the start of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program’s Arctic Coring Expedition, ACEX, on board the icebreaker Oden in the port of Tromsø, Norway on Friday 6 August 2004 at 11.00
Three icebreakers will carry a team of international scientists to the Arctic Ocean next month (8 August), to study its geological history. The Arctic Coring Expedition, ACEX, aims to reach several hundreds of metres into the sediments of the Lomonosov Ridge, an unde
Obscure mathematical ideas developed back in the 1980s could solve current problems of mixing fluids at the microscale, and revolutionise the technology, reports an article in Science.
The need to mix fluids at the microscale affects a whole range of developing technologies – from inkjet printers to DNA analysis – and finding ways to do it is becoming big business. Millions of dollars have already been poured into ‘lab-on-a-chip’ projects, but making miniature labs is not just a question o
A conference at the University of Sheffield is set to celebrate ten years since the first Web search engines, and will reveal some of the capabilities of search engines of the future, and the way that our use of computers will lead them to new ways of archiving and retrieving information. Presentations at the conference will include ways that we can store and search through every personal document we have ever received, and another paper will use George Washington’s letters to demonstrate a new sear
For many years, engineers have worked to efficiently filter valuable bio-process products on an industrial economic scale. The challenge has been to push rates up without incurring high shear rates and resultant cell lysis, which would cause loss of yield. High shear can destroy delicate and valuable biological materials such as proteins, blood, algae and yeasts, and also brings with it a requirement for higher flow rates, which in turn raises pumping costs.
Inventors at the University of Ox
Feedback
