News Articles

Imagine a bullet-proof vest made from a relatively simple protein processed from water - fashionable for those high-risk warzones yet still environmentally terrific.Ancient people knew about this material 5,000 years ago and even made armor from it but  modern science can't replicate it in a laboratory - though we are getting closer.The mystery material is silk fiber.   Silk spun by spiders and silk worms combines high strength and extensibility and fundamental discoveries in how silk fibers are made have shown that chemistry, molecular biology and biophysics all play a role in the process. These discoveries have provided the basis for a new generation of applications for silk materials, from medical devices and drug delivery to electronics.

A new study says that mild H1N1 infection may go undetected using standard diagnostic criteria and concludes that coughing or other respiratory symptoms are more accurate in determining influenza infection than presence of a fever. A team led by Sang Won Park, MD, professor at the Seoul National University, investigated confirmed cases of H1N1 who were hospitalized and quarantined during the early stages of the pandemic in 2009. The study's results showed only 45.5 percent of the case subjects had fever. Individuals with mild infection and no fever have the potential to evade detection at airports or medical triage units, thus continuing the chain of infection.

Body checking in hockey, intentionally slamming an opponent against the boards, is regarded as violence under the guise of sports, according to hockey detractors, but injury numbers don't agree - at least in young players.Findings from a new study show that 66 percent of overall injuries were caused by accidentally hitting the boards or goal posts, colliding with teammates or being hit by a puck.   Only 34 percent of the injuries were caused by checking. Moreover, the accidental injuries were more severe than those from body checks. The results appeared in June issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine and were a surprise to the researchers at the University at Buffalo who conducted the five-year study. 

Calcium supplements are commonly taken by older people for osteoporosis but have now been associated with an increased risk of a heart attack, according to a study published in BMJ-British Medical Journal.   The results seem to indicate that a reassessment of the role of calcium supplements in osteoporosis management is needed.  Calcium supplements are commonly prescribed for skeletal health, but the recent trial suggested they might increase rates of heart attack (myocardial infarction) and cardiovascular events in healthy older women.

A pig's 'mood' can show us how content he is, say researchers at Newcastle's School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development.Led by Dr Catherine Douglas, the team has employed a technique to 'ask' pigs if they are feeling optimistic or pessimistic about life as a result of the way in which they live and their results say that pigs are capable of complex emotions which are directly influenced by their living conditions.The Newcastle team taught the pigs to associate a note on a glockenspiel with a treat (an apple) and a dog training 'clicker' with something unpleasant – rustling a plastic bag.

Werner Heisenberg's 'Uncertainty Principle'(1927) is a fundamental concept in quantum physics, basically saying you can be increasingly accurate in position or momentum (mass X velocity), but not both(1).  This can be an important feature rather than a defect in something like quantum cryptography, where information is transmitted in the form of quantum states such as the polarization of particles of light.A group of scientists from LMU and the ETH in Zurich say they have shown that position and momentum can be predicted more precisely than Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle states - if the recipient makes use of a quantum memory that employs ions or atoms.

Chaos is the disorder of a dynamical system but it is not completely unpredictable.   Researchers are convinced that locating the origin of chaos and watching it develop might allow science to predict, and perhaps counteract, outcomes.Like having a heart attack. Writing in in the journal CHAOS, researchers say chaos models may someday help model cardiac arrhythmias (abnormal electrical rhythms of the heart) and help to understand the behavior of ventricular fibrillation, a severely abnormal heart rhythm that is often life-threatening, in order to mitigate it.

Benguela-goby, or bearded goby, is a fish species that has adapted to a hostile environment poisonous to most other organisms.  This little goby-fish (Sufflogobius bibarbatus) reaches a maximum length of 13 cm and is only found in the Benguela ecosystem, the anoxic continental shelf outside Namibia and South-Africa,  and one of the world’s most productive fisheries areas.   Since the collapse of the sardine fisheries, this goby has become the new predominant prey species for larger fish, birds and mammals in the region.

Genes specific to sex change rapidly but there is one sex-specific gene so vital its function has remained unaltered throughout evolution and is found in almost all animals, according to new research from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.The gene, called Boule, is responsible for sperm production and they say that Boule appears to be the only gene known to be exclusively required for sperm production from an insect to a mammal. 

Superstition may work if you think it works.   If only voodoo were so easy, we'd love to have an army of zombies at our command.But people, and certainly athletes, maintain any number of superstitious rituals, so Lysann Damisch, Barbara Stoberock and Thomas Mussweiler of the University of Cologne designed a set of experiments to see if activating  people's superstitious beliefs would improve their performance on a task.  Their research says that having some kind of lucky token can actually improve performance – but by increasing self-confidence and not any magical mojo.

A new study says it is the first to identify a life-or-death "cell competition" process in mammalian tissue that suppresses cancer by causing cancerous cells to kill themselves. Central to their discovery was the researchers' identification of 'Mahjong,  a gene that can determine the winners of the competition through its close relationship with another powerful protein player.

Think a a mere 0.0350 millionth of a millionth of a millimeter is unimportant?  Think again.   At the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, an international team of researchers has now measured the proton with experiments they say are ten times more accurate than all previous ones.   And all the old values for the dimension of the proton, the nucleus of the hydrogen atom, are off. Instead of 0.8768 femtometres it measures only 0.8418 femtometres, they sayIf so, at least one fundamental constant now changes and physicists also have to check the calculations of quantum electrodynamics. This theory is assumed to be very well proven, but its predictions do not agree with these latest measurements.