Using mobile telephones in hospitals reduces the error rate in medical care because of more timely communication and rarely causes electronic magnetic interference, Yale School of Medicine researchers report this month.

The study published in February’s Anesthesia & Analgesia is believed to be the first to investigate whether use of cell phones by medical personnel has a beneficial impact on safety. It was based on 4,018 responses from attendees at the 2003 meeting of the

An international team of scientists affiliated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center has coaxed a self-assembling material into forming never-before-seen, three-dimensional nanoscale structures, with potential applications ranging from catalysis and chemical separation to semiconductor manufacturing.

Led by UW-Madison chemical and biological engineering professors Paul Nealey and Juan de Pablo and colleagues at Georg-August University

A team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Purdue University, and the Russian Academy of Sciences has used sound waves to induce nuclear fusion without the need for an external neutron source, according to a paper in the Jan. 27 issue of Physical Review Letters. The results address one of the most prominent questions raised after publication of the team’s earlier results in 2004, suggesting that “sonofusion” may be a viable approach to producing neutrons for a variety of appl

An object’s history and how it arose, in other words its provenance, grant it status. Translating this to computing will allow the information generated and managed within distributed networks to be proven and trusted. Laying the foundations for this translation is a team of European researchers.

The importance of understanding the process by which a result was generated is fundamental to many real-life applications in science, engineering, medical domain, supply management, etc. W

Researchers from Liverpool John Moores University’s Astrophysics Research Institute working as part of an international team of experts have made an exciting discovery that could help in the ongoing search for ‘other Earths’.

Mike Bode, LJMU’s Professor in Astrophysics, explained: “Until the 1990s, the only planets we knew of were the ones that orbited the Sun in our Solar System. Over the last 10 years, we have discovered around 170 planets around other stars, known as

Single-walled carbon nanotubes wrapped with DNA can be placed inside living cells and detect trace amounts of harmful contaminants using near infrared light, report researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their discovery opens the door to new types of optical sensors and biomarkers that exploit the unique properties of nanoparticles in living systems.

“This is the first nanotube-based sensor that can detect analytes at the subcellular level,” said Michael Str

Working with an international team of scientists, a Florida State University physics professor has taken part in an experiment that resulted in the creation of a silver atom with exotic properties never before observed. The team’s observations represent another step forward in science’s long journey to understand the nuclear reactions that power stars and produce all matter.

Sam Tabor, a professor of experimental nuclear physics at FSU and director of the university’

Distant Planet Brings Astronomers Closer To Home

Using a network of telescopes scattered across the globe, including the Danish 1.54m telescope at ESO La Silla (Chile), astronomers [1] discovered a new extrasolar planet significantly more Earth-like than any other planet found so far. The planet, which is only about 5 times as massive as the Earth, circles its parent star in about 10 years. It is the least massive exoplanet around an ordinary star detected so far and also the

Discovery of small, rocky, extrasolar world suggests such planets may be common

Using a relatively new planet-hunting technique that can spot worlds one-tenth the mass of our own, researchers have discovered a potentially rocky, icy body that may be the smallest planet yet found orbiting a star outside our solar system.

The discovery suggests the technique, gravitational microlensing, may be an exceptional technology for finding distant planets with traits that could su

Perhaps edging closer to finding planets that harbor life, astronomers have discovered the smallest planet yet identified outside our solar system.

Researchers, including a University of Florida astronomer, found the planet, which has a mass about five times that of Earth, orbiting a small star near the center of the galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius.

Located about three times as far away from its star as the distance from Earth to the sun, it is probably too cold

The EUREKA project E! 2288 on Computer-aided orthopaedic care (MEDAC) is helping orthopaedic surgeons to not only document their clinical cases, but to also manage and analyse all patient data compiled. This award-winning project is revolutionising orthopaedic research and could be applicable to many other specialist areas of medicine. Patients benefit from a fast and documented diagnosis, while surgeons gain access to vast resources of reference data and the means to analyse their own patients

Researchers at Ohio State University have found a way to boost the development of pattern recognition software by taking a different approach from that used by most experts in the field.

This work may impact research in areas as diverse as genetics, economics, climate modeling, and neuroscience.

Aleix Martinez, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State, explained what all these areas of research have in common: pattern recognition.

XMM-Newton, ESA’s X-ray observatory, continues its quest for the unknown. This month, after five years of operations, the mission saw the publication of its 1000th scientific paper, corresponding to an equivalent number of results, in top-class scientific journals. This is not the only record-breaking figure for this X-ray ’hunter’ mission.

There are several ways to measure the scientific success of a mission. One is certainly to look at the use the scientific commu

A team based in Livermore has shed some new light on the phase diagram of carbon at high pressure and temperature.

In particular, the authors determined the solid/liquid and solid/solid phase boundaries for pressures up to 20 million Earth atmospheres and more than 10,000 degrees Kelvin. The simulations provide results on the physical properties of carbon, which are of great importance for devising models of Neptune, Uranus and white dwarf stars, as well as of extrasolar carbon-

Subtropical diseases lay waste to millions of people each year. In the quest to find a cure scientists are using Grid computing, the major driving force for new approaches towards collaborative large-scale science, to discover new drugs and better understand the diseases.

Last year there were about 350-500 million infections and approximately 1.3 million deaths due to malaria, mainly in the tropics. Malaria is spread by female mosquitoes, which carry protozoan parasites called Pla

A single molecule working as the nano scale version of the steam engine: that’s the molecular motor developed by a group of UT scientists led by prof. Julius Vancso of the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology. Natural ‘motor molecules’, capable of converting chemical energy into movement, have been the source of inspiration for this new synthetic version: a polymer molecule that stretches and shrinks caused by redox reactions. The results appear on the cover of Rapid Macromolecular Rapid Com