New views of star birth and the heart of a spiral galaxy have been seen by a state-of-the-art astronomical instrument on its first night. The new UKIRT Imaging Spectrometer (UIST) has a revolutionary ability to ’slice’ any object in the sky into sections, producing a three dimensional view of the conditions throughout entire galaxies in a single observation. UIST has just been installed on the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii.
Project scientist Suzanne Ramsay How
Penn State mechanical engineers, working with medical and pharmaceutical researchers, have developed the first computer-generated “virtual stomach” to follow the path of extended-release tablets that are designed to remain in the stomach for hours while slowly releasing medicine.
The researchers note that, although many medications are prepared in extended-release form, the details of exactly how the pills break down and release medicine in the stomach are largely unknown. The new “virtual
Nanotubes, stringy supermolecules already used to create fuel cell batteries and tiny computer circuits, could find myriad new applications ranging from disease treatment to plastics manufacturing to information storage, reports a Purdue University research team.
Scientists led by Purdue chemist Hicham Fenniri have learned to create multiple species of nanotubes that possess unprecedented physical and chemical properties, each of which could lead to a different industrial application. Also
Investigators at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have discovered a mechanism that helps explain why healthy cells are not killed by DNA-damaging cancer chemotherapy drugs. The findings are published in the Oct. 4 issue of the journal Cell.
DNA-damaging agents are the most common kind of drugs used to treat cancer. Like most chemotherapy drugs, these are carried in the blood and travel throughout the body. They work by irreparably gumming up DNA in rapidly dividing tumo
As anyone with a smattering of geological knowledge knows, Earth’s crust is made up of plates that creep over the planet’s surface at a rate of several inches per year. But why do they move the way they do? Even experts have had trouble teasing out the exact mechanisms.
A model developed by University of Michigan researchers and published in the Oct. 4 issue of Science provides a relatively simple explanation.
“It’s been known that slabs (portions of plates that ext
By examining volcanic rocks retrieved from deep in the ocean, scientists have found they can estimate the carbon dioxide stored beneath much of the earth’s surface – a development that could enhance understanding of how volcanoes affect climate. The research by University of Florida scientists and others will be reported this week in the journal Nature.
Scientists examined chunks of basalt, a type of volcanic rock formed when lava cools, from 12,000 feet below the Pacific along a massiv
For Karen Pressley, Duke’s new Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Center revealed critical details of her heart that could enable her to have an angioplasty.
Physicians at her home medical center in Fort Walton Beach, Fla. were reluctant to perform a heart procedure on 55-year-old Pressley because conventional techniques could not determine the extent of possible heart muscle death from a recent silent heart attack. So Pressley was referred to Duke University Medical Center, where cardiologi
Researchers use flowing fluids to create mechanical stress needed for bone formation
A new study by Rice University researchers indicates that bioengineers growing bone in the laboratory may be able to create the mechanical stimulation needed to grow bone outside the body.
One of the greatest challenges tissue engineers face in growing bone in the laboratory is recreating the conditions that occur inside the body. The recipe for growing healthy bones includes not only a prec
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), Harvard University and the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation have found a way to use a relatively new but readily available technology to quickly detect markers in the DNA of the most deadly type of malaria pathogen.
The technology could enable scientists and public health workers to identify the particular strain of malaria during an outbreak and determine if it is drug resistant or not.
“One of the reason
Two scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) led a collaborative effort involving 18 researchers at half a dozen laboratories in the United States and Great Britain to determine the “proteome” of the most deadly form of the malaria pathogen – Plasmodium falciparum .
This study, in the current issue of the journal Nature, accompanies an article detailing the completion of a major six-year $17.9-million genome-sequencing effort involving 185 researchers from the United Kingd
The European Commission has accepted EVE, the Basque Energy Entity, and Eolicas de Euskadi within the programme to promote renewable energy. The European Union is aware of the effort EVE is doing to obtain 12 % of primary energy from renewable energy. This entity has been accepted in the programme Campaign for Take-Off, together with Eolicas de Euskadi. The programme has been designed by the European Commission and as the first step they want to create a Renewable Energy Partnership. This partnership
The scientists at A.F. Ioffe Physical Technical Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, decided to restore the production of semi-conductor devices for pulse radiotechniques which was interrupted at the beginning of the 1990s. These devices have recently found wide application in different areas of technology: in ultra broadband apparatuses of communication, geopositioning and following, radars where a signal of high power should be generated for short time intervals. The idea of creating the devices
In the Kenyan capital of Nairobi African and European researchers have launched an ambitious international `information mobilisation`-project to disclose the existing knowledge of useful plants of Tropical Africa. The PROTA Project (Plant Resources of Tropical Africa) has been prepared by Wageningen University (the Netherlands), Agropolis in Montpellier (France), Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (United Kingdom) and six African institutes: Makerere University (Uganda), FORIG (Ghana), NHBGM (Malawi), PBZT (M
A team of UK astronomers, led by postgraduate student Ed Hawkins, has made a decisive step toward resolving an argument that has rumbled on in the astronomical community for decades. The scientists from the University of Nottingham have been investigating the properties of quasars and nearby galaxies. As part of this study, they have overturned previous analyses which suggested that these two classes of object are physically associated, thus confirming the alternative, more widely-held view that quas
Training patients with diabetes to adjust their insulin doses to match their food choices, improves diabetes control and quality of life, finds a study in this week’s BMJ.
This approach has been developed in Germany, but has not been widely adopted elsewhere. Patients in the UK often have impaired quality of life and a high risk of diabetic complications. Researchers in Sheffield, London and North Tyneside set out to test this approach in the UK with the dose adjustment for normal eating (DA
People with insulin-treated diabetes may soon be freed from the restrictive diet and regimented lifestyle usually associated with the condition
A study, funded by Diabetes UK and published in the British Medical Journal on Saturday 5 October 2002 [BMJ Volume 325] shows that a new flexible method of treating diabetes in the UK provides substantial benefits for quality of life without increasing health risk.
“DAFNE really does give the freedom to eat what you like, when you lik
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