News Articles

Need excellent boots?  W. L. Gore&Associates is the way to go.   Guitar strings?   Yep, they make those too.   Medical devices, electronics and now researchers at Rush University Medical Center are even using a small, soft-patch device made of a Gore-tex-type material to close a common hole found in the heart called a patent foramen ovale (PFO) in order to prevent recurrent strokes and transient ischemic attacks (TIAs) in adults. The randomized, multinational clinical research trial may determine if repairing a PFO using this device, also known as the GORE HELEX Septal Occluder, is more effective in preventing strokes than medical management alone. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently granted approval to use the device for PFO closures.

The American bison(buffalo) is in trouble, says a survey by the Wildlife Conservation Society, though there are many more of them now than there were a hundred years ago, and we love them - as a symbol of the old West and occasionally to eat, so something should be done to make sure we get more of them home on the range.These sentiments were found in a public survey released today by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) at a national conference on restoring bison populations in the North America.The survey is part of an effort spearheaded by the American Bison Society to lobby government agencies, conservation groups, ranchers, and others to do all they can to restore the bison's ecological role as an important species to North America.

When Ohio State glaciologists failed to find the expected radioactive signals in the latest core they drilled from a Himalayan ice field, they knew it meant trouble for their research.   Those missing markers of radiation, remnants from atomic bomb tests a half-century ago, could mean a much greater threat to the half-billion or more people living downstream of that vast mountain range.It may mean that future water supplies could fall far short of what's needed to keep that population alive.

People are different, both physically and mentally, but genetically everyone is very similar, scientists have said for decades. But with population research becoming more and more common, the University of Alberta's Tim Caulfield is concerned that genetic research could awaken racist attitudes.Just last year Nobel Prize winning geneticist James Watson claimed there are genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence. These comments made international headlines, Watson was vilified and he later apologized.

What is the latest recipe for anti-matter?  Take a gold sample the size of the head of a push pin, shoot a laser through it, and suddenly more than 100 billion particles of anti-matter appear.  The anti-matter, also known as positrons, shoots out of the target in a cone-shaped plasma "jet."This new ability to create a large number of positrons in a small laboratory opens the door to several fresh avenues of anti-matter research, including an understanding of the physics underlying various astrophysical phenomena such as black holes and gamma ray bursts.  Anti-matter research also could reveal why more matter than anti-matter survived the Big Bang at the start of the universe.

Researchers dated remains from four multiple burials discovered in Germany in 2005 and found that the 4,600-year-old graves contained groups of adults and children buried facing each other – an unusual practice in Neolithic culture.  One of the graves was found to contain a female, a male and two children. Using DNA analysis, the researchers established that the group consisted of a mother, father and their two sons aged 8-9 and 4-5 years: the oldest molecular genetic evidence of a nuclear family in the world (so far).The burials, discovered and excavated at Eulau, Saxony-Anhalt, were also unusual for the great care taken in the treatment of the dead. The remains of thirteen individuals were found in total, all of whom had been interned simultaneously.

150 years ago it was discovered that the speech center is in the left cortex  and since then functional differences between left and right hemisphere have become well known; language is mainly handled by the left hemisphere while spatial recognition is more specialized to the right hemisphere.However, the structural differences of synapses underlying left-right difference of the brain have remained unknown. Now a research team led by Prof Ryuichi Shigemoto at the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Japan, and colleagues have found that synaptic size and shape in the center of the spatial memory (i.e. hippocampus) were asymmetrical between synapses receiving input from the left and right hemisphere.

Water vapor is known to be Earth's most abundant greenhouse gas, but the extent of its contribution to global warming has been diminished by attention on the economic/political millstone of western civilization carbon dioxide. Using recent NASA satellite data, researchers have estimated more precisely than ever the heat-trapping effect of water in the air, validating the role of the gas as a critical component of climate change.Andrew Dessler and colleagues from Texas A&M University in College Station confirmed that the heat-amplifying effect of water vapor is potent enough to double the climate warming caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 

Asthma may be overdiagnosed in countries like Canada, suggests a longitudinal study of 540 obese and non-obese adults (http://www.cmaj.ca/press/pg1121.pdf)that found approximately one third of Canadians with physician-diagnosed asthma do not have asthma when objectively tested.

Why do so many people give up on those New Year's resolutions to lose weight or curb luxury spending? A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says it has to do with the way our goals intersect with our natures and it uncovers some important differences in the way people categorize "necessities" and "luxuries.".The study by authors Cait Poynor (University of Pittsburgh) and Kelly L. Haws (Texas A&M University) is one of the first to try to understand why some people have more trouble than others regulating behaviors.

In a study to be published next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists show that forests may influence the Earth's climate in important ways that have not previously been recognized.When sunlight reaches the Earth's surface it can either be absorbed and converted to heat or reflected back to outer space, where it doesn't influence the Earth's temperature. Scott Ollinger, a professor at the University of New Hampshire Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space and the department of Natural Resources and the Environment and colleagues have discovered that, of the total amount of sunlight that falls on forests, the fraction that gets reflected back to space is directly related to levels of nitrogen in their foliage.

Across Europe, we are transforming into a continent of content-craving 'connect-aholics', according to the findings of the AMD European Connectivity Study of over 5,000 online respondents. Sponsored by AMD, in conjunction with independent research company, YouGov, 77% of respondents said they could not live without daily access to the internet.
This was higher than any other item including access to a car (54%) and to a washing machine (61%).