A seminar in this week’s issue of THE LANCET highlights the frequency, diagnosis and management of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, an unexplained thickening of the heart in young adults that has a 1% annual risk of sudden death.
Dr. Perry Elliott from University College, London, UK and Professor William McKenna from The Heart Hospital, London state that this genetically transmitted disease affects 1 in 500 adults and is the commonest cause of sudden death in otherwise fit young people and athle
A devastating meteorite collision caused part of the Earth’s crust to flip inside out billions of years ago and left a dusting of a rare metal scattered on the top of the crater, says new U of T research.
The study, published in the June 3 issue of Nature, examines the devastating effects of meteorite impacts on the Earth’s evolution. Researchers from the University of Toronto and the Geological Survey of Canada studied the remains of a 250-kilometre wide crater in Sudbury, Ontari
Few parent-adolescent discussions elicit as strong a reaction from both parties as the discussion about sexual activity. Yet research has shown this to be a critical discussion among parents and children. New research from the University of Missouri-Columbia suggests that when it comes to “the talk,” older siblings can play a vital role in helping adolescents make safer sexual choices.
Amanda Kolburn, assistant professor of human development and family studies at MU, examined the role that
An engineering team at the University of Dundee has just secured funding to work with European colleagues on the construction of artificial corneas which will allow all cornea replacements to go ahead without the patient having to wait for a donor.
The Euro 2.4m project will help people who suffer from a number of diseases requiring corneal grafting including keratoconus – a thinning of the cornea. Instead of relying on donor corneas from an eye bank, the new technology invented by biochemis
Seven years of waiting comes to an end on 1 July when the Cassini spacecraft swoops closer to Saturn than any spacecraft previously.
Researchers at Imperial College London will be anxiously awaiting the first signals that all has gone to plan during a 90-minute engine burning procedure known as Saturn Orbit Insertion, or SOI, and that their mission to definitively map the magnetic fields around Saturn has successfully begun.
Never has a spacecraft been put in orbit around Saturn and
ILOG’s Optimization Adds Customization Options And Improves Production Efficiency
ILOG® (NASDAQ: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364), a leading supplier of enterprise-class software components and services, today announced that ILOG’s optimization software has been deployed by the Volkswagen (VW) Group of Spain allowing them to offer customers more customized products and optimize production planning. These new car sequencing and production planning systems have been impleme
The large number of parties that must collaborate on construction projects presents difficulties in communicating building design information, but DIVERCITY’s design-simulation software utilising virtual reality technology promises significant cost reductions to Europe’s construction industry.
Construction has become an information-intensive industry, with the excessive number of documents during construction projects resulting in processing errors when data is not properly manage
Neurobiologists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered that altering electrical activity in nerve cells can change the chemical messengers the cells generate to communicate with other cells, a finding that may one day lead to new treatments for mood and learning disorders.
In a study published in the June 3rd issue of the journal Nature, a team led by UCSD professor of biology Nicholas Spitzer shows that manipulating the electrical activity of developing nerve cells can
Regulates neighboring gene simply by being switched on
In a region of DNA long considered a genetic wasteland, Harvard Medical School researchers have discovered a new class of gene. Most genes carry out their tasks by making a product-a protein or enzyme. This is true of those that provide the body’s raw materials, the structural genes, and those that control other genes’ activities, the regulatory genes. The new one, found in yeast, does not produce a protein. It performs
Scientists in the department of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale revealed the crystal structure of the first described enzymatic RNA – what it looks like and how it reacts – in the journal Nature.
Scott Strobel, professor and principal investigator of the study and his research team at Yale, used X-ray crystallography to image the self-splicing group-I intron and the associations it makes as it reacts. The image shows an interaction with metal ions and the alignment of the RNA m
Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder have solved a major galactic mystery that may help astronomers in their quest to develop a detailed picture of the chemical evolution of the Milky Way galaxy.
Speaking at the 204th meeting of the American Astronomical Society held May 30 – June 3 in Denver, the researchers reported that the abundance of deuterium, a heavy form of hydrogen, in the Milky Way galaxy today shows a consistent pattern that can be simply explained, lifting a vei
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom and Tohoku University in Japan, have discovered evidence supporting a possible mechanism for high-temperature superconductivity that had previously appeared incompatible with certain experimental observations. The finding, which hinges paradoxically on what the scientists observed in a particular material that loses its superconduc
Babies who arrive from eight to twelve weeks early and adults who suffer from Crohn’s disease are both at risk for developing short bowel syndrome, a condition that may tie them to an IV for feeding and greatly reduce the quality of their lives –medically, economically, and socially.
Now research in Kelly Tappenden’s laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offers hope to patients who have had parts of their small intestine surgically removed, making it diffic
Rob Vincent, an employee in the University of Rhode Island’s Physics Department, proves the adage that necessity is the mother of invention.
An amateur radio operator since he was 14, Vincent has always lived in houses situated on small lots. Because he couldn’t erect a large antenna on a confined property, he has been continually challenged over the years to find a way to get better reception.
“I was always tinkering in the basement. Thank goodness, my parents we
University of California, San Diego neurobiologists have uncovered evidence that sheds light on the long-standing mystery of how the brain makes sense of the information contained in electrical impulses sent to it by millions of neurons from the body.
In a paper published this week in the early on-line version of the journal Nature, a UCSD team led by Massimo Scanziani explains how neurons, or nerve cells, in the brain sort out information before deciding how to respond. The paper will appea
Sitting blindfolded with a device equipped with 144 pixels in his mouth, any journalist would wonder about his career choice. But after a few minutes of experimentation, you have to recognize that the system developed by neuropsychologist Maurice Ptito of Université de Montréal, together with colleagues in Denmark and the United States , to allow blind people to “see with their tongue” appears strangely effective. In just the first few minutes, the subject is able to build up a fairly clear picture o
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