Scientists explore how we could interact with computers
Imagine ordering your meal in a restaurant by a simple tap on the table, transmitting your choice direct to the kitchens. Or placing an order for goods by making your selection on the surface of the shop window.
It may sound like science fiction, but this could be the way we interact with computers in the future, thanks to a pan-European research project, led by experts at Cardiff University, Wales, UK.
“The v
The researcher who discovered the active form of Vitamin D, Dr. Michael F. Holick, a Professor of Medicine, Dermatology, Physiology and Biophysics at the Boston University School of Medicine, told the National Institutes of Health’s symposium on “Vitamin D and Health in the 21st Century” that the nation faces “severe Vitamin D deficiency” which, if not properly addressed, will have profound far reaching health consequences such as hundreds of thousands of new cases of breast cancer, colon cancer
A new UK project could help detect evidence for life on Mars, as well as improve our understanding of how it evolved on Earth.
The aim is to develop a technique that can identify biomolecules in water that have been trapped in rocks for millions to billions of years.
As well as analysing samples from Earth, the proposed technique could be used to obtain important information from water sealed within rock samples brought back from Mars, for example. The team will also consider how
ESA is now planning a mission that can detect moons around planets outside our Solar System, those orbiting other stars!
Everyone knows our Moon: lovers stare at it, wolves howl at it, and ESA recently sent SMART-1 to study it. But there are over a hundred other moons in our Solar System, each a world in its own right.
A moon is a natural body that travels around a planet. Moons are a by-product of planetary formation and can range in size from small asteroid-sized bodies of a f
The Owasys company in Zamudio has chosen Babel technology, world leader and pioneer in speech technologies, for its new Owasys22C mobile telephone. This mobile phone has been designed and developed by Owasys specifically for those persons who are blind or visually impaired. Initially the Owasys22C will have the Spanish and English version of Babel so that other languages can be added afterwards.
The launching of the Owasys22C on to the market will enable the visually impaired and the blind t
Scientists at the University of Chicago have demonstrated that sleeping has an important and previously unrecognized impact on improving people’s ability to learn language.
Researchers find that ability of students to retain knowledge about words is improved by sleep, even when the students seemed to forget some of what they learned during the day before the next night’s sleep. This paper, “Consolidation During Sleep of Perceptual Learning of Spoken Language,” is being published i
A new study in the Oct. 9 issue of the journal Nature describes three distinct stages in the life of a memory, and helps explain how memories endure – or are forgotten – including the role that sleep plays in safeguarding memories.
“To initiate a memory is almost like creating a word processing file on a computer,” explains the study’s first author, Matthew Walker, Ph.D., instructor of psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. “Once the file has bee
Different parts of brain are activated
In the first study ever to examine how the brain functions when making judgments about forgivability and empathy, researcher Tom Farrow, B.Sc. (Hons.), Ph.D., found that different regions of the brain are activated when a person makes judgments about forgiving.
The findings will be presented at the Scientific Conference on Forgiveness along with studies from over 40 of the top scientists in the world who study forgiveness. The conferen
Researchers at Purdue University are making it easier to read life’s genetic blueprint.
They have precisely placed strands of DNA on a silicon chip and then stretched out the strands so that their encoded information might be read more clearly, two steps critical to possibly using DNA for future electronic devices and computers.
Findings about the research are detailed in a paper posted online this month and will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Advanced Materials.
New evidence gathered in a study funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences suggests that asthmatic children who use maintenance medication are particularly vulnerable to the effects of ground-level ozone, even at levels well below the federal standard set by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Their research results were published Oct. 8 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study was conducted at the Yale University School of Medicine. NIEHS is on
Physicists are getting more involved in the fight against diseases by studying the folding of proteins, which they hope will eventually lead to the development of new drugs. Illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease and even some cancers are the result of protein folding that has gone awry. Since proteins in the body perform different functions according to their shape, the folding process is considered a very important area of study.
Everett Lipman, a new assistant professor of physics at
The molecular mechanisms that may assist the tumor suppressing gene Rb2/p130 in blocking the progression of lung cancer cells has been clearly identified for the first time according to a study by researchers at Temple University’s Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine.
The results of their study, “pRb2/p130 target genes in non-small cell lung cancer cells identified by microarray analysis,” appear in the Oct. 9 issue of Oncogene (http://www.nature.com/onc/).
Treatment for the most common inherited cause of blindness, retinitis pigmentosa, is one step closer, according to investigators at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC). They are the first to link two new gene mutations in two French-Canadian families to loss of vision in humans. Their findings are published in this month’s issue of the American Journal of Ophthalmology. This project was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), le Fonds de la
The EU response to recent declines in pollinators and consequent loss of pollination services has been the inclusion of pollinator-friendly management in agri-environment schemes. These comprise the promotion of semi-natural habitats, such as set-aside and field margin strips. Yet, mass flowering crops, such as oilseed rape, are assumed to be of little value to pollinators.
However, in an article soon to appear in Ecology Letters, C. Westphal, I. Steffan-Dewenter and T. Tscharntke show that
Cyclacel Limited, the UK-based biopharmaceutical company, announced today that it had entered into an agreement with MRC geneservice for the distribution of its proprietary Drosophila RNA interference (RNAi) collection. This agreement will allow access for MRC geneservice’s academic and commercial clients to the Cyclacel collection, for gene identification and validation purposes.
The Cyclacel Drosophila RNAi set covers some 13,605 genes defined in the FlyBase Drosophila genome database. The
Concerns about the ethics of using embryos created to treat infertile couples for stem cell research is discussed by researchers at St Mary’s Hospital, Manchester in this week’s BMJ.
Although the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 allows the creation of embryos for research in the United Kingdom, the House of Lords Select Committee on stem cell research reported in February 2002 that embryos should not be created unless there is a demonstrable and exceptional need that cannot be met
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