A mild, experimental smallpox vaccine known as modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) is nearly as effective as the standard smallpox vaccine in protecting monkeys against monkeypox, a study by researchers of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of the National Institutes of Health, has found. Monkeypox is used to test the effectiveness of a smallpox vaccine because of its similarity to the smallpox virus. The study appears in the March 11 issue of Nature.

“These f

A decades-old mathematical model is being inappropriately used in at least 26 nations to make potentially costly predictions about how shorelines will retreat in response to rising sea levels, two coastal scientists contended in the Friday, March 19, 2004, issue of the research journal Science.

“Models can be a hazard to society, and this is certainly an example of such,” wrote Orrin Pilkey of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, and J. Andrew Cooper

An international team of physicists examining an extremely rare form of subatomic particle decay — a veritable golden needle in a micro-cosmic haystack of 7.8 trillion candidates — has discovered evidence for the highly sought process, which could be an indication of new forces beyond those incorporated in the Standard Model of particle physics. That long-standing theory of all particle physics precisely predicts the rate of such decays to be half that observed by the experimenters although it is s

These are exciting times for space exploration. For the first time in a generation, human missions beyond Earth orbit are being seriously considered by space agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe has initiated the Aurora programme, with the ultimate aim of landing people on Mars by 2033, while the U.S. has recently redirected its human space activities towards a return to the Moon.

On Friday 2 April, Dr. Ian Crawford, a planetary scientist based at Birkbeck College, London, will be

The planet Mars possesses two small moons named Phobos (Fear) and Deimos (Terror). Although their existence has been known since their discovery in 1877 and a number of long-range observations have been made by Earth-based telescopes and spacecraft that have visited Mars, the satellites remain only partially studied, particularly Deimos.

Consequently, a number of outstanding scientific questions remain concerning their origins, evolution, physical nature and composition. A recent study fund

Astronomers have discovered ten previously unknown likely black holes in the Andromeda Galaxy by means of a powerful new search technique they have devised. The Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest neighbouring spiral galaxy, 2.5 million light years away. Drs Robin Barnard, Ulrich Kolb and Carole Haswell of the Open University and Dr Julian Osborne of The University of Leicester used the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray observatory to find what are probably black holes lurking in dou

A group of scientists at The Scripps Research Institute, at the University of California in San Diego, and at the Oregon Hearing Research Center and Vollum Institute at Oregon Health & Science University have discovered a key molecule that is part of the machinery that mediates the sense of hearing.

In a paper that will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Nature, the team reports that a protein called cadherin 23 is part of a complex of proteins called “tip links” that are on hair ce

A single strand of plant or animal DNA may contain tens of thousands of genes, each programmed to produce a specific protein essential for the growth or survival of the organism. The challenge for geneticists is to isolate individual genes and determine their function – a painstaking process often requiring years of laboratory trial and error.

Now an international research team has discovered a technique that dramatically streamlines this process for certain kinds of genes. Developed by sc

Neurobiologists have discovered that a nearly identical version of a gene whose mutation produces an inherited language deficit in humans is a key component of the song-learning machinery in birds.

The researchers, who published their findings in the March 31, 2004, issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, said that their finding will aid research on how genes contribute to the architecture and function of brain circuitry for singing in birds.

Among the lead researchers was neurobiol

Optimizing space missions

Titan, the largest moon of Saturn was discovered by Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens in 1655 and certainly deserves its name. With a diameter of no less than 5,150 km, it is larger than Mercury and twice as large as Pluto. It is unique in having a hazy atmosphere of nitrogen, methane and oily hydrocarbons. Although it was explored in some detail by the NASA Voyager missions, many aspects of the atmosphere and surface still remain unknown. Thus, the existenc

Food packs, containers, toothpaste tubes, wheels, glue, paints … they are all made of polymers. The world of polymers is infinite and, so, there is a great variety. The majority have been designed for a specific application; given that at times the application might be for a food container and, at others, for the superstructure of a vehicle. The specifications needed in either case are quite different.

Polymers are gigantic molecules, but they are synthesised from small compounds: monomer

Over the next two years, researchers at Binghamton University and partnered institutions will be helping to protect life as we know it. While the claim might sound extreme, keep in mind that they will be working to improve the design and energy efficiency of data centers.

Data centers. Thousands of them. All processing vital information, critically important to much that drives our daily lives– from world financial markets, government and military operations, business and industry, worldwi

The hunt for space rocks on a collision course with Earth has so far been pretty much limited to the Northern Hemisphere. But last week astronomers took the search for Earth-threatening asteroids to southern skies. Astronomers using a refurbished telescope at the Australian National University’s Siding Spring Observatory discovered their first two near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) on March 29. NEAs are asteroids that pass near the Earth and may pose a threat of collision. Si

A revolutionary new type of vehicle only one metre wide and specially designed to be driven in cities is being developed by a team of European scientists.

The vehicle combines the safety of a micro-car and the manoeuvrability of a motorbike, while being more fuel-efficient and less polluting than other vehicles.

The CLEVER (Compact Low Emission Vehicle for Urban Transport) vehicle is a £1.5 million collaborative project involving nine European partners from industry and rese

Humans can affect marine life in unexpected ways, as when large numbers of seals succumbed to canine distemper virus in 2000, presumably contracted from domestic dogs. Such human incursions cause even more damage by exacerbating the effects of naturally occurring parasitic and pathogenic diseases. While all indicators point to a real increase in disease in marine organisms, scientists have no baseline data to measure these increases against and so cannot directly test whether marine diseases are gen

VLT looks through narrow atmospheric window and produces most detailed images yet New images of unsurpassed clarity have been obtained with the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) of formations on the surface of Titan, the largest moon in the Saturnian system. They were made by an international research team [1] during recent commissioning observations with the “Simultaneous Differential Imager (SDI)”, a novel optical device, just installed at the NACO Adaptive Optics instrument [2].

With the hi

Berkeley Lab physicists develop way to digitally restore and preserve
audio recordings
The 1995 discovery of the top quark and singer Marian Anderson’s 1947 rendition of Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen may seem unrelated. But through an interagency agreement with the Library of Congress, the same technology used to study subatomic particles is helping to restore and preserve the sounds of yesteryear.

“We developed a way to image the grooves in a recording that is simil

Grasses typify the Great Plains, so it’s not surprising that more than 108 species of grasshoppers are at home on the range in the central United States.

However, a grasshopper that doesn’t love grass lives in Kansas too, a recent discovery at Kansas State University’s Konza Prairie Biological Station shows. This newfound hopper prefers trees.

The first specimen was actually collected in September 2001 by a student from Fort Riley Middle School, according to Valerie

The Arecibo Observatory telescope, the largest and most sensitive single dish radio telescope in the world, is about to get a good deal more sensitive

Today (Wednesday, April 21) the telescope got a new “eye on the sky” that will turn the huge dish, operated by Cornell University for the National Science Foundation, into the equivalent of a seven-pixel radio camera.

The complex new addition to the Arecibo telescope was hauled 150 meters (492 feet) above the telescope’s

Saddle-shaped structure provides the spring to generate powerful punch

Forget boxers Oscar de la Hoya and Shane Mosley. The fastest punches are delivered by a lowly crustacean – the stomatopod, or mantis shrimp.

With the help of a BBC camera crew and the loan of a high-speed video camera, University of California, Berkeley, scientists have recorded the swiftest kick, and perhaps most brutal attack, of any predator. The shrimp flail their club-shaped front leg at peak speeds