Roughly 15 billion years ago, during the Big Bang, equal amounts of matter and anti-matter should have been created, with an anti-particle for every particle created. Yet when matter and anti-matter meet, they both disappear in a flash of light, so why didn’t they annihilate each other completely? For some reason, during the first moments of the Big Bang, although lots of matter and anti-matter did meet and annihilate, we were left with a slight surplus of matter, which makes up the Universe today. W
Researchers of the Hospital of San Sebastian and the Biomedicine Institute of Valencia have discovered the genetic basis of hereditary epilepsy. The work leaded by the researchers Adolfo Lopez de Munain and Jordi Perez Tur has analysed the effect of the gene called LGI1/Epitempina.
Temporal lateral epilepsy is the type of epilepsy that affects the side of the brain. The main characteristic of this type of epilepsy is that patients hear some noises before they lose consciousness. Many researc
Work on developing a prototype wearable ’artificial pancreas’ to improve care and lifestyle for diabetic people is showing “very encouraging results” at City University, London.
The European Commission-funded project mimics the way that insulin is naturally delivered in the body and could mean that people with Type 1 diabetes – often babies and young children – could have their blood glucose levels much closer to normal than is currently possible.
“We have been developing
Psychologists have found that colors enhance an individual’s visual memory. From a series of experiments, researchers learned that subjects were more likely to recall the color version of an image than the same scene in black and white. The results, which appear in the May issue of the journal Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, also indicate that natural colors make a difference. A photo of a landscape with a green sky, for example, will not lodge as effectively in the brai
Core samples taken from far below the ocean floor are helping a University of Edinburgh geologist to form a picture of dramatic climate changes which took place 30 to 40 million years ago. Dr Bridget Wade is part of an international team of scientists studying climate shifts between the Eocene period – the warmest cycle in the last 65 million years – and the cooler Oligocene period, which saw the first major build-up of Antarctic ice. The study could shed new light on present climate trends as the Eo
Rollo, the home robot, has been developed by the Laboratories of Automation Technology, Information and Computer Systems in Automation and Control Engineering of the Helsinki University of Technology for seven years and is presently being adapted for home care and independent living at home. Rollo is part of the “Turning Well-Being Technology into a Success Story” – (iWELL) technology programme of the National Technology Agency Tekes.
“The reason why we arrived at a ball-shaped solution was
At sufficiently cold temperatures, the atoms in a gas can form what is known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), losing their individual identities and merging into a single quantum state. The phenomenon has fascinated physicists ever since gaseous BECs were created in the laboratory in 1995 (although the possiblity was first postulated some 70 years earlier), and a flurry of recent research has uncovered all kinds of remarkable condensate properties. Now researchers writing in the journal Nature ha
Fossil plants form new branch in flower family tree.
Fossils recently plucked from rocks in China are the first representatives of a hitherto unknown group of flowering plants, say their discoverers Ge Sun of Jilin University and colleagues 1 .
They also add to growing evidence that flowering plants, which now dominate the land, originally emerged from the water.
The researchers call the group Archaefructaceae. Its members probably flourished in lake
In order to function properly, living organisms need to eliminate defective cells. This rule is however not always abided by, as evidenced by cancer cells which no longer carry out the tasks originally set for them and yet continue to proliferate, as though they were ” ignoring ” commands from their environment. Cancer can thus be defined, inter alia, as an ailment affecting signal transduction.
A team working at the Institut Curie (Inserm Unit 528) have been looking into information-con
Marine reserves have rapid and lasting impacts on organisms inside reserves, according to scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In a paper published in the current issue of Ecology Letters, the researchers reviewed 80 studies from ‘no-take’ reserves, where it is illegal to extract organisms in any way. These showed that density, biomass, average size and diversity of organisms inside these reserves reach much higher levels within a short period of time, usually one to t
Researchers at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC) have been working with a group of more than two hundred volunteers from among the general public to develop better ways to tackle credit card fraud.
Working with partners across Europe, Professor Mike Fairhurst and Dr Farzin Deravi, from UKC`s Electronics Department, are currently developing a new smart card, which includes a small fingerprint sensor. The credit card user will need to match the fingerprint before the card can be used
Sustained use of the drug infliximab could offer substantial clinical benefit to people with Crohn’s disease, conclude authors of a study in this week’s issue of THE LANCET.
Crohn’s disease is a chronic inflammatory disorder of the intestines. Patients often have to be treated with steroids, which are associated with severe side-effects. Previous research has suggested that the drug infliximab could reduce disease symptoms in the short term; Stephen Hanauer and colleagues from the Universit
Teaching mothers how to implement controlled crying techniques can reduce infant sleep problems and symptoms of postnatal depression, finds a study in this week’s BMJ.
Researchers at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia identified 156 mothers of infants aged 6-12 months with severe sleep problems.
Mothers in the intervention group received advice on the use of controlled crying methods. They also received a sleep management plan, information about normal sleep patte
Walls and curtains could sport liquid-crystal digital displays.
Homes of the future could change their wallpaper from cream to cornflower blue at the touch of a button, says Dirk Broer. His team has developed paint-on liquid crystal displays (LCDs) that offer the technology.
Liquid crystals are peculiar liquids: their molecules spontaneously line up, rather than being randomly orientated as in a normal liquid. Passing a voltage across the molecules switches their alignment, b
Desire drives remote-controlled rodents.
Remote-controlled rats could soon be detecting earthquake survivors or leading bomb-disposal teams to buried land mines.
Signals from a laptop up to 500 metres away make the rats run, climb, jump and even cross brightly lit open spaces, contrary to their instincts. The rodents carry a backpack containing a radio receiver and a power source that transmits the signals into their brains through electrical probes the breadth of a hair.
Dark-matter detector could pin down the Universe’s missing mass.
Researchers in London are building a cheap dark-matter detector that should be able to spot the exotic particles called WIMPs that are suspected of hiding most of the Universe’s missing mass 1 .
A prototype of the detector has just shown, for the first time, that it can spot something as close to a WIMP as it’s possible to produce in the lab.
WIMP stands for ’weakly interacting massiv
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