News Articles

Astronomers find planets in strange places and wonder if they might support life. One such place would be in orbit around a white or brown dwarf. While neither is a star like the sun, both glow and so could be orbited by planets with the right ingredients for life.
No terrestrial, or Earth-like planets have yet been confirmed orbiting white or brown dwarfs, but there is no reason to assume they don't exist. However, new research by Rory Barnes of the University of Washington and René Heller of Germany's Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam hints that planets orbiting white or brown dwarfs will prove poor candidates for life.

Chelation, the controversial treatment for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), is not only ineffective but may be harmful, according to a study conducted by Baylor University researchers.

Chelation attempts to eliminate metals such as mercury from the body. In one example mentioned in the research, "a 5-year-old with ASD died from cardiac arrest caused by hypocalcemia while receiving intravenous chelation." And, a 2008 clinical study of chelation treatment for autism was suspended due to potential safety risks associated with chelation.

In the early 1990s, scientists were surprised to find that areas near Mercury's poles were unusually bright when observed with radar from Earth, a potential indication that ice might be present.  New research in Science sheds some light on the long-standing issue of ice on Mercury. Several independent lines of evidence now reveal that the sun-scorched planet has extensive water ice deposits at its poles.

Spectacular jets powered by the gravitational energy of a super massive black hole in the core of the elliptical galaxy Hercules A are shown off by the combined imaging power of the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 and the recently upgraded Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in New Mexico.

If you are obese, it is reasonably well-established that you are not going to exercise and vibration machines that sound like they might be less work, like the kind developed by the Soviets for astronauts, actually can burn through 400 calories in 15 minutes, so they are not for the casual - but a recent study found that low-intensity vibrations led to improvements in the immune function of obese mice.
If the same effect can be found in people, it would have clinical benefits for obese people suffering from a wide range of immune problems related to obesity.

 Astronomers theorize that an as-yet-unidentified form of matter is responsible for 90 percent of the gravity within galaxies and clusters of galaxies but because it is detected via its gravity and not its light, they call it "dark matter." 

The winners of the 2012 Semantic Web Challenge (SWC), determined by a jury from both academia and industry, were announced at the International Semantic Web Conference held in Boston. The challenge and allocated prizes were sponsored by Elsevier. 
 In 2003, the SWC was set up to showcase the very latest in semantic web technology and every year the final rounds of this competition take place at the annual International Semantic Web Conference. Semantic Web Challenge contestants competed in any of two challenge categories: 'Open Track' and 'Billion Triples Track'. 

A monster black hole has been detected.  With 17 billion solar masses, it is significantly heavier than models predict and could be the most massive black hole known to date. 
 Astronomers believe there is a super-massive black hole at the heart of every galaxy and its mass ranges from several hundred thousand solar masses to a few billion. The black hole that has been best investigated  sits at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and has around four million solar masses.

Merck Serono, a division of Merck, has donated its 100 millionth praziquantel tablet to the World Health Organization (WHO).

People follow patterns. If you were projecting a future for New York City in the early 1980s, you would have rightfully anticipated a Kurt Russell movie where the city is walled off from the rest of the country because the crime problem was rampant. Homicide moves through a city in a process similar to infectious disease, according to a new study that may give police a new tool in tracking and ultimately preventing murders.

Evolutionarily speaking, most of the harmful mutations that still exist in people are recent, which makes the case that nature is still out to get us, even in modern times.
A study dated the age of more than 1 million single-letter variations in the human DNA code and revealed that 86 percent of the harmful protein-coding mutations of this type arose in humans just during the past 5,000 to 10,000 years. These kinds of mutations change one nucleotide – an A, C, T or G – in the DNA sequence. 

There are lots of diagnostic tests available outside of the conventional medical system and those include tests for food intolerance, like vega testing, kinesiology, hair "body field analysis" testing, cytotoxic and live blood testing. 
Doctors and medical practitioners can be justified in assuming the worst and dismissing test results that originate from services such as 'mail order laboratory testing services', as there is no way for them to distinguish between those results which have an evidence basis with clinical data and those that claim results without any real evidence.