Medical researchers would like to use nano-scale tubes to push very tiny amounts of drugs dissolved in water to exactly where they are needed in the human body.
The roadblock to putting this theory into practical use has been the challenge of building pumps small enough to do the job. In addition to the engineering challenge of building a nano-scale pump, there is the added complication of clogging by any biological molecule that can occur in valves small enough to fit a channel the size of
Every morning millions of Americans reach for the world’s most popular drug to help them start their day.
“That drug is caffeine,” said Dr. James Bibb, assistant professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. Bibb is one of the authors of a new report explaining how caffeine exerts its stimulatory effect by altering the biochemistry of the brain. The findings appear in an August issue of Nature.
“Caffeine is the most frequently self-administered dru
The production of fusion energy with a PetaWatt laser is a step closer now that a team of scientists from Japan and the UK has demonstrated that the physics works. Using the GEKKO XII laser system at the Osaka University in Japan, the team has successfully conducted experiments at laser powers equivalent to those required for a full-scale ignition system, and the results will be published in Nature on Thursday 29 August 2002.
“We carried out a first “proof of principle” experiment in 2001 th
Non-smokers who are exposed to environmental tobacco smoke for at least 30 minutes a day are at far greater risk of developing acute coronary syndromes compared with people who are not exposed, finds a study in Tobacco Control.
These findings support the role of environmental tobacco smoke in the development of adverse cardiac events.
A total of 847 individuals with a first event of acute coronary syndromes and 1,078 cardiovascular disease-free controls were included in the study. P
The world’s most sensitive Gamma Ray telescopes are being inaugurated in Namibia (in Southwest Africa) on September 3rd. The High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.), a European/African collaboration in which the UK is a partner, will look for Gamma Rays produced by the most energetic particles in the Universe. The array initially consists of four telescopes, the first of which will become operational next week. This one telescope alone is more sensitive than any other existing ground-based array o
Rush is one of only two sites in nation testing the drug that may provide new treatment option
Physicians at Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center have begun to recruit patients as part of a clinical research study that will evaluate the effectiveness of a new drug as a potential treatment for fragile X syndrome and autism.
The trials are taking place at Rush and the University of California, Davis. The principal investigators in the study are Dr. Elizabeth Berry-Krav
Like tiny Russian dolls, the mealybugs that infest your houseplants carry bacteria inside their cells that are themselves infected with another type of bacteria. A new study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, shows that instead of spreading from bug to bug, the second set of bacteria infected the first several times in the past and are now being passed along and evolving with them.
The knowledge could be useful for working out how the insect species are related to each o
Some bottles of wine are worth thousands of dollars. But if oxygen has leaked past the cork, it could be thousand-dollar vinegar — and there’s no way to tell without opening the bottle. Now chemists at the University of California, Davis, can check an unopened bottle for spoilage using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), the same technology used for medical MRI scans.
Natural bacteria in wine use oxygen from the air to turn alcohol into vinegar, or acetic acid. If a wine bottle is secur
USDA Forest Service plant pathologists have discovered a new cause of damage to loblolly pine seedlings grown in the South – needle nematodes. In the July 2002 issue of Plant Disease, pathologists Stephen Fraedrich (SRS Insects and Diseases of Southern Forests unit in Athens, GA) and Michelle Cram (Forest Health Protection Program, Region 8) report on finding a previously undescribed species of nematode stunting the growth of pine seedlings in a Georgia nursery.
In 1998, a three-year study w
Research on an AIDS-like disease in monkeys continues to help scientists understand problems such as how HIV causes AIDS, how the virus “hides” from the immune system and how the disease might be prevented or treated, two decades after the human and monkey diseases were identified.
“These animals have been indispensable for understanding how the virus works and in working toward vaccines,” said Murray Gardner, professor emeritus of medical pathology at the UC Davis Center for Comparative Me
The link between climate and cholera, a serious health problem in many parts of the world, has become stronger in recent decades, say researchers from the University of Michigan, the University of Barcelona and the International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh.
Their research will be published in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.
In a previous study published in the journal Science, the researchers found eviden
Children raised in a house with two or more dogs or cats during the first year of life may be less likely to develop allergic diseases as compared with children raised without pets, according to a study in the August 28 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).
“The striking finding here is that high pet exposure ear
Citric acid may help alleviate chronic shortages of critical clotting factor
The common additive that gives “tartness” to orange juice, lemon juice and sodas also can dramatically boost the production of a protein critical for treating victims of hemophilia and other bleeding disorders, a UC Irvine study has found.
The findings indicate that citric acid, the juice additive, may help alleviate recurring shortages of a protein called Factor VIII, which is important for the norm
Rogue trees are being ‘fingered’ by gene detectives using a well-known technique to catch criminals.
Newcastle University scientists are using DNA fingerprinting to help insurers identify trees that are causing houses to subside.
Often disputes can last for several years, as when two trees of the same kind grow in an area it is very difficult to find out which one is behind the problem. This is because their roots – which can grow underneath a house and cause the subsidenc
The peculiar behavior of high-temperature superconductors has baffled scientists for many years. Now, by imaging the copper-oxide plane in a cuprate superconductor for the first time, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found several new pieces to this important puzzle.
As reported in the Aug. 19 issue of Physical Review Letters, physics professor Ali Yazdani, graduate student Shashank Misra, and colleagues used a scanning tunneling microscope to demonstrate t
There may well be a plastic biochip in your future, thanks in part to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Microfluidics devices, also known as “lab-on-a-chip” systems, are miniaturized chemical and biochemical analyzers that one day may be used for quick, inexpensive tests in physicians’ offices. Most microfluidics devices today are made of glass materials. Cheaper, disposable devices could be made of plastics, but their properties are not yet well understood.
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