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.
The downside to concerns about manure contaminating ground water is that, as manure pit storage to protect water has increased, so have fatalities due to toxic gas buildup. Researchers estimate that about 10 people die each year in North American animal-manure pits. That doesn't sound like a lot but the number of manure storage facilities on farms is steadily growing, because the average farm size is increasing, the number of farms is decreasing and that will mean more manure pits. These deaths are entirely preventable, it was just not a problem in the past, so Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences have published a standard for ventilation in confined animal-manure storage facilities used at large livestock operations.
Synthetic surfaces, popularly called Astroturf since the Houston Astrodome made it famous, were introduced in the 1960s to reduce strain on the playing surface and thus reduce field maintenance.
But it was linked to an increase in injuries, one example in football parlance being "turf toe".
Third generation artificial surfaces behave more like grass and soil but continue to be associated with injuries to the foot, ankle, toe, knee and even concussions. Characteristics of the play surface directly affect how much energy is absorbed by the athlete upon impact and that means shoes are important.
A tiny fossil, the nearly complete skeleton of a bird that would have fit in the palm of your hand and weighed less than an ounce, offers clues to the precursors of swift and hummingbird wings. The fossil
discovered in Wyoming
is unusual in having exceptionally well-preserved feathers, which allowed the researchers to reconstruct the size and shape of the bird's wings in ways not possible with bones alone.
The paleontologists spotted the specimen, which was collected at the Green River Formation, while they were working at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and named it Eocypselus rowei, in honor of John W. Rowe, Chairman of the Field Museum's Board of Trustees.
Are 'smart' objects the future?
People certainly like so-called smart phones, and almost every home in America has a computer, and making everything 'smart' might be a future trend, say humanities scholars at Penn State University.
As sensors and computers increasingly become smaller and cheaper, smart objects will appear in more homes and offices and not be hidden or shielded from interacting with people, according to the researchers. For example, smart refrigerators could talk or send tweets to signal when certain food items are almost out, or when expiration dates are nearing.
Imagine being the project scientist for a NASA experiment and getting an email telling you that a 3,100 lb. defunct spy satellite dating back to the Cold War might crash into your baby?
That's what happened to Julie McEnery of NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which maps the highest-energy light in the universe, a year ago. When she checked her email on March 29th, 2012, she had an automatically generated report from NASA's Robotic Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) saying that in about a week Fermi might be hit by Cosmos 1805.
In the modern regulatory environment, start-ups and smaller companies tend to be less well-known. The costs are increasingly high and its hard to get venture capital funding without knowing how long it can take to clear government hurdles so if things look promising, companies are acquired instead.
But some are sticking it out and they are trying to gain momentum as they advance their technologies and produce significant clinical data on the road to eventual commercialization of their technologies.
As planets age the general rule is that they become darker and cooler - but Saturn is an exception. Why it looks so young for its age has been a space science topic since the late 1960s but a paper in Nature Geoscience says it has some answers.
Elsevier and the Integrated Earth Data Applications facility at Columbia University have announced a competition to improve preservation of and access to research data in the earth sciences.
Members of the international geosciences community who have worked on preservation and improved access of research data, particularly dark data, can share their work and advise on ways that these data are being processed, stored and used.
Brown and white fat cells in a living organism can be converted from one cell type to the other, according to a study using mice as a model organism.
A drug developed by Gilead Sciences and tested in an animal model at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio suppresses hepatitis B virus infection by stimulating the immune system and inducing loss of infected cells.
Cancer cells that can break out of a tumor and invade other organs are more aggressive and nimble than nonmalignant cells. Such cells exert greater force on their environment and can more easily maneuver small spaces, researchers write, due to a systematic comparison of metastatic breast-cancer cells to healthy breast cells which revealed dramatic differences between the two cell lines in their mechanics, migration, oxygen response, protein production and ability to stick to surfaces.
“Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” is the beginning to one of the world's most popular hymns, yet while millions of people can oddly identify Nicki Minaj, almost no one knows the name of Charles Wesley or his Hymns and Sacred Poems. “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” became regarded as one of the Great Four Anglican Hymns and was published as number 403 in "The Church Hymn Book". It has been recorded by everyone from Frank Sinatra to the kids on "Charlie Brown"(1) and now the private letters of the composer have been edited by Dr. Gareth Lloyd of The University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library and Professor Kenneth Newport of Liverpool Hope University and published by Oxford University Press. They provide a rare glimpse into both the man and the birth of Methodism.
