Jubilant astronomers today unveiled humankind`s most spectacular views of the Universe as captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope`s new Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). They also reported that Hubble is operating superbly since the March servicing mission and are looking forward to more pictures from the newly revived NICMOS camera.
“The ACS is opening a wide new window onto the Universe. These are among the best images of the distant Universe humans have ever seen,” says Johns Hop
The key role of computer technology in the fine-tuning of drug development and design will be considered by Professor Stephen Muggleton of Imperial College, London in his inaugural lecture, Models of Mind and Models of Body, today.
The new Professor of Bioinformatics in the Department of Computing will focus on how machine learning and logic programming can reduce the high costs of drug development in the pharmaceutical industry.
The pharmaceutical industry is increasingly overwhelm
A novel prototype light meter has been developed by researchers in New York. Published today in the Institute of Physics journal, Measurement Science and Technology, this new retinal flux density meter will provide an affordable tool for measuring light at all levels and might ultimately lead to new standards to improve both energy efficiency and safety at night.
The retina in the eye detects light using cells called rods and cones. At high light levels, such as in daylight, the cones detec
A University of Ulster researcher has discovered a new population of cave dwelling crocodiles, never before seen outside their Saharan habitat.
PhD student Tara Shine discovered the cave dwelling crocodiles while living in the remote African country of Mauritania as part of a two and a half year volunteer project.
Previously unknown, except by local tribespeople, the crocodiles live in burrows and caves throughout the dry season and periods of drought – a phenomenon never
The promising link between certain properties in human hair which could have potentially helped in diagnosis of breast cancer is “dubious” according to research published today in the Institute of Physics journal, Physics in Medicine and Biology. Dr Mark Sutton of the McGill University in Canada and colleagues have found no clear association between peaks seen in what is known as small angle x-ray scattering and the risk of breast cancer, as had been reported previously in the journal Nature (James e
A new technique has been developed by researchers in the Netherlands to look at the effect of radiation from mobile phones on complex structures like the inner ear and eye. The technique called `quasistatic zooming` will help researchers calculate the amount of radiation from mobile phones absorbed by human tissue on scales of less than one millimetre. The work is published today in the Institute of Physics journal, Physics in Medicine and Biology.
Concern about the potentially hazardous e
An article in the May issue of Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine suggests that much of the medical inspiration for Mary Shelley’s legendary novel Frankenstein came not from central Europe, but from a retired Scots physician living in Windsor. Christopher Goulding, a postgraduate student at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, bases his claims on his PhD research into the scientific interests of the novelist’s husband, the poet Percy Shelley.
Most criticism of Mary Shelley’s much-in
It sounds like a photographer’s worst nightmare: the light of the flashbulb causes the subject of the photo to burst into flames. But that’s exactly what happened recently when researchers snapped a picture of some single-walled carbon nanotubes, tiny cylinders of pure carbon. The findings, described in a report published in the current issue of the journal Science, suggest that the minute straws could be used as triggering devices or for remote light-induced ignition.
The discovery was ma
Animals may have beaten upright plants to land.
The oldest fossils of footprints ever found on land hint that animals may have beaten plants out of the primordial seas. Lobster-sized, centipede-like animals made the prints wading out of the ocean and scuttling over sand dunes about 530 million years ago. Previous fossils indicated that animals didn’t take this step until 40 million years later.
“It’s staggering that we thought for all this time that animals appeared on land
Succession of relationships keeps heavenly bodies young
Astronomers have uncovered a scandalous degree of promiscuity in the cosmos. Clusters where stars gather more densely than usual are veritable hotbeds of partner-swapping. Some stars engage in half a dozen or so relationships during their lifetime 1 .
Star clusters range from loose groups of ten thousand or so stars to dense globular clusters of a million or more. They exist throughout galaxies like ours
A woman’s fertility starts declining as early as her late 20s – not in her 30s as was previously thought, according to a study published today (Tuesday 30 April) in Human Reproduction*, Europe’s leading journal of reproductive medicine.
The finding comes from a US-Italian study of 782 healthy couples who were using natural family planning methods to avoid pregnancy.
US-based lead author Dr David Dunson said that, to his knowledge, this was the first study to observe that a woman’s fertil
The most comprehensive picture yet of how dinosaurs evolved has been produced by a team at Bristol University.
More than 1,000 species of dinosaurs have been named since the first skeletons were dug up in the 19th century, and unravelling their patterns of evolution has been a major area of research.
Since 1980, over 150 evolutionary trees of dinosaurs have been published, most of them looking at small groups of species. The Bristol researchers have put all of these smaller
Peptic ulcer surgery seems to increase the risk of developing pancreatic cancer, finds research in the Journal of Clinical Pathology.
Pancreatic cancer is the fifth leading cause of death from cancer, largely because the prognosis is so poor.
Dutch researchers monitored the progress of 2633 patients who underwent surgery for the removal of a peptic or duodenal ulcer between 1931 and 1960. A preliminary analysis suggested that these patients had double the risk of developing pancrea
Common viral infections in early childhood do not protect against allergy, concludes research in Thorax. If anything, the evidence points to an increased risk.
The findings contradict the increasingly popular if general theory that the rise in prevalence of allergies and asthma is partly attributable to the fact that children are less frequently exposed to viral infections early in life – the so-called ‘hygiene hypothesis.’
The research focused on 889 pregnant Danish women, who wer
Fatty diets or high alcohol intake during pregnancy may lead to diabetes in children
Women who consume a high fat diet or who drink significant amounts of alcohol during pregnancy may increase the risk of their child developing diabetes as an adult according to a study in the current edition of the Journal of Endocrinology.
A team led by Dr Sam Pennington of the Department of Biochemistry, Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University has found that insulin resistance,
The pressure on the environment of building during the past 5000 years can be observed clearly from the air. In a recent lecture at the Society of Chemical Industry (SCI), aerial photographer and concrete specialist Christopher Stanley illustrated the evolution of construction and its lasting impact, from stone circles to skyscrapers.
Stanley’s lecture ‘Managing the environment: a perspective from land, air and sea’ followed the presentation of the 2002 SCI Environment Medal in recognition o
Feedback
