Deserts covered Central Asia as early as 22 million years ago
The great Asian deserts developed 22 million years ago at the latest, 14 million years earlier than had been thought. So concludes a new analysis of Chinese soils, filling in another piece of the puzzle of the Himalayas’ birth.
Today, huge deserts characterize the vast landmasses inside Asia, the largest continent on Earth. Here, cut off by the Himalayas from the humidity of the Indian Ocean and far from any othe
Formidable catalogue puts army of ants online.
After four years of cooperation and tenacity worthy of their quarry, ant experts have completed Antbase, a centralized, online information resource cataloguing all 11,000 known species of ant.
Its creators hope that Antbase will one day become the ant equivalent of GenBank, the public database of genetic sequence data, and a boon not just for ant specialists, but for entomologists and ecologists of every kind.
Ant ta
Successful Test Observations With Powerful New Instrument at Paranal
One of the most fundamental tasks of modern astrophysics is the study of the evolution of the Universe. This is a daunting undertaking that requires extensive observations of large samples of objects in order to produce reasonably detailed maps of the distribution of galaxies in the Universe and to perform statistical analysis.
Much effort is now being put into mapping the relatively nearby space and the
It may be possible to find the causes for autism in over a third of cases, suggests research in the Journal of Medical Genetics. And these are likely to include a range of factors.
Autism is a chronic and severe disorder that takes the form of severely impaired language and social skills, delayed development, and repetitive behaviours. Three times as many boys as girls are affected, and three quarters of those with autism will have a mental disability. It is thought that a combination of a g
Pancreatic cancer is notoriously difficult to treat, largely because of the location of the pancreas close to major arteries and vital organs, and the effects of a poorly functioning pancreas on the rest of the body. It is one of the top 10 leading causes of death from cancer worldwide, and in the UK kills around 6500 people every year.
Doctors gave intravenous photosensitising agent (meso-tetrahydroxyphenyl chlorin) to 16 patients with inoperable pancreatic cancer. Three days later they ins
Many chemicals commonly used in medications such as over-the-counter painkillers or birth control pills end up far from their intended destination – in American streams. According to a new report, published online today by the journal Environmental Science and Technology, a number of the waterways contain complex cocktails of compounds.
The 30-state study, conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey, tested 139 streams for 95 organic contaminants – ranging from medications and hormones to inse
An inventive breakthrough from the Applied Optics Group at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC) is set to revolutionise current methods of eye examinations.
Professor David Jackson, Dr Adrian Podoleanu and Dr John Rogers, who gained his doctorate at Kent, have developed an instrument known as an Optical Dual Channel Tomograph. The instrument blends together two imaging technologies. Although in its early stages, it is already being used by ophthalmologists and researchers at New York`
Bouncing laser beams could bring quantum strangeness to the everyday world.
The quantum world of atoms and subatomic particles is full of intuition-defying phenomena such as objects existing in two different states at once. We don’t normally have to worry about such weirdness impinging on our everyday macroscopic world. But Italian physicists have worked out how to invest something we can see and touch with quantum strangeness.
Stefano Mancini, of the University of Mila
Chemists copy from cells to make a tunnel for salt
Chemists have finally achieved what every human cell can do. They have designed and built from scratch a gate for electrically charged chlorine atoms to pass through 1 .
George Gokel and colleagues at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, based their gate on biological proteins that transport chloride ions from one side of our cell membranes to the other. Like these, the synthetic channel can be opene
+++ EURESCOM for the first time demonstrates seamless access with a PDA. +++
Premiere at the EURESCOM workshop `Wireless Access` in Heidelberg on 12 March: The EURESCOM project on `Bluetooth Access` presented the first PDA, which can seamlessly connect to different access networks, like LAN, Bluetooth, Wireless LAN, and GPRS.
In co-operation with the software company Birdstep from Norway and access point supplier Patria Ailon from Finland, the European project team implement
There are two ways of dealing with the problem of nuclear waste. The first one is the easiest but not the most sensible: you can simply bury nuclear waste products and try to forget about them. However, this way does not seem to be the most rational. It seems much more attractive to try to derive some benefit from the situation. In this case it is worth extracting the compounds that could be used in future from the whole mass of nuclear wastes. In the first instance, these are non-burnt uranium and p
A lack of investment in corporate research may be counterproductive to industry says Dr Elsa Reichmanis, director of Materials Research at Lucent Technologies` Bell Labs, New Jersey, USA. In an exclusive Tomorrow’s Leaders online broadcast, Reichmanis stated ‘In order to succeed in the long term, investment in the future is a must, and that means investment in research.’
Dr Reichmanis made her remarks during a one-hour live broadcast at www.tomorrows-leaders.net. She answered questions fr
Report assesses chemical effects of Gulf war weapon.
Depleted uranium in weapons may have left some soldiers with kidney damage and could cause long-term environmental contamination, say British scientists. Their independent review calls for accurate exposure tests and long-term environmental monitoring in combat zones.
Depleted uranium (DU) is a dense radioactive substance. It was used in weapons to punch through heavily armoured vehicles during the Gulf War and Kosovo conf
The tobacco industry has deliberately deceived the public with “low tar/light” cigarettes, reveals an analysis in a special supplement to Tobacco Control. Industry documents show that companies recognised that low tar products were as dangerous as regular cigarettes, yet marketed them as healthy alternatives.
The authors analysed trade sources and internal US tobacco company documents. These show that the industry feared mounting evidence linking tobacco with lung cancer would discourage smo
Surplus of Intergalactic Material May Be Young Supercluster Observations with ESO`s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have enabled an international group of astronomers to study in unprecedented detail the surroundings of a very remote galaxy, almost 12 billion light-years distant. The corresponding light travel time means that it is seen at a moment only about 3 billion years after the Big Bang. This galaxy is designated MS 1512-cB58 and is the brightest known at such a large distance and
Virtual organ image beamed into OR.
Liver surgeon Rory McCloy carries a wad of CAT scans into his operations. “I spend my life looking at 60 slices of salami,” he says. Peering at the light-box, he constructs a mental picture of a tumour before making a cut. “I’m trying to do a 3D operation with 2D images,” he protests.
Despite the wide availability of 3D graphics programs, they rarely penetrate operating theatres. Frustrated by the technology void, McCloy, of Manchester Roy
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