Cooking with gas seems to increase the risk of respiratory illness, indicates research in Archives of Disease in Childhood.
Parents of 426 children living in two housing estates in Hong Kong were surveyed about their children’s health. One of the estates was located in an area of high environmental pollution.
None of the children, whose ages ranged from a few months up to 6 years old, had yet started school, so were likely to spend a good deal of time indoors.
Their pa
Climate may influence prevailing rates of asthma and eczema indicates an international study of almost 670,000 children in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
Marked seasonal variations in temperature, altitude, outdoor humidity and latitude all affected rates of asthma and eczema.
The conclusions are based on data collected between 1992 and 1996 from children 6 to 7 and 12 to 13 years old from over 50 countries taking part the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Ch
Scientists have induced a movement disorder in rats that closely resembles Parkinson’s disease in humans. The study, published June 21, 2004, in the online edition of the Annals of Neurology, suggests that natural toxins found in the environment could contribute to the development of this debilitating movement disorder.
The compounds, called proteasome inhibitors, can be produced by bacteria and fungi. Man-made proteasome inhibitors may also find their way into the environment.
“Th
SARS, the highly infectious respiratory virus, has been found in tears, reveals a small study in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.
The finding suggests that tear analysis could not only be an effective means of diagnosing the infection, but also an unrecognised source of its spread, if appropriate preventive measures are not taken, say the authors.
Tear samples were swabbed from the tear ducts of 36 patients in Singapore with suspected SARS over 12 days in April 2003. Mo
The University of Colorado at Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics has been selected by NASA to build two of the three instruments for a satellite that will launch in 2006 to study noctilucent clouds, the shiny, silvery-blue polar mesospheric clouds that form about 50 miles over Earth’s polar regions each summer.
The Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere mission, or AIM, will receive $100 million in NASA funding for development and flight of the satellite. CU’s LASP will recei
American students are happy to find jobs during the summer to help pay for their schooling. Others are more fortunate to be part of intern programs that prepare them for their eventual professional lives. For some others, however, the summer prospects are even more rewarding. How about an opportunity to construct carbon nanotubes in a Sydney, Australia laboratory? What about the chance to study with a molecular virologist in Taipei to search for a potential HIV cure? Or maybe do research based on a f
In a study published in Geophysical Research Letters (Vol. 31, No.18), University of South Florida College of Marine Science professor Boris Galperin and colleagues explain a link between the movement and appearance of ocean currents on Earth and the bands that characterize the surface of Jupiter and some other giant planets.
“The banded structure of Jupiter has long been a subject of fascination and intensive research,” says Galperin, a physical oceanographer who analyzes turbulence theo
New research by scientists by the University of Warwick may explain why methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections are so difficult to control in hospitals. MRSA is a major cause of invasive and sometimes deadly disease in hospitalised patients. Currently, attempts to prevent spread of these infections include isolating infected patients and increasing staff hygiene measures such as handwashing. However, these attempts have met with limited success.
A new mathematical mo
Researchers have new insights into a mysterious type of amnesia, according to a study published in the June 22 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study showed lesions didn’t appear immediately in the patients’ brains, but developed one to two days after an episode of transient global amnesia.
Using diffusion weighted imaging, a type of MRI, a team in Germany examined 31 patients within hours of the onset of amnesia. In a new approach, the pat
Scientists have discovered a striking similarity between certain ocean currents on Earth and the bands that characterize the surface of large, gaseous planets like Jupiter. Boris Galperin of the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science in Saint Petersburg and colleagues in the United States, Israel, and Japan report their findings later this month in Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union. “The banded structure of Jupiter has long been a
IPv6 will play a key role in the next generation Internet. It promises to deliver better quality services than the existing Internet, but how can we be sure? IST project 6QM was set up to ensure service providers deliver what they promise.
The 6QM project has developed technology to measure the quality of service (QoS) in IPv6 networks. “A prominent feature that we are concentrating on in our measurement system is the capability to perform passive flow measurement,” says Rudolf Roth, proje
In an article posted June 10 to the Astrophysical Journal Letters website, astrophysicists at Stanford report spotting a black hole so massive that it’s more than 10 billion times the mass of our sun. More important, this heavyweight is so far away that the scientists think it formed when the universe first began to light up with stars and galaxies, so it may provide a window into our cosmological origins.
’’In cosmology, it turns out that ’a galaxy a long time ago’ and ’far, far away’ re
CIDETEC have been working with EGOKI HANDLES on developing new anti-adhesive finishes for metal parts for a number of different applications.
The aim of the project has been to achieve product enhancement, specifically to add a transparent and anti-adhesive protective coating to the TIRADORES EGOKI (EGOKI HANDLES) company range of decorative finishes for their metal.
From a technical perspective, two alternatives were initially put forward for obtaining organic protective coatings for
Advances in the study of the salmonella bacteria, being undertaken at the Pamplona Institute of Agrobiotechnology and Natural Resources and led by professor Iñigo Lasa Uzcudun of the Public University of Navarre, have been recognised in the principal international magazine in the field of Microbiology, Molecular Microbiology, at a congress held recently in the German city of Heidelberg.
The Navarre researchers are analysing the role that a new family of Salmonella typhimurium proteins pl
Early and accurate detection of oncological disease is critical to the treatment and, ultimately, survival of patients suffering from cancer. In an effort to determine the accuracy of an integrated PET/CT scanner with more traditional diagnostic imaging methods for whole-body, malignant tumors, researchers in Essen, Germany, compared the imaging results of the integrated FDG-PET/CT with CT images alone, PET images alone, and CT and PET images viewed side-by-side.
The scientists theorized
“AIDS is now the leading cause of death in military and police forces in some African countries, accounting for more than half of in-service mortality,” write Ugboga Nwokoji and Ademola Ajuwon in the Open Access journal BMC Public Health today. They believe that secrecy about AIDS-related deaths, and multiple sex partnering in the Nigerian navy could be helping to fuel the HIV epidemic in Nigeria, Africa’s most populated country.
Their survey of 480 Nigerian naval personnel revealed that
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