News Articles

Resverlogix Corp. has announced that its Phase 2b ASSURE clinical trial evaluating RVX-208 in high-risk cardiovascular patients with low high-density lipoprotein (HDL) did not meet its primary endpoint of a -0.6% change in percent atheroma volume as determined by intravascular ultrasound (IVUS). The RVX-208 treated group had -0.4% plaque regression (p= 0.08).

Crystal Solar has completed a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funded Incubator project regarding technology development and manufacturing cost-effectiveness of epitaxial solar cells and modules. Thin epitaxial silicon solar cell  technology has the capability to improve the way silicon is made by eliminating many steps in the current process flow while retaining the high efficiency of mono-crystalline silicon.  They estimate this could result in reduction of module costs by approximately 50% from today's levels to ~$0.40/W, enabling the cost of solar power to become comparable to existing energy costs in most parts of the world.  

Is kite power economically viable in the 21st century?We'll find out. The TwingKite,  based on Empa's Tensairity technology, is set to take flight thanks to a  “Venture Kick” jury that is providing 10,000 Swiss Francs in support.A kite, a reel and a console are the components of this new method for making electricity from wind. Rather than going up a hundred meters, like legacy wind efforts, TwingKite will go up to 300.

As narratives of modern “hook-up” culture in young people take center stage in popular media, behavioral researchers are starting to ask what psychological consequences, if any, may be in store for young adults who engage in casual sex.A new survey found higher levels of general anxiety, social anxiety, and depression among students who recently had casual sex.

Hockey moves fast. As efforts to track the puck visually showed, it can be dizzying to keep track of things in a small field of view like a television.
Analyzing games and plays means manual work, for that reason. But Disney Research, located in Pittsburgh and Zurich, have developed an automated technique for analyzing the patterns of play of field hockey teams, providing a new tool for coaches and commentators who must make sense of mountains of video and other game data. 

The current administration may be worried that the high profile of its domestic tracking and spying and punitive efforts will make it harder for them to monitor the public.  
MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory may be able to help. They may be able to help us be a little more like Superman, really. Technology to build a device capable of seeing people through walls has involved the use of expensive and bulky radar technology that uses a part of the electromagnetic spectrum only available to the military - and anyone in the  government who says monitoring citizens is a national security issue.

To our forefathers, distinguishing the living from the dead centered on calidum innatum - vital heat. Aristotle showed that when the heart turns cold, compared to other organs, a person dies and postulated that the vital heat produced in the heart caused blood vessels to react like water bubbles in boiling water - heat which our lungs cooled with air, to keep the cycle going. Modern microbiology knows body heat is not what the ancients envisioned and is more complex than an organ; biological processes should produce thermal signatures no matter how small, even within single cells, it was just that nobody knew how to measure them.

Everyone has seen dinosaur skeletons in museums. You're not supposed to touch them, even on the outside.
Dr. Qi Zhao of the Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology in Beijing got to not only touch some, he got to section two arm and two leg bones from 16 individual dinosaurs, ranging in age from less than one year to 10 years old (fully-grown). He did the sectioning work in a special palaeohistology laboratory in Bonn. 

Myotonic dystrophy is an inherited disorder, the most common form of a group of conditions called muscular dystrophies that involve progressive muscle wasting and weakness.
Myotonic dystrophy type 1 is caused a type of RNA defect known as a "triplet repeat," a series of three nucleotides repeated more times than normal in an individual's genetic code. In this case, a cytosine-uracil-guanine (CUG) triplet repeat binds to the protein MBNL1, rendering it inactive and resulting in RNA splicing abnormalities.

Spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way appear to be much larger and more massive than previously believed, according to new observations made with Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph.

We all think about space exploration, but we also need to think about dodging 50 years of debris from space exploration - aluminum, steel, nylon, even liquid sodium from Russian satellites. Sierra Club hasn't started fundraising over this issue yet but they might after reading this article.
According to NASA, there are more than 21,000 pieces of 'space junk' roughly the size of a baseball in orbit, and about 500,000 pieces that are golf ball-sized. Sure, space is big, but when a piece of space junk strikes a spacecraft, the collision occurs at a velocity of 5 to 15 kilometers per second, roughly ten times faster than a speeding bullet.

Michael Graner, PhD, a CU Cancer Center investigator and associate professor of neurosurgery at the CU School of Medicine, experimented on his dog.
Before anyone yells "Tesla!" and PETA gets up in arms, he did it for the best of reasons.  At age 12, his great dane Star collapsed during a coughing fit and Graner discovered the cause: lung cancer, specifically advanced bronchoalveolar adenocarcinoma with metastasis to the lymph nodes. The prognosis was grim, with a median survival from diagnosis of only about 6-27 days. And Star was well past the age when she could've tolerated chemotherapy or radiation.