News Articles

Could a new bag squash a new bug?A new medical bag designed to replace ‘outdated and unsafe’ portable medical bags could transform treatment around the world, says its manufacturer.  A study found a third of its outdated predecessors carry the MRSA bug.  In 2008, East Riding of Yorkshire (NHS ERY) introduced the first of its Neighbourhood Care Teams (NCT) to enable patients with long-term illnesses to receive treatment at home. NCTs now provide over 450,000 patient contacts each year.

Silicone and living cardiac muscle cells have been combined to form a freely swimming "jellyfish", proof of concept for reverse engineering a variety of muscular organs and simple life forms. It also suggests a broader definition of what counts as synthetic life.Study co-author Kevin Kit Parker previously demonstrated bioengineered constructs that can grip, pump, and even walk. He says the inspiration to mimic a jellyfish came out of frustration with the state of the cardiac field. Similar to the way a human heart moves blood throughout the body, jellyfish propel themselves through the water by pumping. In figuring out how to take apart and then rebuild the primary motor function of a jellyfish, the goal was to figure out how such pumps really worked.

A team of academics from the University of Southampton thinks they will top the rest of the English Fantasy Football League when the new football season kicks off next month in England.By football, we mean Soccer to Americans.  Sorry if we confusingly used the term for the game that actually uses feet and lets people who use their feet in the Hall of Fame.

Drug addicts are outraged by recent changes to the formula of frequently abused prescription painkiller OxyContin which makes it harder to inhale. So they are taking their business to heroin.For nearly three years, psychiatrists have been collecting information from patients entering treatment for drug abuse and more than 2,500 patients from 150 treatment centers in 39 states have answered survey questions about their drug use with a particular focus on the reformulation of OxyContin.Surveys. Of drug addicts. Calibrate accordingly.

Brain activity is a complex cipher but researchers were recently able to 'decode' monkey thoughts and determine how the little primates were planning to approach the same task - before they moved a muscle.Watching large groups of neurons doesn't reveal much but a group of scientists recently took it to another level; they demonstrated that multiple parameters can be embedded in the firing rate of a single neuron and that certain types of parameters are encoded only if they are needed to solve the task at hand. Interesting enough, but  they also discovered that the population vectors could reveal different planning strategies.   They could, in effect, read the monkeys' minds.

Compared to most moons in our solar system, Titan is relatively smooth. It has few craters  but Titan is around four billion years old, about the same age as the rest of the solar system - so it isn't an age issue. Yet if you went by the number of craters, its surface looks much younger, between 100 million and one billion years old.In 2004, radar images from the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft penetrated the atmosphere of Titan and revealed an icy terrain carved out over millions of years by rivers of liquid methane, similar to how rivers of water have etched into Earth's rocky continents but that opened up the mystery about its geologic past. 

The Very Large Array (VLA) radio astronomy observatory, named for American physicist Karl Guthe Jansky, who discovered radio waves emanating from the Milky Way in 1931, is the largest and most capable radio telescope in the world

California had the highest number of cases of whooping cough (pertussis) in 60 years, despite the fact that it has a readily available vaccine. A new study in The Journal of Pediatrics describes that 2010 whooping cough epidemic and details strategies to decrease the incidence of this infection.Some science education would be a good place to start. California has a strong anti-vaccine mentality, especially in coastal regions, and results showed much higher incidents of Whooping Cough in those areas, despite those being high income, well-educated communities.

Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), considered the main cause of global warming, increased by 3% last year, reaching an all-time high of 34 billion tons in 2011.

Redheads are dangerous to human men but in wild boars, red hair means a danger to themselves. New research has found that boars with more reddish hair tend to have higher levels of oxidative stress; damage that occurs as toxins from cell respiration build up. The researchers suggest it is because the process of producing reddish pigment eats up a valuable antioxidant that would otherwise be fighting the free radicals that lead to oxidative stress.

Data visualization is gaining increased importance. Unlike arcane statistics (damned lies), visualizing data can provide context for a very big story - even enormous datasets like the heating and cooling effects of the sun.Nicholeen Viall, a solar scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., creates images of the sun with broad strokes of bright color splashed across a yellow background. But it's not simply art. The color of each pixel contains a wealth of information about the 12-hour history of cooling and heating at that particular spot on the sun. That heat history holds clues to the mechanisms that drive the temperature and movements of the sun's atmosphere, or corona.

Neanderthals - Cave Men, in colloquial terms (as if Cro-Magnon emerged in a medieval castle; they all lived in caves if they could) - don't get a lot of respect for being smart.  But they probably had a few things going for them, since they survived until around 20,000 B.C.Maybe even medicine.50,000-year-old Neanderthal teeth from the El Sidrón site in northern Spain show that they were not just meat-eaters, nor were they eating plants just as foragers.  They may even have understood natural medicine.