A significant percentage of children recently diagnosed with autism receive complementary or alternative medicine treatments, some of which are potentially harmful, according to a research team from The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
The researchers reviewed charts for 284 patients evaluated at the Hospital’s Regional Autism Center for autistic spectrum disorder. They found that 90 children, or 32 percent of the total, were using complementary and alternative medicine, with
Scientists using CSIRO’s Australia Telescope Compact Array, a radio synthesis telescope in New South Wales, Australia, have seen a neutron star spitting out a jet of matter at very close to the speed of light. This is the first time such a fast jet has been seen from anything other than a black hole.
The discovery, reported in this week’s issue of ’Nature’, challenges the idea that only black holes can create the conditions needed to accelerate jets of particles to extreme speeds.
Smokers trying to kick the habit for 2004 are probably finding it much harder than they expected. New research by University of Sussex psychologists reveals that smokers subconsciously react to all sorts of visual cues that encourage them to light up.
It’s not just the obvious sight or smell of a cigarette that sparks off the behaviour. The researchers found that neutral images can also set off the craving.
“The implication of these findings is that cures for smoking should be focu
People who take the recreational drug ecstasy risk impairing their memory, according to an international study which surveyed users in places including the UK, other European countries, the USA and Australia.
The study, which also surveyed non-drug users, found that those who regularly took ecstasy suffered from mainly long-term memory difficulties, and that they were 23 per cent more likely to report problems with remembering things than non-users.
The British research team, led
A “robot scientist” that generates hypotheses about the function of particular genes in baker’s yeast – and then designs and carries out experiments to test them – has been developed by a team of British scientists, according to new research published in the journal Nature today [15 January 2004].
“This research is very exciting as we have given the robot – under our supervision – the ability to design the experiments and interpret the data for us,” says Professor Ross King from the Univers
A hot debate in the Earth Sciences is finally resolved in this week’s issue of Nature. Researchers from the Department of Earth Sciences at Bristol University show that large volcanoes do not contain material from the Earth’s core. This overturns previous theories that conflicted with models of how the Earth’s magnetic field is sustained.
The magnetic field results from the movement of liquid iron in the core and affects everything from bird migration to the navigation of aircraft, so it is
Evidence from fossilised embryos of worm-like creatures that lived 500 million years ago shows that embryos developed then in much the same way as their living relatives do today. The implications of this remarkable discovery, reported in this week’s issue of Nature, is that embryological processes that occur today must have been established very early on in the evolution of animals.
Because embryos are composed of tissues that decay away to nothing in an instant they are very rarely preserv
Civil engineer Heather MacLean examines environmental impact of automobiles from plant to scrapyard
Although she leads a national research team on automotive life-cycle assessments, studies the future of hybrid electric and hydrogen fuel cell cars and takes the subway to work, the car sitting in her driveway is a rusty 1987 BMW. And although she rarely drives it, her attachment to the vehicle speaks volumes about the challenges of shifting to newer, low-emission vehicles. “I like my
Month-long project leads to four-month investigation and revolutionary discovery
A U of T student had no idea his class project would end up unravelling the history of SARS. But when he was assigned an open-ended study, John Stavrinides jumped at the chance to tackle public enemy number one.
“I chose the SARS genome because it was obviously very important from a medical perspective,” said Stavrinides, a PhD candidate in comparative genomics.
Under the supervision of
A research team from the Department of Electric and Electronic Engineering at the Public University of Navarre has designed nanostructured optical sensors and instrumentation to monitor these sensors, for the United States’ company NanoSonic, which has begun to market the product.
The optic fibre sensors are human hair-sized devices. The Public University of Navarre has developed a humidity sensor and a light source for applications with optic fibre sensors. Moreover, the Navarre team has
An international team of scientists working in the UK, Australia, Italy and the USA has made an astronomical discovery that has major implications for testing Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Using the 64-m CSIRO Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia, the team recently detected the first system of two pulsars orbiting each other – the only system of its kind found so far among the 1400-plus pulsars discovered in the last 35 years.
Team member Dr. Richard
The oceans have their desert zones, in other words areas poor in nutrients and unfavourable for phytoplankton to develop. Half of the southern Pacific thus consists of great expanses of warm water with an average temperature of 28 °C (a greater surface area than Europe), which receives no input of deep-source cold water, rich in nutrient salts.
However, in 2000 analyses of satellite observations on the colour of the ocean conducted by American scientists revealed unusually high concentrati
2004 Earth Feature Story
Satellites and computers are getting so good, that now they can help study human activity on scales as local as ones own neighborhood, and may answer questions concerning how local conditions affect global processes, like water and energy cycles.
NASA’s Land Information System (LIS) uses computer models to predict impacts that cities and other local land surfaces might have on regional and global land and atmospheric processes. Dr. Christa Pete
A growing number of cancer patients are receiving aggressive treatments when they are near death, according to a study led by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The findings will be published in the Jan. 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
“Our research has shown that the treatment of cancer patients near death is becoming increasingly aggressive and that more patients are being admitted to emergency rooms and to intensive care units during their last few weeks of life,”
A University of Alberta researcher has developed the first model to predict risk of West Nile virus in North America–a tool that could help prevent the infectious disease from becoming an outbreak.
Dr. Marjorie Wonham and her research team from the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Alberta, created a simple mathematical model using the dead bird counts collected in New York in 2000. Her research is published in the current issue of the Royal Society of London’s jour
Sediment samples dating back thousands of years and taken from under the deep water of West Olaf Lake in Minnesota have revealed an unexpected climate indicator that can be factored into future projections.
In the Jan. 13 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report that native C4 plants did not fare well during prolonged periods of severe drought that occurred in the middle Holocene (4,000 to 8,000 years a
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