Researchers led by Jason Jaworski, PhD, and Michael Kuhar, PhD, both at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University, have shown that CART peptide, a chemical that occurs naturally in both the rodent and human brain, reduces some effects of cocaine when additional amounts are administered to the region of the brain that is associated with reward and addiction. These findings, which appear online in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and which will be presente
American Heart Association meeting report
About one in eight schoolchildren have three or more risk factors of the metabolic syndrome, a precursor of cardiovascular disease, researchers reported today at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2003.
“The risk was about 1.6 times higher for girls than boys,” said the study’s lead author Joanne S. Harrell, Ph.D., professor of nursing and director of the Center for Research on Chronic Illness at the Univer
Alistair Lees spends much of his research time hoping to see the light.
Using tools that improve by several orders of magnitude on the accuracy of microscopes and stopwatches, Lees is working at the molecular level to explore the effect of light on chemical systems. The field is called photochemistry and Lees’ efforts could help to find less-expensive ways to produce gasoline, make the environment cleaner and safer, and enhance the quality of microcircuitry and the equipment that re
Air safety will be boosted and the world aviation industry is set to save millions of dollars with the development by Australian company Tenix and CSIRO of an airborne volcanic gas and ash detector.
Costs in excess of $250 million have been borne by airlines worldwide as a result of undetected volcanic ash in flightpaths. Silicate particles in the ash can enter the engines and melt, leading to serious engine damage.
Volcanic ash also causes windscreen scouring, instrument damage a
Say researchers from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center
If you’re helpless without your glasses, try using your ears.
For some tasks, hearing can augment poor eyesight, according to research reported by Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center today at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans.
“It has been long known that blind people often develop more acute hearing,” said Mark Wallace, Ph.D., senior researcher. “What w
Other genes, environmental factors also likely to contribute to prevalent skin disorder
After a decade of searching, researchers have identified three genes linked to psoriasis, a potentially debilitating and disfiguring skin condition characterized by burning or itching patches of raised red skin.
The project’s leader, Anne Bowcock, Ph.D., professor of genetics, of medicine and of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, says the results cou
New data presented by Emory researchers at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions abstract poster sessions today address angina related quality of life in diabetic and non-diabetic patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), medical procedures performed in catheterization laboratories to reduce the amount of narrowing in a coronary artery due to plaque formation.
According to Emory Heart Center cardiologist William Weintraub, M.D. FACC, who headed the re
As mountains of scrap tires continue to rise above the landscape, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found an environmentally friendly use for them: grind them up and place the rubber bits beneath golf course greens.
In a paper accepted for publication in the journal Waste Management, the researchers show that these ground tires can absorb excess chemicals from fertilizers and pesticides, preventing them from leaching into groundwater and contaminating the surrounding enviro
The latest expeditions to ice caps in the high, tropical Peruvian Andes Mountains by Ohio State University scientists may shed light on a mysterious global climate change they believe occurred more than 5,000 years ago.
They hope that ice cores retrieved from two tropical ice caps there, as well as ancient plants retrieved from beneath the retreating glaciers, may contain clues that could link ancient events that changed daily life in South America, Europe and Asia.
Something happ
Researchers funded by the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) have found mixed evidence about the value of cannabis-derived treatments for people with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) but conclude that such treatments may be of benefit for some patients.
The researchers found little objective evidence that cannabis benefits people with MS but, subjectively, a majority of patients felt cannabis improved some of their symptoms.
The results of the world’s largest study to assess the medicinal
An innovative vaccine against tuberculosis has shown promise in persons with HIV, researchers from Dartmouth Medical School and the National Public Health Institute of Finland report in the Nov. 7 issue of the journal AIDS.
An international team led by DMS infectious disease expert Dr. C. Fordham von Reyn, professor of medicine, found that the new booster, a killed vaccine, enhanced the TB immunity of HIV patients. Their weakened immune systems make the current TB vaccine, which is a live vacci
Researchers at Brown University and the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass., have found a physical connection between the herpes simplex virus and amyloid precursor protein, a protein that breaks down to form a major component of the amyloid plaques that are consistently present in the brains of persons with Alzheimer’s disease.
Amyloid precursor protein – or APP – breaks down to form beta-amyloid. There is strong evidence, according to the researchers, that beta-amyloid
Almost all of the active volcanoes on Earth lie beneath miles of seawater at mid-ocean ridges, creating the long chain of volcanic mountains that encircles the Earth like the seam of a baseball. Scientists have long been puzzled by the observation that flows, erupted as white-hot lava at mid-ocean ridges, can be traced for several miles from their vents despite the fact that they erupt into seawater close to its freezing point. Now a group of scientists from academia and government believe they have
While the medical community has been exploring the use of bacteriophages, a form of virus that can be used to manage bacteria that have become resistant to antibiotics, plant pathologists with the American Phytopathological Society (APS) now say that this same approach may also help fight plant disease.
According to Jason Gill, a phage researcher at the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, phages have been proposed as plant-pathogen control agents in a process known as phage therapy–the
Detection of toxic ’atheronal’ molecules may lead to new diagnostics
A team of investigators led by The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) President Richard A. Lerner, M.D., and TSRI Associate Professor Paul Wentworth, Jr., Ph.D., are reporting evidence for the production of ozone in fatty atherosclerotic plaques taken from diseased arteries.
Lerner is Lita Annenberg Hazen Professor of Immunochemistry and holds the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Chair in Chemistry at TSRI. He is a
The behavior of intermetallic superconductors, like the kind used in hospital MRI machines, is even more curious than recent Nobel Prize-winning physicist Alexei Abrikosov had theorized. In newly reported research,* scientists working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Center for Neutron Research have determined that so-called type II superconductors have the equivalent of a multiple personality—at least three distinct physical states, each with its own superconducting beh
Feedback
