In recent years, the solution to the problem of diseased or damaged organs has been to replace the old with the new. By taking tissue from either a patient or a donor, surgeons have transplanted this to the damaged area and given many people a new lease of life.
The method is not without limitations, however. Issues such as the availability of donor organs and the need to use drugs to prevent the immune system rejecting the “foreign” tissue have prompted research into alternative ways to d
Europe’s first mission to the Red Planet, continues its successful mission with another successful ’’high-risk’’ post-launch milestone. Mars Express engineers breathed a sigh of relief this morning at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), in Germany.
If a particularly delicate operation had not proceeded as planned, it would have been impossible to deploy the Mars Express lander, Beagle 2, on arrival at Mars.
This crucial operation consisted of releasing
The first overview analysis of a year’s worth of high-resolution infrared data gathered by the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) on NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft is opening Mars to a new kind of detailed geological analysis and revealing a dynamic planet that has experienced dramatic environmental change.
The report by THEMIS’s science team will appear in an upcoming issue of Science and will be released on June 5 in the magazine’s online preview, Science Express.
“THEMIS
In plants, many proteins are degraded or activated within the vacuole, a large water and nutrient-filled vesicle found in plant cells that helps maintain the shape of plant cells and that stores food molecules. The manner by which this degradation or activation occurs, however, is uncertain.
In the June 10, 2003, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), however, scientists from UC Riverside identify a key protein, vacuolar processing enzyme or VPEg, in Arabidops
Scientists announce in the current issue of the journal Nature their discovery that plants respond to environmental stresses with a sequence of molecular signals known in humans and other mammals as the “G-protein signaling pathway,” revealing that this signaling strategy has long been conserved throughout evolution. Because a large percentage of all the drugs approved for use in humans target the G-protein signaling pathway, the team’s findings could also be used in the search for plant compounds t
A small, bizarre cluster of a million young stars, enshrouded in thick gas and dust in a nearby dwarf galaxy, has been confirmed by Jean Turner, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, and her colleagues, in the June 5 issue of the journal Nature.
Turner and her colleagues estimate that the stars are still in the process of forming, and are less than a million years old — extremely young by astronomical standards.
The cluster contains more than 4,000 massive “O” stars, each a milli
For decades, scientists have disagreed about the way the brain gathers memories, developing two apparently contradictory concepts. But newly published research by a team of scientists at Rutgers-Newark’s Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience (CMBN) indicates that both models of memory may be partially correct – and that resolving this conflict could lead to new approaches for the treatment of memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s Disease.
The dispute has centered on how
’Finished’ sequence reveals twice as many genes, cereal similarity
Behold a grain of rice. Inside are thousands of cells; within each cell are 12 chromosomes; and on rice’s smallest chromosome, No. 10, are about 3,500 genes and more than 22 million base pairs, the links in the chain of DNA.
So, what’s the big deal about rice’s smallest chromosome?
There are several, according to a report in the June 6 issue of the journal Science. Upon close exami
A NASA-Department of Energy jointly funded study concludes the Earth has been greening over the past 20 years. As climate changed, plants found it easier to grow.
The globally comprehensive, multi-discipline study appears in this week’s Science magazine. The article states climate changes have provided extra doses of water, heat and sunlight in areas where one or more of those ingredients may have been lacking. Plants flourished in places where climatic conditions previously limited gro
Expanding their successful business relation Siemens Information and Communication Mobile (FSE, NYSE: SIE), a leading provider of mobile phones, and Infineon Technologies (FSE, NYSE: IFX), a leading semiconductor supplier for secure mobile solutions, today announced that Siemens has chosen Infineon’s S-GOLD Family for their next generation of multimedia oriented GPRS and EDGE handsets.
Infineon’s chipset platforms for GPRS and EDGE handsets are based on S-GOLDlite and S-GOLD. Both platforms
New glow-in the-dark plastic technology has enabled researchers to develop a torch that glows in the dark, so you can find it in the dark. Collaboration between DualGlo Ltd, a Hereford technology company and Innovation-Direct, a free consultancy service for SME companies delivered by the Universities of Warwick and Wolverhampton, has developed a unique product that is now entering markets all around the world.
After turning to the Innovation Direct advice centre DualGlo Ltd, a small techno
All gardeners know that their plants have to compete against insects and weeds. We apply insecticides to protect plants from the munching hordes, and we apply herbicides, or hoe, to protect plants from weeds. But, according to Stan Finch and Rosemary Collier of Horticulture Research International, Wellesbourne, the latter is a bad move that actually helps insects to find our crop plants.
Writing in the June issue of Biologist, Finch and Collier provide evidence that specialist insects, those
Research from Sri Lanka in this week’s issue of THE LANCET highlights how repeated doses of charcoal could reduce deaths from oleander-seed poisoning by up to 70%. The authors of the study suggest that charcoal could also be effective in treating poisoning from drugs used in Western populations with similar effects to oleander-seed poisoning, such as digoxin and digitoxin, or with drugs that are eliminated from the body in a similar fashion.
Deliberate self-poisoning with yellow oleander see
A review article in this week’s BMJ dispels some of the myths about treating head lice, using the most up-to-date medical research. For example, it shows that:
Head lice are harmless
Head lice on clothing or furniture cannot infect a person
Cutting hair, or tying it back, is not helpful
Banning children with nits from school is ineffective
Head lice are parasites that usually infest the scalps of school age children. Lice attach their eggs to hair shafts near the scalp
Pregnant women carrying boys have a 10% higher energy intake than those carrying girls, finds a study in this week’s BMJ.
Researchers analysed the dietary intake of 244 pregnant women attending a large hospital in Boston, United States.
They found that women who were carrying a male embryo had an 8% higher intake of protein, a 9% higher intake of carbohydrates, an 11% higher intake of animal fats, and a 15% higher intake of vegetable fats than women who were carrying a female embryo
By analyzing data on tree pollen extracted from ancient lake sediments, ecologists have sharpened the understanding of how forests can maintain a diversity of species. Their findings indicate that stabilizing processes have been more important than previously thought, and that the human-caused loss of species could upset that stability in ways that remain poorly understood.
“Quantifying the link between stability and diversity, and identifying the factors that promote species diversity, ha
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