Peering back in time more than 7 billion years, a team of astronomers using a powerful new spectrograph at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii has obtained the first maps showing the distribution of galaxies in the early universe. The maps show the clustering of galaxies into a variety of large-scale structures, including long filaments, empty voids, and dense groups and clusters.
These maps are among the first results from the DEEP2 Redshift Survey, an ongoing three-year project d
Gonzaga Santesteban, lecturer at the Public University of Navarre, concluded his thesis stating that a generalised recommendation on vine irrigation cannot be offered as the factors involved are diverse: the terrain where the vine is planted, the climate on the zone and the quantity of grape involved.
Problems with irrigation policy
Gonzaga Santesteban has investigated “The effect of irrigation on the quality of the grape and the wine in the Tempranillo variety”.
It
In their quest for a vaccine that may one day routinely protect against heart attacks and strokes, cardiologists at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and their colleagues in Sweden have isolated a key step in the mechanism that leads to vascular plaque buildup and blood clot formation.
In mice genetically predisposed to quickly develop atherosclerosis, the researchers were able to trigger a protective immune response, significantly increasing the level of immunoglobulin gamma G (IgG), an antibody
Scientists report in Nature today that significantly fewer asteroids could hit the Earth’s surface than previously reckoned.
Researchers from Imperial College London and the Russian Academy of Sciences have built a computer simulation that predicts whether asteroids with a diameter up to one kilometre (km) will explode in the atmosphere or hit the surface.
The results indicate that asteroids with a diameter greater than 200 metres (the length of two football pitches) will hi
A study published today reveals that a common industrial chemical causes sexual deformities in oysters, producing large numbers of hermaphrodite animals. The chemical, nonylphenol, is a breakdown product from a surfactant widely used in detergents, dispersing agents, herbicides, spermicides and cosmetics.
Dr Helen Nice who undertook this study at Royal Holloway, University of London, says, ‘Our results may cast doubt on the widespread use of this chemical in many human products including co
A team of UK astronomers have announced the discovery that some supernovae have bad habits – they belch out huge quantities of ’’smoke’’ known as cosmic dust. This solves a mystery more than 10 billion years in the making. The new observations published on 17th July in the journal ’’Nature’’, answer long-standing questions about the origin of the first solid particles ever to form in the Universe.
The team measured the cold cosmic dust in ’’C
From 16 to 31 July, 32 international student teams of researchers will gather in Bordeaux, France, to fly their experiments in zero-gravity on board a specially adapted Airbus A-300.
This year’s Student Parabolic Flight Campaign, organised by ESA’s Education Office, will see experiments performed in a variety scientific areas including physics, human biology, material science and robotics, some using objects as diverse as jelly and moths.
Four flights in two
UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas researchers have discovered a tumor-suppressor gene that, in fruit flies, simultaneously restricts cell proliferation and promotes cell death, a process that may also play an important role in the genesis of cancer in humans.
Removal of the gene, hippo, resulted in tumor formation in every organ of the fruit fly. The findings, which are currently online, will appear in an upcoming issue of Cell.
“This is one of the few genes that has been d
Discovery of quadruply lensed quasar with Einstein ring
Using the ESO 3.6-m telescope at La Silla (Chile), an international team of astronomers [1] has discovered a complex cosmic mirage in the southern constellation Crater (The Cup). This “gravitational lens” system consists of (at least) four images of the same quasar as well as a ring-shaped image of the galaxy in which the quasar reside – known as an “Einstein ring”. The more nearby lensing galaxy that causes this intriguing opt
With 15,000 tons produced each year for batteries, alloys, and pigments, the heavy metal cadmium is one of the most serious environmental pollutants. Chronic exposure can induce kidney damage and bone disease and is thought to cause cancer. A study in the August issue of Nature Medicine now shows that cadmium mimics the effects of estrogen, and suggests that even at relatively low doses cadmium might have wide-ranging effects on the body.
Mary Beth Martin and colleagues report that,
A Yale researcher who invented a test to determine whether a woman’s endometrium (uterine lining) is healthy and ready for embryo implantation has identified two new biochemical markers that improve assessment of the endometrium.
The endometrial function test (EFT®) was created by Harvey J. Kliman, M.D., a research scientist in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the Yale School of Medicine. An abnormal EFT is associated with pregnancy failure, whil
Yale researcher M. Marc Abreu, M.D., has identified an area of the brain he calls the brain temperature tunnel, which transmits brain temperature to an area of skin and has the potential to prevent death from heat stroke and hypothermia, and detect infectious diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
Abreu, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Ophthalmology at Yale School of Medicine, found that a small area of skin near the eyes and the nose is the point of
Yale researchers have, for the first time, identified two types of reading disability: a primarily inherent type with higher cognitive ability (poor readers who compensate for disability), and a more environmentally influenced type with lower cognitive skills and attendance at more disadvantaged schools (persistently poor readers).
The findings, published in the July 1 issue of Biological Psychiatry, show that compensated poor readers were able to overcome some of the disability, impr
Imagine being able to quickly detect and diagnose blood vessel growth in cancerous tumors, and even predict how fast the tumors might metastasize or spread. Researchers at the University of Virginia Health System are doing just that in animal models using millions of tiny microbubbles injected into the bloodstream, coupled with contrast-enhanced ultrasound, an inexpensive and widely-used technique using sound waves to “see” inside the body.
Their findings are published in the July 22
Brain scientists will have to rethink the current theory of how the visual processing region of the brain is organized to analyze basic information about the geometry of the environment, according to Duke neurobiologists. In a new study reported in the June 26, 2003, Nature, they studied the visual-processing region — called the visual cortex — of ferrets, as the animals’ brains responded to complex patterns.
The results, they said, indicated that clusters of neurons in that region
Rutgers geneticist Tara Matise and her colleagues have produced a map that will help pinpoint the genes linked to such serious diseases as diabetes, high blood pressure and schizophrenia.
This linkage map is based on the amount of the interaction or recombination taking place among nearly 3,000 genetic markers whose positions are known. The markers used for the map are single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – the variations of a gene that people may carry at one point on their DNA.
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