A 25-year-old man will undergo Western Australia’s first ever simultaneous bilateral cochlear implant operation on Thursday 9 February at St John of God Hospital in Subiaco.

Danny Clarke will have two cochlear hearing devices implanted in both his ears at the same time.

Danny, who became a successful search and rescue helicopter air crewman despite losing his hearing in his right ear due to a fall at the age of 11, became permanently deaf last year after being at

Gold compounds have been used for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases for more than 75 years, but until now, how the metals work has been a mystery. Harvard Medical School researchers report in the Feb. 27 issue of Nature Chemical Biology that special forms of gold, platinum, and other classes of medicinal metals work by stripping bacteria and virus particles from the grasp of a key immune system protein.

“We were searching for a new drug to treat autoimmun

… Management of Dementia

Alzheimer’s disease–specific biomarkers clearly are needed for the differential diagnosis of cognitive impairment in the elderly. What sets age-related disorders like hypertension, hypercholesterolemia and diabetes mellitus apart from Alzheimer’s disease is that each has biomarkers that can be followed easily and repeatedly, not simply to diagnose, but also to monitor response and optimize treatment. In contrast, the current role of clinical labor

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found how coffee can reduce the risk of alcohol-induced pancreatitis.

Pancreatitis is a condition in which the pancreas becomes inflamed, causing severe abdominal pain. It is often triggered by alcohol consumption which causes digestive enzymes to digest part of the pancreas.

Scientists have known for some time that coffee can reduce the risk of alcoholic pancreatitis, but have been unable to determine how. Researchers at

Found with genes that control human immune response, discovery could lead to safer and more effective psoriasis treatments

University of Michigan scientists have found a common genetic variation in an immune system gene that makes people much more likely to develop psoriasis – a disfiguring inflammatory skin disease.

Named PSORS1 (SORE-ESS-1), for psoriasis susceptibility 1, the gene is the first genetic determinant of psoriasis to be definitively identified in a large c

Evidence never dies in the popular TV show Cold Case. Nor do some traces of life disappear on Earth, Mars, or elsewhere. An international team of scientists,* including researchers from the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory, has developed techniques to detect miniscule amounts of biological remains, dubbed biosignatures, in the frozen Mars-like terrain of Svalbard, a island north of Norway. This technology will be used on future life-search missions to the Red Planet. The work is

British scientists are joining colleagues from around the world today (Thursday March 30th 2006) at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in the USA to share the first results from a new neutrino experiment. The Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) is designed to study ghostly particles called neutrinos and in particular to study how the three different types are able to transform one into the other. In their first data release, the MINOS team has already reached the sensi

First results from the Arecibo Galaxy Environment Survey (AGES) suggest the discovery of a new dark galaxy. The AGES survey, which started in January 2006, is the most sensitive, large-scale survey of neutral hydrogen to date. Neutral hydrogen is found in most galaxies and it is a key tool in the search for dark galaxies as it can be detected even when there are no stars or other radiation sources to “shine a light” on matter.

The new candidate dark galaxy is located near NGC1156, an appar

Dutch researcher Maarten de Rijke and his co-workers Gilad Mishne and Krisztian Balog have developed a new programme that can trace and explain significant changes in mood patterns on the Internet. MoodViews is a collection of instruments that maps the mood of bloggers as they write their message.

Internet diaries, blogs, are an increasingly common phenomenon on the Internet. The opinions and experiences of tens of millions of people can be followed every day. Researchers from the P

Bilingual search for long-term preservation resources available free of charge

Access to German and international sources of information

The “nestor” network of expertise in long-term preservation of digital resources has just put into practice an agreement made in April 2005 between the Australian colleagues working on the PADI (Preserving Access to Digital information) portal at the National Library of Australia and the nestor partner, Goettingen State and University

Researchers from the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) connected to the University of Antwerp are the first to show that the quantity of amyloid protein in brain cells is a major risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. Amyloid protein has already been known to be the primary component of the senile plaques in the brains of patients. The new discovery demonstrates that the greater the quantity of the protein that is produced, the younger the dementia patient is.

Researchers from the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) connected to the University of Antwerp are the first to show that the quantity of amyloid protein in brain cells is a major risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. Amyloid protein has already been known to be the primary component of the senile plaques in the brains of patients. The new discovery demonstrates that the greater the quantity of the protein that is produced, the younger the dementia patient is.

Researchers at Fox Chase Cancer Center have developed a new technique to speed discovery of drug targets in chemical genetics. As highlighted on the April cover of Chemistry & Biology, Fox Chase researcher Jeffrey R. Peterson, Ph.D., and his colleagues describe a new way to swiftly find the proteins targeted by small molecule inhibitors during high-throughput screening (HTS) experiments. The new work offers a critical solution to a common stumbling block in this booming field of drug discovery.

The Binary Research Institute (BRI) has found that orbital characteristics of the recently discovered planetoid, “Sedna”, demonstrate the possibility that our sun might be part of a binary star system. A binary star system consists of two stars gravitationally bound orbiting a common center of mass. Once thought to be highly unusual, such systems are now considered to be common in the Milky Way galaxy.

Walter Cruttenden at BRI, Professor Richard Muller at UC Berkeley, Dr. Daniel Whitmire

Biologists have vastly expanded understanding of the biological machinery controlling the intricate process by which plant roots burgeon from single cells into complex tissues. A Duke-led team’s discovery of new components of the root-development pathway in the mustard plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, represents both a scientific and technical achievement, the scientists said.

Scientifically, Arabidopsis is a basic biological model for all flowering plants, so the finding offers insigh

In a painstaking set of experiments in overweight mice, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered a gene that appears to play an important role in the onset of type 2 diabetes.

The finding is important because it provides evidence that the same gene in humans could provide clinicians with a powerful tool to determine the likelihood that some individuals will acquire the condition. Moreover, the finding that the gene works through a pathway not generally

Recent discoveries at Mayo Clinic added two more cardiac genes to the list of potential links to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), increasing the possibility that genetic defects of the heart may cause up to 15 percent of SIDS cases. This research will be presented Friday at Heart Rhythm 2006, the 27th Annual Scientific Sessions of the Heart Rhythm Society in Boston.

In the two recent separate studies, researchers examined caveolin-3 (CAV3) and the cardiac ryanodine recept

Oregon Health & Science University researchers have identified the gene behind a group of rare, progressive childhood disorders caused by an abnormal buildup…

It’s the crucial last link in the SOA chain and it’s fraught with risks and challenges. “Improving service description, then announcing that those services are…

By generating tumors in laboratory mice that mimic human liver cancer and by comparing the DNA of mouse and human tumors, researchers at Cold Spring Harbor…