Microbes researchers highlight drawbacks of antibiotics
Bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics can live in the human intestines for at least one year. Professor Charlotta Edlund from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, and Research Professor Pentti Huovinen from the National Public Health Institute in Turku, Finland, are keen to highlight the risks involved in the excessive use of antibiotics.
In their research funded by the Academy of Finland, the two profess
A contract for the construction and supply of cutting edge neutron scanning technology was today signed by the CEOs of Customs and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
Customs and the CSIRO have been working together to develop the scanner that has the ability to detect explosives, drugs and other prohibited imports in air cargo more effectively than existing x-ray systems.
Customs CEO, Lionel Woodward said: “This technology is one of the measure
Advances in an area widely regarded in scientific circles as the ’next big thing’ – RNA interference (RNAi) – will be the major focus of a CSIRO-hosted conference on the Gold Coast in September.
The chairman of the ’Horizons in Livestock Sciences’ conference, CSIRO’s Dr Tim Doran, says RNAi research has major implications for plant, animal and human health.
“Since RNAi was first described in the 1990s, the technology has been rapidly adopted in laboratories
The first computing resources of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) TeraGrid became fully available for scientific use in January, and some of the first applications will be tracking the formation of galaxies in the early universe and finding the most efficient and least expensive ways to clean up groundwater pollution.
Other early TeraGrid (www.teragrid.org) users will study seismic events and analyze biomolecular dynamics on the Linux clusters at the National Center for Supercomp
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have come up with computational tools that serve as a virtual screening lab to help chemists weed through millions of possible drug candidates even before they dirty their first test tube.
Chemist Curt Breneman, mathematician Kristin Bennett, and computer scientist Mark Embrechts developed faster and more accurate techniques for describing molecules and combined them with next-generation neural networks and learning methods as part of the
Scientists report that they have identified a cellular mechanism that prevents the immune system from destroying chronic, incurable viral infections such as herpes, hepatitis and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The research, published in the March issue of Immunity, explains why critical immune cells fail to act against the viral infection and demonstrates a successful intervention that facilitates elimination of the virus. The results open up exciting new avenues for design of future antiviral t
A needle-free, self-contained fentanyl patient-controlled transdermal system (PCTS) is as effective for post-surgical pain management as the traditional intravenous pump (IV), while giving patients more mobility and freeing nurses to devote more time to patient care. The study led by researchers from Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, appears in the March 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
The multi-center study conducte
An international team of geoscientists believes that carbon dioxide, and not changes in cosmic ray intensity, was the factor controlling ancient global temperatures. The new findings resulted from the researchers inclusion of the ocean’s changing acidity in their calculations.
“Reviewing the geologic records of carbon dioxide and glaciations, we found that carbon dioxide was low during periods of long-lived and widespread continental glaciations and high during other, warmer periods,” s
Flame retardants have been showing up in some surprising places, from human breast milk to peregrine falcon eggs. Now this growing list can be expanded to include dietary supplements based on cod liver oil, according to a new study.
European scientists have found that flame retardant levels have increased significantly during the past four years in products containing cod liver oil, a common component of dietary supplements. The report appears in the April 7 edition of the Journal of Agricu
In the March issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Max Moritz (University of California, Berkeley), Jon Keeley (US Geological Survey and University of California, Los Angeles), Edward Johnson (University of Calgary) and Andrew Schaffner (Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo) present research that challenges some of the assumptions for managing fire-prone regions. With “Testing a basic assumption of shrubland fire management: how important is fuel age?,” the authors suggest natural
A chemical once used in pesticides in Asia has accumulated thousands of miles away in Canada, according to a University of Toronto study.
High concentrations of alpha-hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH) were detected in the atmosphere of Sable Island off the coast of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, says Professor Frank Wania of chemistry. The chemical was last used about 15 years ago in countries such as China and India but followed atmospheric and water flows across the Pacific, Arctic and Atl
The presence of two mutated genes in bladder cancer tumors indicates there is a high risk that the cancer will continue grow and spread, said a Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) researcher in a report released today in the March 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
One of the mutated proteins – p53 – is a tumor suppressor that in its normal form prevents cell changes that can lead to cancer. When p53 binds to DNA is stimulates another gene to produce p21. Then p21 interacts with a pr
Ontario diabetics live 12 to 13 years less than people without the disease, says a new study – a finding which is one of the factors prompting the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care to investigate additional strategies for diabetes management and prevention.
The study, which appeared in the February issue of Diabetes Care, is the first to assess the impact of the disease on life expectancy in the province. Life expectancy for male diabetics in Ontario is 64.7 years (77.5 in general male p
New findings in animals suggest a potential treatment to minimize disability after spinal cord and other nervous system injuries, say neuroscientists from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center.
“Our approach is based on a natural mechanism cells have for protecting themselves, called the stress protein response,” said Michael Tytell, Ph.D., a neuroscientist and the study’s lead researcher. “We believe it has potential for preventing some of the disability that occurs as a resul
Information about the genetic make-up of tumors should, in the long term, help clinicians decide on the most effective course of treatment for patients with cancer. To be most helpful these molecular data must be incorporated into a tumor classification that includes morphological and clinical information. Jules Berman describes his ideas for a new comprehensive tumor classification in BMC Cancer this week.
Berman, the Program Director for Pathology Informatics within the National Cancer
On Friday, 12 March 2004, the Sun ejected a spectacular ’eruptive prominence’ into the heliosphere. SOHO, the ESA/NASA solar watchdog observatory, faithfully recorded the event.
This ’eruptive prominence’ is a mass of relatively cool plasma, or ionised gas. We say ’relatively’ cool, because the plasma observed by the Extreme-ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) on board SOHO was only about 80 000 degrees Celsius, compared to the plasma at one or two milli
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