When earthquakes strike, people often get trapped in buildings. Search and rescue teams can pinpoint some victims using sniffer dogs and sensors. But a new European system that takes pictures during or after a building collapse promises to save many more lives.

The ‘low-cost catastrophic event capturing system’ is the fruit of the IST Loccatec project. It comprises capturing devices (small, autonomous infrared cameras) and a portable central unit for the rescue teams. The cameras – p

It started with tennis balls. As a former collegiate tennis player, Daniela Rus habitually rolls two tennis balls around in her hand as she paces her office. As a robotics researcher at Dartmouth College, she wondered why the tennis balls shouldn’t be able to roll themselves around.

She soon determined that electromagnets didn’t have enough lifting power to solve the tennis-ball problem. However, her question led to a decade-long research program into the challenges of designing robot

A new study being carried out at the University of Leicester traces the erosion of the traditional concept of Maasai manhood and the emergence of new role for Maasais- reliving their warrior dreams in paid employment, business or trading in livestock.

The romantic notion of the ‘noble savage’ Maasai warrior, replete with traditional ponytails and weapons- a key image for tourism in Kenya – masks a crisis of cultures that has blighted this once proud tribal race, according to a study

The issue (31 august) of the US scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), one of the most prestigious in the world, carries an article on important aspects related to a molecule (ADPglucose) which is required for plants to produce starch.

In order to assess the importance of this research of the Public University of Navarre, two fundamental factors have to be taken into account: one is the annual production of starch derived from the main vegetables a

Mesothelioma is an aggressive cancer of the chest cavity that kills about 2000 people a year in the United States. Seventy to eighty percent of patients with this rare cancer have had exposure to asbestos. It has also been proposed that simian virus 40 (SV40), a contaminant in some polio vaccines administered in the 1950’s and 1960’s, might be a cause. However, studies reporting the detection of SV40 DNA in human tumors (including mesotheliomas, and also some lymphomas, brain cancers, an

Cannabinoid receptor necessary, but can’t be overloaded, mouse model shows

Marijuana use may increase the risk of ectopic (tubal) pregnancies, researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center reported this week. The researchers studied CB1, a “cannabinoid” receptor that binds the main active chemical for marijuana, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).

In pregnant mice that lacked the gene for the receptor, or in which the receptor was blocked, the embryo failed to go

In the midst of crammed slums in the Nicaraguan district of Matagalpa, aid workers are hunting house-to-house for hidden killers, their search guided by high-resolution satellite imagery supplied through an ESA-backed project.

Their targets are blood-sucking reduviid insects, generally known as ’kissing bugs’ because they emerge from their hiding places each night to bite human skin where it is thinnest – around the mouth and eyes. Growing up to five centimetres long, the kissing bug

A new class of very small handheld devices can detect motion a thousand times more subtly than any tool known.

“There was nothing in the [optics] literature to predict that this would happen,” says Sandia National Laboratories researcher Dustin Carr of his group’s device, which reflects a bright light from a very small moving object.

Sandia is a National Nuclear Security Administration laboratory.

Carr, who earlier gained fame as a graduate student at Cornell

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh are launching a new two-year study aimed at improving treatment for three of Scotland’s most common life-threatening diseases: heart disease, stroke and diabetes. The study will recruit 1,000 adults from one of the remotest parts of the UK– the North Isles of Orkney. The islands have been chosen for the project because the people living there are isolated geographically, which means they share a more similar environment: there is less variety in

Call To Rename Class Of Muscle-Derived IL-6 As “Myokines”

For the most of the past century, researchers have searched for a muscle-contraction-induced factor, which mediates some of the exercise effects in other tissues and organs such as the liver and adipose tissue. In their quest for this magic trigger, or class of effectors, it’s been referred to as the “work stimulus,” “work factor” or the “exercise factor.”

Bente Karlund Pedersen, professor of internal medicine at R

A team of University of Florida researchers has invented a way to rapidly detect traces of TNT or other hidden explosives simply by shining a light on any potentially contaminated object, from a speck of dust in the air to the surface of a suitcase. “We have to find explosives quickly, inexpensively and, particularly, reliably,” said Rolf Hummel, a UF professor emeritus of materials science and engineering who heads the lab where the method was invented.

The development provides in

Combination of computer science and biology could aid cancer research

In a boost to cancer research, Princeton scientists have invented a fast and reliable method for identifying alterations to chromosomes that occur when cells become malignant. The technique helps to show how cells modify their own genetic makeup and may allow cancer treatments to be tailored more precisely to a patient’s disease. Cancer cells are known among biologists for their remarkable ability to disable s

Results of a new study in monkeys offer scientists a rare glimpse of how, on a molecular level, the smallpox virus attacks its victims. The findings shed light on how the virus caused mass death and suffering, and will help point the way to new diagnostics, vaccines and drugs that would be needed in the event of a smallpox bioterror incident.

The study, led by David Relman, M.D., of Stanford University, is now online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS

Researchers have identified a molecule that can transform the mechanical stimulus of a sound wave into an electrical signal recognizable by the brain. The protein forms an ion channel that opens in response to sound, causing electrical impulses that communicate the pitch, volume, and duration of a sound to the brain.

Scientists have long suspected that such a molecule must exist in the tiny cilia extending from receptor cells in the inner ear. Now, researchers led by Howard Hughes M

Doing a little now to mitigate long-term climate change would cost much less than doing nothing and making an adjustment in the future, say scientists whose paper appears in the Oct. 15 issue of the journal Science.

Implementing a carbon tax of five cents per gallon of gasoline and gradually increasing the tax over the next 30 years is the optimal solution, the researchers report. “You can think of the tax as a low-cost insurance policy that protects against climate change,” sa

Purdue University chemists have developed a fast, efficient means of analyzing chemical samples found on surfaces, resulting in a device that could impact everything from airport security to astrobiology to forensic science.

A team, including R. Graham Cooks, has improved the mass spectrometer, a device well known to chemists for its ability to provide information on the composition of unknown substances. Mass spectrometers, essential tools in any modern chemistry lab, are often

Along with five European academic laboratories, researchers from the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) connected to Ghent University are accelerating the study of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana.

Taking advantage of the new RNAi technology, they are able to study the function of genes with the aid of specially designed fragments that turn off the corresponding genes. The scientists are building a collection of such fragments in Arabidopsis. Their ul

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have discovered the gene for a form of Joubert Syndrome, a condition present before birth that affects an area of the brain controlling balance and coordination in about 1 in 10,000 individuals. Their study, published in the November 2004 issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics*, pointed to mutations in a gene called AHI1 that lead to the production of a protein the scientists named Jouberin.

For the first time, researchers from the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) connected with the Catholic University of Leuven have shown clearly that receptors in yeast cells detect and react to nutrients in the cell. The chance is great that this is also the case with human cells. Because about 40% of today’s medicines act on receptors in our cells, this research opens new possibilities for the treatment of metabolic disorders such as diabetes and obesity.

A University of Florida scientist has grown a living “brain” that can fly a simulated plane, giving scientists a novel way to observe how brain cells function as a network.

The “brain” — a collection of 25,000 living neurons, or nerve cells, taken from a rat’s brain and cultured inside a glass dish — gives scientists a unique real-time window into the brain at the cellular level. By watching the brain cells interact, scientists hope to understand what causes neural disorde