Bacteria responsible for a lethal form of food poisoning may escape the immune system by hiding out in the gall bladder of seemingly healthy people. The finding by researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine suggests that an unwitting food worker could transmit the bacteria to others by contaminating food products.
The bacteria, Listeria monocytogenes, can cause severe illness or death in people with weakened immune systems and may cause miscarriage in pregnant women. “Twenty to 40
Treating stroke is all a matter of timing: therapy delivered too late misses the critical window when neurons can still be saved. A report by Stanford University School of Medicine researchers shows that cooling the brain can lengthen the therapeutic window, giving doctors more time to protect brain cells.
The idea of cooling the brain isn’t new. Study leader Gary Steinberg, MD, PhD, the Lacroute-Hearst Professor of Neurosurgery and the Neurosciences, said he started cooling brains dur
Devoted to finding the most effective and safest blood-thinning recipe, Northwestern Memorial researchers present findings at National Stroke Conference
Aspirin dose and type may not matter when taken in combination with Plavix for the purpose of thinning blood and possibly reducing the risk of stroke in people with cerebrovascular disease, according to research presented today at the American Stroke Association’s 29th International Stroke Conference. The American Stroke Associat
MIT neuroscientists have discovered a new brain mechanism controlling the formation of lasting memories. This mechanism explains how signals between neurons stimulate production of the protein building blocks needed for long-term memory storage.
The study, which will appear in the Feb. 6 issue of the journal Cell, has broad implications for our understanding of how learning and memory normally occur, and how these abilities may be undermined in psychiatric and neurologic diseases.
L
A method for determining the function of large numbers of genes is being developed and piloted by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers at Harvard Medical School. In a trial of the technique, the researchers characterized the role in growth and viability of nearly all the genes in the genome of the fruit fly Drosophila.
Although the fruit fly genome was chosen for the first study, the researchers are confident that their technique can be applied to any organism, including humans
Different combinations of genetic mutations may give rise to diverse human traits, including complex diseases such as schizophrenia, say scientists at the University of Toronto and McGill University in Montreal.
Drs. Brenda Andrews and Charles Boone of U of T and Howard Bussey of McGill used simple yeast cells to demonstrate that there are many different combinations of genetic mutations that can lead to cell death or reduced cell fitness. The research team will now focus on mapping gene int
The transformation of terrestrial and coastal ecosystems by humans is well known, but only recently have the impacts of anthropogenic forces in the open ocean been recognized. In particular, intense exploitation by industrial fisheries is rapidly changing oceanic ecosystems by drastically reducing populations of many marine species. For most oceanic species we lack a historical perspective.
In an important article to shortly appear in Ecology Letters, Baum and Myers demonstrate that the ini
ESA PR 08-2004. With just 21 days to the launch of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta comet mission, the spacecraft’s lander has been named “Philae”. Rosetta embarks on a 10-year journey to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from Kourou, French Guiana, on 26 February.
Philae is the island in the river Nile on which an obelisk was found that had a bilingual inscription including the names of Cleopatra and Ptolemy in Egyptian hieroglyphs. This provided the French historian Jean-Franço
Scientific exploration to measure scat in the rainforest
Insect feces and leaf litter in the rainforest may provide important clues to better understanding global climate change, according to a group of scientists conducting research in the Panamanian rainforest on a JASON Project expedition.
Clues to determining how these factors contribute to global climate change lie in scientists investigating how plant and animal activity in the rainforest treetops, known as the canopy,
Research shows potential warming unmatched over past 48,000 years
The new century may bring hundreds or even thousands of plant and animal extinctions to the Andes Mountains of Peru according to new research by Florida Institute of Technology Paleo-Ecologist Mark Bush. Bush’s findings, chronicled in the Feb. 6 issue of the prestigious journal Science, result from the study of the first continuous record of Andean climate change during the past 48,000 years. The Andes region of Pe
University of Central Florida researchers are looking into how people form opinions about others through e-mail
Online romantics trying to win over valentines and businesspeople seeking to impress colleagues and clients may get some help from University of Central Florida research looking into how people form opinions about others through e-mail.
Professor Michael Rabby of UCF’s Nicholson School of Communication and graduate student Amanda Coho want to find out what mes
A recent theory proposing that unsafe injections are a major cause of HIV-1 infection in sub-Saharan Africa is rejected by authors of an article in this week’s issue of THE LANCET.
During the past year, a group (D Gisselquist and colleagues) has argued that unsafe injections are a major mode of HIV-1 transmission in sub-Saharan Africa, with up to 40% of HIV-1 infections being attributed to unsafe injections. In this week’s issue of THE LANCET, an international group of experts* has identifie
Two studies in this week’s issue of THE LANCET highlight the public-health implications of blood transfusion as a possible route for infection by the prion protein responsible for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).
The death from vCJD of an individual in the UK who had previously received a blood transfusion from a donor who went on to have vCJD was announced on December 17, 2003. Robert Will from the National CJD Surveillance Unit, Edinburgh, UK and colleagues outline the process wh
Cutting high-thickness metal sheets is a basic manufacturing process common to a wide range of industrial sectors, from heavy carpentry to ship-building. Laser-cutting technology ought, in theory, to have significant advantages over traditional cutting processes, among them high cutting speed, no tool wear and a reduction in the transfer of energy to the piece of metal being cut. Yet despite the fact that commercial laser-cutting systems have been on the market for a decade, their use has not become
Dutch researcher Michiel Blauw has described the physical limitations of the plasma-etching of deep, narrow microstructures in silicon. His results have led to such an improvement in the etching process that trenches with a depth more than 30 times their width can now be made. This is important for the production of sensitive sensors.
Blauw investigated fluorine-based plasma etching processes. A plasma with a high ion-density ’burns’ a small hole in silicon. Many applications requi
Dutch researcher Arjan Lock has investigated the behaviour of vibrating water molecules. Using ultra-short laser pulses, he found that hydrogen atoms in water molecules vibrate for longer at higher temperatures. This is abnormal because in the majority of substances a vibration lives shorter at higher temperatures.
Lock studied the OH-stretch vibration in water. He found that the lifetime of the OH-stretch vibration, a vibration of a hydrogen atom with respect to the oxygen atom, is extremel
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