Researchers have successfully tested a system that can replace a cellular tower’s room full of communications hardware with a single desk-top style computer, making the technology affordable for small, rural communities.
The software is also capable of running emergency communications-such as police, fire and ambulance channels-on the same device as the civilian system, eliminating the need for a separate network of emergency communications towers.
“Rural customers are the firs
NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) has resumed measurements of the Earth’s polar ice sheets, clouds, mountains and forests with the second of its three lasers. Crisscrossing the globe at nearly 17,000 miles per hour, this new space mission is providing data with unprecedented accuracy on the critical third dimension of the Earth, its vertical characteristics.
“The first set of laser measurements is revealing features of the polar ice sheets with details never seen befor
Some seed gene banks contain more higher plant species per square meter than anywhere else on the planet’, write Simon Linington and colleagues of the Millenium Seed Bank, Kew, in the October issue of Biologist. This helps to ‘ensure plant diversity is available long term for use in development or habitat restoration’, they explain.
Although genetically uniform crop varieties can produce good yields, the plants may be more vulnerable to new diseases than traditional varieties. Seed banks un
Gene expression profiling can help doctors accurately identify subtypes of pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), according to the October 15, 2003, issue of Blood, the official journal of the American Society of Hematology. Diagnosing a subtype of ALL can allow physicians to customize a treatment program based on a patient’s likelihood of responding to therapy.
Pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia has a number of subtypes, each with unique cellular and molecular characteristi
Babies who sleep in adult beds can be up to 40 times more likely to suffocate, new Saint Louis University research shows
Babies who are put to sleep in an adult bed face a risk of suffocation that is as much as 40 times greater than babies who sleep in standard cribs, a Saint Louis University researcher says in this month’s issue of Pediatrics.
“The odds of death go up dramatically among babies who use adult beds,” says James Kemp, M.D., one of the researchers and an as
Will new technologies protect privacy or hamper it in the post-September 11 world? Trends in information society technology will have a significant impact on the balance between citizens’ security and privacy, according to a report released today by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). The study on “Security and Privacy for the Citizen in the Post-September 11 Digital Age: A Prospective Overview”, commissioned by the European Parliament, analyses the security and privacy implication
A team of Purdue University researchers has recently uncovered the genetic mechanism that prevents certain crop plants from growing tall – a finding that has future crop production applications since some grains produce greater yields if plants are kept short.
Guri Johal, assistant professor of botany and plant pathology, and his colleagues have identified the process that generates dwarfed corn and sorghum plants, which grow to roughly half the height of their normal counterparts. This disc
A team of researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder has taken another step in the quest to build a compact, tabletop x-ray microscope that could be used for biological imaging at super-high resolution.
By firing a femtosecond laser – a laser that generates light pulses with durations as short as 100 trillionth of a second – through a gas-filled tube called a waveguide, they were able to create more efficient “laser-like” beams in regions of the spectrum that were previously inacc
New research by a group of economists and psychology researchers at the University of Warwick reveals that our rank position within an organisation has a bigger effect on our happiness within that job than the happiness generated by our actual level of pay. In short being top dog makes us happier than simply getting top dollar.
The researchers, University of Warwick Economists Professor Andrew Oswald and Dr Jonathan.Gardner (Joanthan now with Watson Wyatt) and University of Warwick psycholo
NASA researchers and other scientists used a satellite combined with aircraft video to create a new technique for detecting ponds of water on top of Arctic sea ice. Until now, it was not possible to accurately monitor these ponds on ice from space.
Water that forms on sea ice during the summer, called a melt pond, absorbs the Sun’s energy rather than reflecting it back to space the way ice does. The balance between reflected and absorbed energy has a large effect on Arctic and global c
A complete molecular-scale picture of how plants convert sunlight to chemical energy has been obtained at Purdue University, offering potential new insights into animal metabolism as well.
Using advanced imaging techniques, a team of Purdue biologists has determined the structure of the cytochrome, a protein complex that governs photosynthesis in a blue-green bacterium. While their work does not immediately suggest any industrial applications, it does reveal a wealth of information not onl
A pattern produced by a chemical change that turns off genes in tumor cells may help predict the seriousness of a particular cancer, and perhaps its outcome.
The study by researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute examined how a chemical change known as methylation spreads from one region of a breast-cancer gene to a neighboring region in tumor cells taken from patients.
The findings
For the second time in 26 months, a massive iceberg has clogged a large portion of Antarctica’s Ross Sea, causing what could turn out to be a devastating loss of penguins and other marine life, according to a NASA-funded study by Stanford scientists.
Using satellite data, geophysicists Kevin Arrigo and Gert L. van Dijken monitored the movements of a giant iceberg named “C-19,” which calved off the western face of the Ross Ice Shelf in May 2002. C-19 is one of the largest icebergs ever
In amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), neighborhood may be everything, if a new study in mouse models of the disease holds true for patients.
ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, brings about a gradual death of the motor neurons that activate muscles. Paralysis follows. But according to work described today in the journal Science, the cells that are next to motor neurons — but aren’t themselves nerve cells — can play a major role in advancing or limiting the disease.
“What w
Duke University Medical Center researchers have linked elevated levels of a specific heart protein in elderly hearts to a decrease in the pumping ability of the heart.
Since levels of this protein, known as G-alpha-i, are also elevated in patients with congestive heart failure, the researchers believe that not only do they better understand why the heart’s pumping ability decreases with age, but that there may be a pharmacological approach to prevent this age-related decline.
Could help improve treatment of anxiety
Behavior therapists may have a better way to help anxious patients, thanks to insights from a UCLA study of different ways to get mice past their fears. Rodents have long been used to study learning by association. Neuroscientists compared different ways of exposing mice to a stimulus that they had learned to fear, and found that “massing” the feared stimulus -– delivering it in concentrated bursts, not pacing it with longer pauses in between –
Feedback
