Police aim to ‘design out’ crime by equipping valuable items with tracking devices that sound an alert or record their movement. They are being helped by electronic engineers at the University of Leeds who are devising a way of locating objects using widely-available technology.
Using Bluetooth – a short-range communications technology incorporated into many mobile phones and computers – researchers are creating networks which locate devices in relation to each other and track them using mon
Female fruit flies sleep around. Nobody knows exactly why, but Nina Wedell of Leeds University’s school of biology aims to find out.
Conventional wisdom on animal mating strategies said that females sought male partners with healthy genes to pass on to offspring, but this theory is now discredited, as it does not explain all variations of behaviour.
Instead it has been found that females often mate with numerous partners and screen sperm so that only the most healthy is used. What
University of Iowa researchers have shown for the first time that gene therapy delivered to the brains of living mice can prevent the physical symptoms and neurological damage caused by an inherited neurodegenerative disease that is similar to Huntington’s disease (HD).
If the therapeutic approach can be extended to humans, it may provide a treatment for a group of incurable, progressive neurological diseases called polyglutamine-repeat diseases, which include HD and several spinocereb
Scientists have determined a three-dimensional (3-D) molecular image of how anthrax toxin enters human cells, giving scientists more potential targets for blocking the toxin, the lethal part of anthrax bacteria. The finding also points to a possible way to design anthrax toxin molecules that selectively attack tumor cells, as described in the journal Nature published online July 4. The study, funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Healt
Most visitors to the seaside are content to ride donkeys, eat ice cream, and build sandcastles. But, University of Leeds scientists have no time for sunbathing; they are witnessing the birth of a new species on the rocky shores of North Yorkshire.
Littorina saxatilis (right) is an unremarkable rough periwinkle – a small, grey-brown sea-snail which litters the coast by the million. But it has overcome its lack of charisma and grabbed the attention of scientists trying to unlock the secrets
A new protocol for bone marrow transplants, which does not require the destruction of the recipient’s immune system before transfer of the new bone marrow, is described by a group of Oxford scientists in the 6th of July issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Furthermore, Luis Graça, Alain Le Moine, Herman Waldmann and colleagues from the University of Oxford, UK also found that following bone marrow transplant it is possible to succes
Researchers in the University of Warwick’s Department of Physics have developed a novel non-contact method of using ultrasound to detect and measure cracks and flaws in rail track – particularly gauge corner cracking – that has the potential to simply be attached to a normal passenger or freight train travelling at high speeds.
Current ultrasonic techniques for detecting defects only work at much slower speeds (around 20-30 miles an hour). A handful of special trains have been created usin
The health of people in Britain is being put at risk by official policy that discourages sunbathing and promotes use of sunblock products. The cost of disease caused by insufficient exposure to sunlight and consequent deficiency of vitamin D is estimated to be billions of pounds per year in Britain.
Government advice to “cover up, keep in the shade…and use factor 15 plus sunscreen”* is based on outdated information, mistaken interpretation of evidence and guesswork. It ignores evidence sho
WHO’s objective is to enable 3 million people living with HIV to have access to antiretroviral treatments by 2005. The development of simple and inexpensive generic fixed-dose combined therapies appears the most suitable solution for making possible this access to treatments in developing countries with meagre resources.
The tritherapies that associate two different classes of antiretrovirals (two inverse transcriptase nucleoside inhibitors and a non-nucleosidic inhibitor of this same viral
Severe sepsis, is a costly complication in hospitalized cancer patients causing around one in ten cancer deaths each year in the USA, according to an article published today in Critical Care. The excessive response to infection in patients with severe sepsis injures critical organs such as the lungs and kidneys.
Dr Mark Williams and his colleagues from Eli Lilly & Co. in Indianapolis, and Health Process Management, LLC, Pennsylvania used data from six US states to analyze all the hospitaliza
Toni Schmader, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has won a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to explore how awareness of negative stereotypes impacts the cognitive functions of women and Latinos.
At issue is whether exposure to a negative stereotype can affect cognitive function. Social psychologists have recently discovered that women and racial or ethnic minorities often perform more poorly on academic tests when exposed to nega
Of course, not the crab itself, but its hepatopancreas, which is a gland performing functions of both liver and pancreas. And not an entire hepatopancreas, but only some of its enzymes isolated by the Moscow scientists supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) and Foundation for Assistance to Small Innovative Enterprises (FASIE).
Doctor of chemical sciences Galina Rudenskaya from the Moscow State University and her colleagues from small enterprise TRINITA have made an im
Consumers must be afforded better protection against interventions falsely claiming to reverse or retard the aging process, according to an article published by legal and medical professionals in the June issue of The Gerontologist (Vol. 44, No. 3).
The team of researchers, based at Case Western Reserve University, urge professional organizations to undertake a sustained program of specific educational efforts to designed to sort out the “helpful, the harmful, the fraudulent, and the harmle
People who have early stage Alzheimer’s disease (AD) could be more capable of learning than previously thought, according to two new studies supported by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a part of the National Institutes of Health. The promising studies suggest that some people with early cognitive impairment can still be taught to recall important information and to better perform daily tasks.
In a July 2004 report, researchers in Miami, FL, found mildly impaired AD patients who pa
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures the iridescent tapestry of star birth in a neighbouring galaxy in this panoramic view of glowing gas, dark dust clouds, and young, hot stars. The star-forming region, catalogued as N11B lies in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), located only 160,000 light-years from Earth. With its high resolution, the Hubble Space Telescope is able to view details of star formation in the LMC as easily as ground-based telescopes are able to observe stellar formation withi
How best to detect and manage bowel cancer is the subject of the latest issue of effective health care.
Colorectal (bowel) cancer is the second most common cause of cancer death in England and Wales. Early detection and good management result in improved survival rates.
Improvements have been made in the provision of services and treatment of colorectal cancers, but wide variations still exist across the country. There are still patients who fit the NHS ‘two-week wait’ criteria who
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