Study’s findings contradict long-held belief that penicillin is best for the job
Pediatricians treating a child who has strep throat should reconsider the role of penicillin given that a newer class of antibiotics called cephalosporins are three times more effective, according to a study being published in the April issue of Pediatrics. The findings will spark widespread debate, because they contradict long-established guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Heart
Infant feeding experiences help shape flavor preferences later in life
Ever wonder why your child loves to eat macaroni and cheese while her best friend likes nothing better than a steaming bowl of cauliflower curry? The answer may lie in part with what they were fed as young infants. Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia report that feeding experiences during the first seven months of life may contribute to food likes and dislikes.
“This research
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center have designed an online, Web-based system for ordering total parenteral nutrition (TPN) that identifies and pre-emptively eliminates potentially serious calculation errors.
The Children’s Center team describes its “TPN Calculator” in the April issue of Pediatrics.
“TPN Calculator” not only reduced TPN order errors in the Hopkins Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) by nearly 90 percent, but also proved to be faster and ea
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center report that 20 percent of children with asthma do not get enough exercise, even though physical activities such as running and swimming have been shown to decrease the severity of asthma symptoms.
The report, published in the April issue of Pediatrics, shows that this physical inactivity is partly due to parents’ misconceptions that exercise poses a risk to asthmatic children.
The findings are based on the results of a t
Climate change could dramatically increase the forest cover of the Earth’s mountains, ecologists are predicting. Using data from the Austrian Alps, ecologists have developed a model that predicts the area covered by the local pine, Pinus mugo Turra, will increase from 10% today to 60% by the turn of the next millennium. The findings are published in the current issue of of the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Ecology and, the authors believe, this is the first paper to model tree lin
A team of researchers from the University Hospital of Grenoble (CHU – Inserm U647) and the ESRF1 has found a new treatment that improves the survival of rats with high-grade gliomas.
This research was carried out at the ESRF Medical Beamline. It showed that after a year of this treatment, three rats out of 10 were considered cured, whereas without treatment, all would be dead. The results have just been published in the scientific journal Cancer Research. A glioma is one of the most frequen
Just when you thought it was safe to go to bed, the bed-bug is returning to UK cities
Many urban infesting organisms are in decline. Worryingly, the bed-bug is bucking this trend. One London borough has seen infestations increase nearly ten-fold in the last ten years.
Bed-bugs are not known to spread any diseases, but their bites are a severe nuisance. Would you like to share your home with this ancient bedfellow? And the current trend is especially worrying to hoteliers (n
We’ve all sat there in a dull moment at work stretching an elastic band between our fingers and watching it return to its original shape and size as we let it go. But how many of us would have thought of combining the elasticity of rubber with the optical properties of the liquid crystals commonly used in watches, laptops and calculators? On Monday 5th April at the Institute of Physics Condensed Matter and Materials Physics Conference in Warwick, Professor Mark Warner from the University of Camb
Being exposed to high levels of ’second-hand’ smoke can reduce the speed at which wounds heal, leading to a lack of healing or greater levels of scarring. A study published in the journal BMC Cell Biology this week may begin to explain why: when cells are exposed to smoke, their ability to migrate towards the site of damage is compromised. The study, carried out by researchers from University of California, Riverside, examined the effects of ’second-hand’ smoke on fibroblasts, cells that pl
The planet Mars possesses two small moons named Phobos (Fear) and Deimos (Terror). Although their existence has been known since their discovery in 1877 and a number of long-range observations have been made by Earth-based telescopes and spacecraft that have visited Mars, the satellites remain only partially studied, particularly Deimos.
Consequently, a number of outstanding scientific questions remain concerning their origins, evolution, physical nature and composition. A recent study fund
The first phase of a working unit that can remove greenhouse gases from ordinary air is to be completed by the end of this year, according to a report in Chemistry & Industry magazine. Marina Murphy describes the groundbreaking work being done by brothers Allen and Burton Wright (and Burton’s engineering firm, Kelly Wright & Assoc, Tucson, AZ) to create a wind scrubber – a 10 square metre structure that will capture excess carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere around it.
Scientists have s
How land-living animals evolved from fish has long been a scientific puzzle. A key missing piece has been knowledge of how the fins of fish transformed into the arms and legs of our ancestors. In this week’s issue of the journal Science, paleontologists Neil Shubin and Michael Coates from the University of Chicago and Ted Daeschler from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, describe a remarkable fossil that bridges the gap between fish and amphibian and provides a glimpse of the struc
Virginia Tech researchers are mixing air and soybean oil to create new polymers to replace petroleum-based materials.
“These natural polymers could be used in biocompatible or biodegradable ways,” says Tim Long of Blacksburg, chemistry professor in the College of Science at Virginia Tech. “We are looking for natural products derived in the United States.”
Ann R. Fornof of Toledo, Ohio, a graduate student in Virginia Tech’s Macromolecular and Science Engineering program, will
Today’s advanced materials have become extremely complex in chemistry, structure and function, which means scientists need faster, more efficient ways to model and test new designs.
J. Carson Meredith, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has pioneered combinatorial synthesis and high-throughput screening in polymer science – techniques that allow researchers to create and evaluate thousands of polymeric materials in a
A stable cluster of aluminum atoms, Al13, acts as a single entity in chemical reactions, demonstrating properties similar to those of a halogen, reports a research team led by A. Welford Castleman Jr., the Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry and Physics and the Eberly Family Distinguished Chair in Science at Penn State, in a paper to be published in the 2 April 2004 issue of the journal Science. Experimental results and theoretical calculations indicate that the cluster chemically resembles a “superhalo
Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have designed a potential roadmap to use a biosynthetic pathway taken from a common microorganism to produce compounds that could serve as precursors to explosives or components in everyday devices such as liquid crystal displays or anti-cancer agents.
In a presentation at the 227th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, Illinois doctoral student Wenjuan Zha reported how the fatty acid biosynthetic pathway of Brevibact
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