A new study by gene therapy scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill may lead to an effective long-term treatment for preventing seizures associated with a common form of epilepsy. The study appears this week in the Internet edition of the journal Nature Medicine and will appear in the Aug. 1 print edition of the journal. The research provides an important foundation for the development of new gene therapies to treat focal seizure disorders, the authors said.
As the name
Computer Researchers Find Critical Flaws in Popular Software Produced for U.S. Elections
The software believed to be at the heart of an electronic voting system being marketed for use in elections across the nation has weaknesses that could easily allow someone to cast multiple votes for one candidate, computer security researchers at The Johns Hopkins University have determined.
The researchers reached this conclusion after studying computer code believed to be for Ohio-base
Scientists at the MPI-CBG in Dresden and EMBL in Heidelberg map forces that help cells divide
“Cells obey the laws of physics and chemistry,” begins a famous biology textbook, and one of the main goals of molecular biology is to link the properties of single molecules to the behavior of cells and the lives of organisms. So it is probably no surprise that an important new discovery about the physical forces that underlie cell division comes from a physics student-turned biologist, usi
Some thirty million species now live on Earth, but their spatial distribution is highly uneven. Biologists since Darwin have been asking why. Now, scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), have discovered part of the answer: how plant and animal communities originally assembled is a predictor of future biodiversity and ecosystem productivity.
“Despite its importance, species diversity has proven difficult to understand, in large part because multiple processes operating at
A study of microbes that thrive in hot, acidic conditions has overturned a long-held view that species of micro-organisms do not differ by geographic location like other forms of life. The research by the University of Cincinnati and the University of California-Berkeley has just been published online by the journal Science.
When it comes to plant life and animal life, a species usually shows genetic differences in different parts of the world. For the tiny form of life known as micro-org
Three years before he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, Eugene Wigner published an article entitled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” (1960). He marveled at how often physicists develop concepts to describe the “real” world only to discover that mathematicians–heedless of that real world–have already thought up and explored the concepts. His own experience of the uncanny applicability of mathematical insights to the physical reality of quantum mechanics led
Astronomers from the University of Cambridge, UK, have found for the first time the true outer limits of a galaxy. They have also shown that the dark matter in this galaxy is not distributed in the way conventional theory predicts.
The team – Professor Gerry Gilmore, Dr Mark Wilkinson, Dr Jan Kleyna and Dr Wyn Evans – presents its results today at the 25th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Sydney, Australia. The work could provide the key to understanding how
Scientists at Harvard Medical School have cleared up some of the mystery surrounding a key structure in the developing brain that helps form the visual circuits. Their findings, which appear in the July 25 issue of Science, could provide new insight into early brain defects that are linked to conditions like cerebral palsy and learning disabilities.
During development, nerve cells in the eye send messages to the thalamus, a region located deep within the brain. The thalamus then passe
Geologists have long assumed that the Hawaiian Islands owe their existence to a “hotspot” – stationary plumes of magma that rise from the Earth’s mantle to form Mauna Loa, Kilauea and Hawaii’s other massive volcanoes. But a new study posted on the online version of the journal Science disputes that long-standing paradigm by concluding that the fixed hotspot in the Pacific was not stationary after all.
“Our research suggests that the Hawaiian hotspot actually drifted southwa
Two University of Toronto astronomers and a U.S. colleague have made the first-ever measurements of the size and shape of massive dark matter halos that surround galaxies
‘Our findings give us the clearest picture yet of a very mysterious part of our universe,’ says principal investigator Henk Hoekstra, a post-doctoral fellow at University of Toronto’s Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics. ‘Using relatively simple physics, we can get our first direct glimpse of the size an
The UK Analytical Partnership (UKAP), now in its third year, has announced five prime areas for analytical innovation: biomimetic analysis, health sensors, managing the chemical environment, real-time analysis/factory of the future and analysis in design. UKAP will be staging a number of events in the autumn to enable input from parties interested in involvement with these projects.
Richard Bahu of the Oxis Partnership, co-author of this foresight study for UKAP´s Innovation Network w
Forget blue skies research, it is clouds that have focused minds at the University of Leicester where scientists are tackling the causes of ozone depletion.
Atmospheric scientists in the Department of Physics and Astronomy are spearheading the MAPSCORE project, a European Commission Environment project which investigates a major cause of ozone depletion – high altitude polar clouds which activate the chlorine originally from CFCs and lead eventually to severe ozone destruction.
The new Director-General of WHO is calling for global collaboration to tackle the crisis identified by The Lancet’s Child Survival Series, which concludes in this week’s issue.
The series has highlighted a global public-health disaster: over 10 million children under five years dead every year; the majority from easily preventable causes. In a Commentary in this week’s issue, Dr JW Lee highlights three key priorities for action. He comments: “First, the health of children and mothers must be
Leading public-health scientists highlight in a study in this week’s issue of THE LANCET how confronting major risk factors that lead to poor health could have a substantial effect in reducing premature deaths and morbidity globally-especially in the poorest areas of the world. This preventive approach would also reduce the prevailing health inequalities that exist between the world’s richest and poorest nations.
Majid Ezzati from the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, USA, Christophe
The bereaved family and friends of cancer patients who die by euthanasia have less grief symptoms and post-traumatic stress reactions than the bereaved of comparable cancer patients who die a natural death, finds a study in this week’s BMJ.
Researchers from the Netherlands assessed 189 bereaved family members and close friends of terminally ill cancer patients who died by euthanasia and 316 bereaved family members and close friends of comparable cancer patients who died a natural dea
Disrupted-In-Schizophrenia 1 (DISC1) was identified as a novel gene disrupted by a (1;11)(q42.1;q14.3) translocation that segregated with schizophrenia in a Scottish family. Predicted DISC1 product has no significant homology to other known proteins. Here, Dr. Katayama and colleagues in Osaka, Japan, demonstrated the existence of DISC1 protein and identified fasciculation and elongation protein zeta-1 (FEZ1) as an interacting partner of DISC1 by a yeast two-hybrid study. FEZ1 and its nematode homolog
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