Lung injury due to infection, such as in sepsis, accounts for hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations a year. Sepsis occurs in 2 percent of hospital admissions and is associated with a death rate of about 50 percent. Many of these patients require ventilation to support their breathing, which may in itself produce additional injury to the lung. Yet, there are few available treatments for lung injury associated with sepsis or ventilation.
Now, scientists at Northwestern University have demo
The number of housing developments on greenfield sites could be significantly reduced thanks to technology, pioneered by University of Greenwich environmental scientists, which can quickly decontaminate polluted and brownfield land, ready for building affordable environmentally friendly housing.
nown as Accelerated Carbonation Technology (ACT), this new process can treat contaminated land and hazardous waste in minutes rather than the days or weeks required by some conventional methods.
A survey on contraception by French researchers has found that a third of the pregnancies among women in their study were unplanned and that two-thirds of these pregnancies occurred in contraception users.
A fifth of the unplanned pregnancies happened among women using the Pill and a tenth among women using the IUD (intra-uterine device) – both theoretically highly effective medical methods of contraception, said principal investigators Dr Nathalie Bajos and Dr Nadine Job-Spira of the INSERM
A study by Italian researchers of motorway tollgate attendants has demonstrated that traffic pollution damages the quality of sperm in young and middle-aged men.
In research published today (Wednesday 30 April) in Europe’s leading reproductive medicine journal Human Reproduction [1] the research team from the University of Naples say their work should prompt studies on other types of workers exposed to similar levels of pollution and alert health authorities to pollution’s insidious health e
The use of toxic chemicals to sterilise medical instruments may soon be a thing of the past, according to researchers at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and the University of California in San Diego. Their work, released on 30 April 2003 in New Journal of Physics, published jointly by the Institute of Physics and the German Physical Society, tests a new way of killing bacteria using a plasma at room temperature and pressure, which could have applications in decontamination of biological
Areas deforested in Brazil increased from 152 000 km_ in 1976 to 517 000 km_ in 1996. That figure is the equivalent of the surface area of France. Deforestation is a complex process and involves a host of changing and widely differing situations. The factors behind it are many and varied. They include rising demand for agricultural land, international trade needs for timber and political decisions regarding strategic planning and development.
Researchers of the IRD Space Unit conducted an i
The Ntumu (the Beti-Fang), live in the equatorial forest in southern Cameroon, in the north of Gabon and of Equatorial Guinea. They practice a semi-nomadic slash-and-burn form of agriculture. Their farming is highly diversified, mainly of food crops (such as cassava, plantain banana, sweet potato, yam and taro) but they also produce cash crops (cacao, groundnuts). When they clear a plot (1 ha on average), the Ntumu systematically spare certain trees, generally about 15 whatever cutting methods or imp
Researchers at Oxford University’s Department of Biochemistry have developed methods for making RNA duplexes and single-stranded RNAs of desired length and sequence. This exciting technology is most applicable to commercial RNA providers and companies with large in-house requirements for RNA molecules as it will greatly increase cost-effectiveness.
Small interfering ribonucleic acids (siRNAs) are powerful laboratory tools for directed post- transcriptional gene expression knockdown and inhi
A group of researchers from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have discovered rare genetic mutations in a subset of people who come down with a particular kind of severe sepsis, an acute and often deadly disease.
These rare mutations in a human gene called TLR4 lend susceptibility to meningococcal sepsis, which strikes over 2,500 people a year in the United States. About half of those who contract meningococcal sepsis are younger than the age of two, and the disease has an overall case
University of Toronto researchers have developed a hybrid plastic that can produce light at wavelengths used for fibre-optic communication, paving the way for an optical computer chip.
The material, developed by a joint team of engineers and chemists, is a plastic embedded with quantum dots – crystals just five billionths of a metre in size – that convert electrons into photons. The findings hold promise for directly linking high-speed computers with networks that transmit information using
Cooking with sesame oil in place of other edible oils appears to help reduce high blood pressure and lower the amount of medication needed to control hypertension, researchers reported today at the XVth Scientific Meeting of the Inter-American Society of Hypertension. The meeting is co-sponsored by the American Heart Association’s Council for High Blood Pressure Research.
Using sesame oil as the sole cooking oil for 60 days along with drug treatment lowered patients’ blood pressur
A new magnetic resonance (MR) imaging technique using hyperpolarized helium lights up the lungs’ airways, providing, for the first time, clear resolution of even the smaller, seventh-generation airways. The technique, dynamic hyperpolarized 3He (helium) MR imaging, should help physicians better understand and treat asthma, as well as other chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases. Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital reported their findings in the May issue of the journal Radiology.
Humans are not alone in creating ‘signposts’ to help them find their way, according to new research published in the open access journal BMC Ecology. Wood mice, say scientists, move objects from their environment around using them as portable signposts whilst they explore.
The finding is significant as this is the first time such sophisticated behaviour has been identified in any mammal except humans. According to the authors,
“This is precisely how a human might tackle the pro
Preliminary findings from Hong Kong investigators fast-tracked for publication on THE LANCET’s website-www.thelancet.com – outline how severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) may have a less serious effect on young children compared with teenagers and adults.
There have been no childhood deaths from SARS up to April 25, 2003. Tai Fai Fok from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and colleagues prospectively studied the first 10 children with SARS who received treatment during the early phase
Several industrial activities of the previous decades resulted in serious contamination of groundwater. For instance, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) production and related activities cause annual underground releases of 137 tonnes of 1,2-dichloroethane (1,2-DCA) in the USA (1988-1999). The latter molecule has an environmental half-life of about 50 years, is the most abundant groundwater pollutant of all chloroethenes and –ethanes, and is a suspected carcinogen. Its physico-chemical properties result in a s
The method that Staphylococcus aureus (staph) infection uses to inactivate the body’s immune response and cause previously healthy B cells to commit suicide, is described for the first time by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine in the May 5, 2003 issue of the Journal of Experimental Medicine. The paper was selected for early online publication on April 28.
Normally, B cells mount an early defense against invading bacteria. From this immunol
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