Researchers uncover new tumor suppression mechanism
Cancerous and precancerous cells can detect that they are abnormal and kill themselves, or remain alive indefinitely but cease proliferating, through two intrinsic processes called programmed cell death and cellular senescence. One goal of cancer chemotherapy is to help stimulate these potent antitumor processes.
Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island have recently shown that by locking cancer cells int
Using a so-called “data-mining” method, it is possible to automatically find previously unknown side-effects of drugs in the huge WHO database of side-effect reports. This is demonstrated in a doctoral dissertation by Andrew Bate at Umeå University in Sweden.
The use of pharmaceuticals sometimes causes side-effects. By gathering reports about suspected cases of side-effects, it is possible to detect previously unknown ties between a certain drug and a side-effect at an early stage, so-calle
For just pennies per person per year, the new Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) plans to bring the benefits of foods fortified with vitamins and minerals and end micronutrient deficiency for the poor in developing countries, which can save millions of lives and prevent crippling conditions such as blindness and mental retardation.
“Micronutrient deficiency also has many invisible economic effects that are widely underestimated, because they sap the energy of working-age p
Research led by Professor Paul Sharp at The University of Nottingham’s Institute of Genetics has shed further light on the origins of HIV-1, the virus that causes AIDS.
For more than 10 years, Professor Sharp has been collaborating with Professor Beatrice Hann, at the University of Alabama, on research aimed at clarifying the origins and evolution of AIDS viruses. In 1999, this team identified the origin of HIV-1 as being transmission of a virus (SIVcpz) from chimpanzees to humans, but a mys
A new type of polymers can be produced in a more environmentally friendly way, using wood instead of oil as a raw material, according to research at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. The next step is to replace the wood with the process water from the pulp industry. This means a solution to an environmental problem and access to a cheap renewable raw material.
The substances in question, hemicellulose-based hydrogels, are a good example of how oil can be replaced
Addressing the market demand for ever greater reach for VDSL and ever greater bandwidth over a single pair, Infineon Technologies (FSE/NYSE: IFX) and Metalink (Nasdaq: MTLK), today announced they are each developing VDSLPlus, which introduces a fifth-band extension of standard VDSL technology. VDSLPlus will enable service providers to offer scalable DSL services ranging from short range applications at data rates up to 150 Megabits per second (Mbps), to long reach applications that allow for more
In Letter to Nature, NYU and Syracuse neuroscientists prove that we read by detecting simple features
Do we visually recognize things — words or faces — by wholes or by parts? Denis Pelli of New York University and Bart Farell of Syracuse University have answered that question in their forthcoming Letter to Nature. Their article, “The Remarkable Inefficiency of Word Recognition,” is accompanied by a “News and Views” piece discussing their work.
Using the example of letters
Scientists from the University of California at Berkeley along with researchers from Ethiopia and several other countries have uncovered fossils of the earliest modern human, Homo sapiens, estimated at 154,000 to 160,000 years old. According to the scientists, the findings provide strong evidence that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals co-existed, rather than the former descending from the latter.
In two articles appearing in the June 12 edition of the journal Nature, the authors describe the fo
Researchers will assess how businesses manage waste
Researchers at Cardiff University, UK, are aiming to gather vital information from a load of garbage.
Businesses and commercial organisations in Wales, UK, generate millions of tonnes of waste each year, and much of it goes to landfill sites – a method of disposal which is causing mounting environmental concern and is increasingly subject to legislation.
Yet current data on how much waste is produced, what it comp
The answer to how the complex, cavernous inner ear forms from a mostly homogenous group of cells may be that it doesn’t, says a Medical College of Georgia researcher who has found a new cell type that appears to migrate to the developing ear.
Dr. Paul Sohal first saw the cells he named ventrally emigrating neural tube cells in 1995, following the path of newly formed nerves out of the developing neural tube.
His research published in the June issue of the International Journal of D
Inflation’s got nothing to do with it. Since the beginning of time, a picture has always been worth more than a thousand words. But in this age of information proliferation, that reality is the taproot of a vexing problem that Zhongfei “Mark” Zhang, an assistant professor of computer science at Binghamton University, is determined to help solve.
From personal and commercial digital image libraries and multimedia databases to data mining programs and high-tech security and defense survei
C.J. Zhong hopes that within the next three to five years diabetics the world could see their quality of life enhanced by his tiny invention-a chip-sized pump with no moving parts. The device is also expected to find its way into myriad industrial and environmental applications, where it could mean huge savings in manufacturing and monitoring processes.
Zhong’s patent on the low-power, electrically driven pumping device is one of the reasons the State University of New York has broken i
The tiny spheres inside brain cells that ferry chemical messengers into the synapse make their rounds much more expeditiously than once assumed, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) – funded researchers have discovered. They used a dye to track the behavior of such synaptic vesicles in real time, in rat brain cells. Rather than fusing completely with the cell membrane and disgorging their dye contents all at once, brain vesicles more often remained intact, secreting only part of the tracer car
A biomedical-imaging technique that would highlight the cytoskeletal infrastructure of nerve cells and map the nervous system as it develops and struggles to repair itself has been proposed by biophysics researchers at Cornell and Harvard universities.
Reporting in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS June 10, 2003) , the researchers say that besides the new imaging technique’s obvious applications in studying the dynamics of nervous system development, it could answer the
Using the superior sensitivity of ESA’s X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton, a team of European astronomers has made the first direct measurement of a neutron star’s magnetic field.
The results provide deep insights into the extreme physics of neutron stars and reveal a new mystery yet to be solved about the end of this star’s life.
A neutron star is very dense celestial object that usually has something like the mass of our Sun packed into a tiny sphere only 20–30 km across. It is the p
VLT Interferometer Measurements of Achernar Challenge Stellar Theory
To a first approximation, planets and stars are round. Think of the Earth we live on. Think of the Sun, the nearest star, and how it looks in the sky.
But if you think more about it, you realize that this is not completely true. Due to its daily rotation, the solid Earth is slightly flattened (“oblate”) – its equatorial radius is some 21 km (0.3%) larger than the polar one. Stars are enormous gaseous spheres
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