The population of the aged, globally, is growing inexorably and by 2020, the figure will have risen by 25%. In fact, the number of those in their 80s will have more than doubled. This means changes in family structures: there are more and more elderly persons living alone while the number of carers is falling.
Falls are one of the most common problems amongst the elderly, 30% of them having a fall at least once a year and representing 75% of the total number of victims of falls. 70% of accid
A new discovery of microbial activity in 3.5 billion-year-old volcanic rock and one of earth’s earliest signs of geological existence sheds new light on the antiquity of life, says University of Alberta researchers who are part of a team that made the groundbreaking finding.
“People have been looking for signs of early bacteria for the last 50 years,” said Dr. Karlis Muehlenbachs, from the U of A’s Faculty of Science and an author on the paper just published in the journal Science
Innovation for People-this is what the project “Design for Well-Being” at Luleå University of Technology is all about. If people’s needs can be captured and carefully considered, then technology can help us feel better. This is the basic approach that is guiding eleven of the students in this year’s version of the course titled SIRIUS-Creative Product Development. Together with students from Stanford University and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, they are developing a wheelchair
Scientists have taken a significant leap forward in understanding the complex ways that molecules work together in cells. The work of the Structural & Computational Programme at EMBL-Heidelberg, in collaboration with Cellzome AG, appears in the current issue of the journal Science (March 26, 2004).
Although scientists already know a lot about single molecules, they know very little about how they are assembled into larger molecular complexes or “machines” and how these machines work together
The Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) is today launching a new initiative to unite biologists and medical researchers with physicists, engineers, computer scientists and mathematicians to work on an innovative approach to discovering the next generation of drugs.
CMI is funding a transatlantic Next-Generation Drug Discovery Community that will bring together researchers at Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with partners from the IT, pharmaceutical and biot
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have come up with computational tools that serve as a virtual screening lab to help chemists weed through millions of possible drug candidates even before they dirty their first test tube.
Chemist Curt Breneman, mathematician Kristin Bennett, and computer scientist Mark Embrechts developed faster and more accurate techniques for describing molecules and combined them with next-generation neural networks and learning methods as part of the
It looks like a tornado
A team consisting of an art student and mechanical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis has made an award-winning movie that captures for the first time the fluid mechanics phenomenon of two things that classically don’t mix, doing just that.
Amy Shen, Ph.D., assistant professor of mechanical engineering, her graduate student William Alexander and Arts & Sciences art major Sarah Roland, have photographed three different oils atop a layer o
From corn to carp to the bacteria in yogurt, people have modified organisms for specific traits for centuries. Today, genetic engineering offers the potential to provide new benefits and new risks, as does any new technology. The Ecological Society of America (ESA)’s scientific position paper, “Genetically engineered organisms and the environment: Current status and recommendations,” authored by an ESA committee of experts, addresses the nature of genetically engineered organisms (GEOs) and thei
Before humans can leave their boot prints on the dusty surface of Mars, many questions have to be answered and many problems solved. One of the most fundamental questions – one that has intrigued humankind for centuries – is whether life has ever existed on Mars, the most Earthlike of all the planets.
Through its long-term Aurora Programme of solar system exploration, ESA is already preparing a series of robotic missions that will reveal the Red Planet’s secrets and pave the way for a human
Madzuu is a village in Kenya’s western highlands and Lake Victoria basin where the rainfall is abundant, and there is some access to urban markets. And yet about 61 percent of the village population earned less than 50 cents a day in real terms in both 1989 and 2002. Many people there are trapped in chronic poverty from which escape is difficult.
Alice Pell, professor of animal science at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., is the principal investigator on a five-year, multidisciplinary
There are no general laws of human relationships as there are for physics, but a leading marital researcher and group of applied mathematicians have teamed up to create a mathematical model that predicts which couples will divorce with astonishing accuracy. The model holds promise of giving therapists new tools for helping couples overcome patterns of interaction that can send them rushing down the road toward divorce.
Psychologist John Gottman and applied mathematicians James D. Murray and
Findings Could Lead to Faster Electronic Devices
Working at the nexus of biology and nanotechnology, a researcher and an alumnus from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have released findings that could lead to the tailoring of bacterial processes for a host of smaller, faster semiconductors and other electronic devices.
Pulickel Ajayan, professor of materials science and engineering at Rensselaer, and geobiologist Ronald Oremland reported that three different kinds of common
“The light shines brilliantly these days at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL). The start up of SSRL’s new synchrotron light facility, SPEAR3, guarantees a world-class program in x-ray science for years to come,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. “This is the first time the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health have joined in funding an accelerator research facility. I expect this to be a long and productive collaboration whose impact will be truly
Preparing for the arrival of the first European Automated Transfer Vehicle. Europe’s scientific utilisation of the International Space Station (ISS) took an important step forward with the launch of an unmanned Russian Progress cargo spacecraft today at 12:58 Central European Time (16:58 local time) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The Progress supply vehicle will take two days to reach the International Space Station, carrying experiment hardware for the Delta mission to be
Using math and physics to investigate mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE) and similar diseases caused by infectious proteins called prions is the aim of research by physicists Daniel Cox, Rajiv Singh and colleagues at UC Davis. The researchers are using mathematical models to study issues such as the incubation time, prion “strains” and treatment or detection strategies.
Diseases such as BSE in cattle, Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in humans and chronic wasting disease in d
Scientists interested in the Earth’s carbon cycle – something that must be understood to assess the ongoing effects of carbon dioxide created by human actions, such as driving cars – have a new problem. They need to adjust various calculations because one component, graphitic black carbon, similar to the material found in pencil lead, turns out to be so tough.
In a letter in today’s issue of Nature, researchers say that graphitic black carbon is created as sedimentary rocks undergo
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