News Articles

Depictions of bioethical issues and professionalism portrayed in two popular medical dramas—"Grey's Anatomy" and "House, M.D."—suggest that the shows are "rife" with ethical dilemmas and actions that often run afoul of professional codes of conduct, according to a review in the Journal of Medical EthicsThe authors admit that their findings would end up stating the obvious. But they nonetheless wanted to provide data that would explain how these depictions influence the perceptions of viewers, both health professionals and the general public.They also hope the research will inform discussions about whether medical dramas should be shown in a classroom to spur conversations about ethics and professionalism among medical and nursing students.

University students have developed a computer game that is operated by eye movements, which could allow people with severe physical disabilities to become 'gamers' for the first time. The technology behind the game may one day be adapted to create more sophisticated games and applications such as wheelchairs and computer cursors controlled by eye movements.The researchers adapted an open source game called 'Pong', where a player moves a bat to hit a ball as it bounces around the screen. The adaptation enables the player to move the bat using their eye.

The "exceptionally simple theory of everything," proposed by physicist Antony Garrett Lisi in 2007 does not hold water, according to a particle physicist and mathematician writing in Communications in Mathematical Physics.In November of 2007, Lisi published an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything." The paper centered on the elegant mathematical structure known as E8, which also appears in string theory. First identified in 1887, E8 has 248 dimensions and cannot be seen, or even drawn, in its complete form.

Palaeontologists have discovered a new fossil species called Cloudina carinata, a small fossil with a tubular appearance and one of the first animals that developed an external skeleton between 550 and 543 million years ago. The discovery is documented in Precambrian Research.The fossils were found in the archaeological site El Membrillar (Badajoz), one of the few sites in Europe where the remains of Cloudina can be found. "The specimens display exceptional preservation, they appear preserved in three dimensions, and show their original form and numerous details of the shells", lead author Iván Cortijo says. "Cloudina carinata is characterized by its elaborate ornamentation and complexity of the shells and tube that are formed when inserted."

In a paper appearing today in Science, Los Alamos researchers report that a newly discovered "loading-unloading" effect allows nanocrystalline materials to heal themselves after suffering radiation-induced damage. The discovery may eventually lead to much safer nuclear power plants. Nanocrystalline materials are those created from nanosized particles, in this case copper particles. A single nanosized particle—called a grain—is the size of a virus or even smaller. Nanocrystalline materials consist of a mixture of grains and the interface between those grains, called grain boundaries.

Scientists have identified a hip bone found at Dinosaur Cove in Victoria, Australia that belonged to an ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex. The discovery is the first evidence that tyrannosaur dinosaurs existed on southern continents. The find, published in Science, sheds new light on the evolutionary history of this group of dinosaurs. It also raises the crucial question of why it was only in the north that tyrannosaurs evolved into the giant predators like T. rex.The 30cm-long pubis bone from Dinosaur Cove looks like a rod with two expanded ends, one of which is flattened and connects to the hip and the other looks like a 'boot'.

As a result of the economic growth across much of Asia pollution from the region is being wafted up to the stratosphere during monsoon season, according to a new study in Science. The new finding provides additional evidence of the global nature of air pollution and its effects far above Earth's surface.Using satellite observations and computer models, the research team determined that vigorous summertime circulation patterns associated with the Asian monsoon rapidly transport air upward from the Earth's surface. Those vertical movements provide a pathway for black carbon, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and other pollutants to ascend into the stratosphere, about 20-25 miles above the Earth's surface.

Satellite measurements of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), part of the global ocean conveyor belt that helps regulate climate around the North Atlantic, show no significant slowing over the past 15 years and suggest that the circulation may have even sped up slightly in the recent past.The findings are the result of a new monitoring technique, developed by oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using measurements from ocean-observing satellites and profiling floats.

Tumors mimic key features of lymph nodes in order to create a tolerant microenviroment and escape attack from the immune system, say researchers from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The discovery, published in Science underscores the role of the lymphatic system in cancer and may open up new possibilities for cancer treatment.

Although the internet has given anybody with a computer access to a seemingly limitless amount of information, it has also had a profound effect on clinical medicine--and not necessarily a good one. Doctor's writing in the New England Journal of Medicine say that patients are often exposed to incorrect or poorly interpreted information on the internet that is fundamentally changing the "the core relationship between doctor and patient."While applauding the ability of patients to receive test results and communicate with their clinicians electronically – and to search for disease symptoms at numerous web sites – the authors suggest it is a journey no patient should undertake alone.

An international team of astronomers has confirmed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating after looking at new data from the largest-ever survey conducted by the Hubble Space Telescope. The results of the research will appear in Astronomy and Astrophysics.Researchers studied more than 446,000 galaxies to map the matter distribution and the expansion history of the universe. They were able to observe precisely how dark matter evolved in the universe and to reconstruct a three-dimensional map of the dark matter and use this to test Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.

By changing the material medium through which x-rays pass, physicists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have used laser light to control x-ray beams.As a new generation of powerful light sources comes online, intense x-ray beams may be able to control matter directly and allow one beam of x-rays to control another, the new Nature Physics study suggests.Using the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source femtosecond spectroscopy beamline 6.0.2, researchers sent ultrashort pulses of laser light and higher-frequency x-rays together through a gas cell filled with pressurized neon. Excited by the laser pulses, the gas, which normally absorbs x-rays, became transparent to the x-ray pulses during their quick passage.