The Regea Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which operates under the University of Tampere in Finland, administered the first clinical stem cell therapy to two patients in cooperation with the Tampere University Hospital. The therapy was a success.

The patients suffered from severe, prolonged frontal sinusitis. An implant combining stem cells and biomaterial was inserted into the damaged bone. Since the therapy, the patients have been well and no longer suffer from frontal sinusitis.

Stem cell therapy was administered to patients with prolonged and severely symptomatic frontal sinusitis that destroyed bone tissue in the forehead. Other treatments such as traditional implants or fat tissue transplants failed to relieve infection.

The Internet is serving as a fertile medium for "HIV denialists" to spread false ideas about HIV/AIDS, which could have terrible public health consequences, say scientists in a policy paper in PLoS Medicine.

"It may seem remarkable that, 23 years after the identification of HIV, there is still denial that the virus is the cause of AIDS," say Tara Smith (University of Iowa College of Public Health) and Steven Novella (Yale University School of Medicine). But with the arrival of the Internet, HIV denialist organizations such as "Reappraising AIDS" have reignited their campaign to spread misinformation.

A team has examined over 300,000 genetic markers in thousands of asthmatic children and compared their data with those of healthy controls. The newly found gene, ORMDL3, is a promising object of research: it could help to improve the prevention and diagnosis of asthma, and possibly to develop a new therapy.

The scientists used the fact that the genetic material of different individuals shows differences. One type of DNA variants is called SNPs, short for “Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms”. They can be compared and statistically analysed.

By creating "Teflon" versions of natural antibiotics found in frog skin, a research team led by biological chemist E. Neil Marsh has made the potential drugs better at thwarting bacterial defenses, an improvement that could enhance their effectiveness.

Marsh and collaborators work with compounds called antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), which are produced by virtually all animals, from insects to frogs to humans. AMPs are the immune system's early line of defense, battling microbes at the first places they try to penetrate: skin, mucous membranes and other surfaces. They're copiously produced in injured or infected frog skin, for instance, and the linings of the human respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts also crank out the short proteins in response to invading pathogens.

Non-medicinal interventions are highly effective in preventing the behavioral and academic problems associated with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), according to a five-year study led by researchers at Lehigh University’s College of Education.

The study, titled “Project Achieve” and funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), was the largest of its kind focusing on children aged 3 to 5 who have shown significant symptoms of ADHD. It also involved researchers from Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown, Pa.

The researchers, led by George DuPaul, professor of school psychology at Lehigh; Lee Kern, professor of special education at Lehigh; and Dr.

Research can often be a thankless job for the researcher - logically even more so if you make your data available to the community at large. Someone in the peer community will challenge it, bloggers will pick it apart, newspapers will misinterpret it and someone, somewhere, will find a way to use it to bolster their favorite political argument.

The benefits of open science to the science community receiving the data are obvious. They get results without effort or money or time. Is there any benefit to the researcher and, if not, why would anyone do it?

We had our first SciFoo Lives On session today on Nature Island (Second Nature) in Second Life. We had about a dozen people participate. The topic was "Tools for Open Science". I wanted to explore more fully the actual technology that people are starting to use towards doing more open science. I started off by showing screenshots of UsefulChem wiki and blogs from my poster.

Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are uniting theory, computation and experiment to discover exactly how heavy elements, such as uranium and technetium, interact in their environment.

As part of that effort, scientists have combined sensitive experimental measurements with fi rst principle electronic structure calculations to measure, and to really understand, the structural and bonding parameters of uranyl, the most common oxidation state of uranium in systems containing water.

The insights were achieved by PNNL scientist Bert de Jong and associates Gary Groenewold of Idaho National Laboratory and Michael Van Stipdonk of Wichita State University, employing the supercomputing resources of the William R.

Errors in the genetic code can give rise to cancer and a host of other diseases, but finding these errors can be more difficult than looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack. Now, scientists at Johns Hopkins have uncovered how the tiny protein-machines in cells tasked to search for such potentially life-threatening genetic damage actually recognize DNA errors.

Appearing online next week in Nature, the Hopkins team describes how the UDG enzyme (for uracil DNA glycosylase) scrutinizes the shape of DNA building blocks by holding onto them and testing their fit into a specially sized pocket. The UDG pocket holds onto mistakes only — the enzyme loses its grip on the right building blocks, which fall back in line with the rest of the DNA.

Do bats use their ultrasonic echolocation calls to recognize their own species?

A new study in the Journal of Biogeography by Danilo Russo and colleagues suggests that this is certainly the case for Rhinolophidae - horseshoe bats. These bats find their way in the dark and detect insect prey by emitting long ultrasound calls mainly made of a constant frequency. Different rhinolophid species show different frequency values. It has been proposed that such differences are large enough to allow recognition of conspecifics.

The study proved that in Sardinia, Mediterranean (Rhinolophus euryale) and lesser (R.. hipposideros) horseshoe bats show divergence in call frequency, spacing them out more than their conspecifics living in peninsular Italy (i.e. on the mainland).