Scientists have reported that an experimental vaccine targeting one of the most common genetic drivers of pancreatic cancer, called mutant KRAS, is safe and generated a durable immune responses aimed at preventing the cancer.
When it comes to what's for dinner – or breakfast and lunch for that matter - too many people suffer from chemophobia, an irrational fear of chemicals that pose no risk to our health.
Chemistry Professor Gordon Gribble argues that low doses of chemicals in modern food are inherent, typically harmless and often highly beneficial. He says most people don't know they are routinely exposed to a host of compounds in non-toxic concentrations in what they eat and drink each day.
Even the air we breathe, whether in big cities or the countryside, is full of naturally occurring and synthetic chemicals, including wine "aroma," flower "bouquet," perfume "fragrance," bakery "smell" and "garbage "stench."
Physicists have successfully teleported information in a solid state system for the first time - they moved information from A to B for the first time in an electronic circuit, similar to a computer chip.
The essential difference between their method and the usual computer chip is that the information is not stored and processed based on the laws of classical physics, but on those of quantum physics. The researchers were able to teleport information across a distance of about six millimeters, from one corner of a chip to the opposite one. This was shown to be possible without transporting the physical object carrying the information itself from the sender's to the receiver's corner.
The Earth has periodic ice ages - every 100,000 years, give or take, and the ice ages last far longer than the warm periods.
In the last century, scientists determined that Earth's ice ages were determined by the wobbling of the planet's orbit, which changes its orientation to the sun and affects the amount of sunlight reaching higher latitudes, particularly the polar regions. The Northern Hemisphere's last ice age ended about 20,000 years ago and then the ice age in the Southern Hemisphere ended about 2,000 years later, suggesting that the south was responding to warming in the north.
But new research says that Antarctic warming began at least two, and perhaps four, millennia earlier than previously thought.
Which strategies give players an edge at winning in multi-player real-time strategy games like Warcraft III/ Defense of the Ancients or Starcraft II?
An analysis technique by North Carolina State University computer scientists offers extremely precise information about how a player's actions affect a team's chances of winning, and could be used to develop technology for use by players and developers to improve gameplay experiences.
Their technique various existing analytical tools to evaluate logs of player actions from thousands of real-time strategy games. They then used that information to develop a set of rules governing team gameplay strategies, in order to identify which approaches give teams the best chance of winning.
Cleaner drinking water with fewer chemicals may be made possible using ... bacteria.
A research team studied four bacteria, Sphingobium, Xenophilus, Methylobacterium and Rhodococcus, found in a city's drinking water to see which combinations were more likely to produce a 'biofilm'. Biofilms are layers of bacteria which form on the inner surfaces of water pipes. Like in many instances, bacteria can be harmful or not.
For as much as the War of the Roses has been over-analyzed and documented, you'd think researchers would know where the Battle of Bosworth, which brought the Plantagenet King of England Richard III to a grisly end at the hands of the Tudors, was fought.Not really. it was thought that the Battle of Bosworth took place at a site in Leicestershire called Ambion Hill. There is a battlefield heritage center there. Like Glastonbury being the burial place of King Arthur, sometimes the English just pick a spot.
Zoos have used water moats to confine chimpanzees, gorillas or orangutans. When apes ventured into deep water, they often drowned, which indicated that apes could not learn to swim and so prefer to stay on dry land.But it turns out that they can.Two researchers have video-based observation of swimming and diving apes. Instead of the usual dog-paddle stroke used by most terrestrial mammals, these animals use a kind of breaststroke. This swimming strokes peculiar to humans (and apes) might be the result of an earlier adaptation to an arboreal life.
Light traveling in a vacuum is the ultimate speed demon, moving at about 700 million miles per hour.
Matter cannot exceed the speed of light - unless, perhaps, there is a speed bump in light's path. Researchers from France's Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis and China's Xiamen University have embedded dye molecules in a liquid crystal matrix to throttle the group velocity of light back to less than one billionth of its top speed. The team says the ability to slow light in this manner may one day lead to new technologies in remote sensing and measurement science.
Though women work in corporations and serve at higher levels of organizations more than at any time in world history, sociologists note that they still lag behind men in one high-profile way; fraud.
Obviously cultural critics can argue that women are being left behind in opportunities to commit fraud because they do not have equal numbers at the highest levels, but that is a self-correcting problem over time. Regardless of the gender landscape, the sociologists who examined a database of recent corporate frauds found that women typically were not part of the conspiracy. When women did play a role, it was rarely a significant one.
Toxicologist Edward Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts Amherst has dropped cultural bombs on both the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and two scientists who provided crucial information for Atomic Age carcinogen risk assessment.
Regarding the linear no threshold (LNT) dose-response approach to ionizing radiation exposure in the 1950s, Calabrese says there was deliberate suppression of evidence to prevent the regulatory panel from considering an alternative, threshold model - the LNT model was later generalized to chemical carcinogen risk ssessment.
An international analysis of conservation biologists finds that they work late at night and over weekends - just like much of the salaried corporate world and science writers.
Thanks to athletes like Ryan Braun and Lance Armstrong, doping has gotten a bad rap, but if solar power is ever going to be viable, doping will be essential.
Flexible thin film solar cells require fewer materials and can be manufactured in large quantities by roll-to-roll processing. One such technology relies on cadmium telluride (CdTe), which is a distant second to silicon-based solar cells but cheap in terms of production costs. Because they are grown on rigid glass plates, these superstrate cells have, however a big drawback: they require a transparent supporting material that lets sunlight pass through to reach the light-harvesting CdTe layer, thus limiting the choice of carriers to transparent materials.
