News Articles

A new Dutch invention makes it possible to reforest large desert and rocky areas in the coming years, they say. Experiments in the Sahara desert have shown that the WaterBoxx allows trees to grow under harsh conditions and can provide them with sufficient water.
The invention of the Dutch businessman and inventor Pieter Hoff has won the prestigious Beta Dragons Award during the annual Flying Dutchman 2008, Science Technology Summit in Amsterdam. A board of scientists and captains of industry proclaimed his design to be the most promising and innovative project.

A new study finds that breast cancer patients who participate in intervention sessions focusing on improving mood, coping effectively, and altering health behaviors live longer than patients who do not receive such psychological support. Published in the December 15, 2008 issue of CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study indicates that reducing the stress that can accompany cancer diagnosis and treatment can have a significant impact on patients' survival.

Researchers at the University of Utah are enrolling people in a new clinical trial that uses a patient's own stem cells to treat ischemic and non-ischemic heart failure.   The one-year Cardiac Repair Cell Treatment of Patients with Dilated Cardiomyopathy (IMPACT-DCM) study will look at the safety of injecting Cardiac Repair Cells (CRC) and their ability to improve heart function.

The temperature might not be the only thing plummeting this winter. Many people also will experience a decrease in their vitamin D levels, which can play a role in heart disease, according to a new review article in Circulation. Vitamin D deficiency results in part from reduced exposure to sunlight, which is common during cold weather months when days are shorter and more time is spent indoors. "Chronic vitamin D deficiency may be a culprit in heart disease, high blood pressure and metabolic syndrome," said Sue Penckofer, PhD, RN, study author and professor, Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing, Loyola University Chicago. 

A study published today in the online advance edition of The American Journal of Psychiatry for the first time reveals shape differences in the brains of children with ADHD, which could help pinpoint the specific neural circuits involved in the disorder.

Did you go to basic training for the military?  If so, it is a special memory and you remember it vividly but you don't want to repeat it.   On the opposite end of the spectrum, the truly special positive experiences are not something we want to repeat either - we want to keep them as memories.So most people are unlikely to return to the place of their Honeymoon because they can't repeat it and don't want to diminish the memory. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says people tend to treat their memories of previous special experiences as assets to be protected.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more people die from lung cancer than any other cancer type. In fact, according to 2004 data, more people died from lung cancer than breast, prostate and colon cancers combined. Smoking is the biggest risk factor for developing lung cancer, even after quitting for long periods of time.   But only 10% of smokers get lung cancer and almost 50% of lung cancer cases involve former smokers.   

Construction of new coal-fired power plants in the United States is in danger of coming to a standstill, partly due to the high cost of the requirement, whether existing or anticipated, to capture all emissions of carbon dioxide, an important greenhouse gas. But an MIT analysis suggests an intermediate step that could get construction moving again, allowing the nation to fend off growing electricity shortages using our most-abundant, least-expensive fuel while also reducing emissions.Instead of capturing all of its CO2 emissions, plants could capture a significant fraction of those emissions with less costly changes in plant design and operation, the MIT analysis shows.

You wouldn't ordinarily think of soil as a non-renewable resource, but it is.    Healing damage to soil takes geologic time, not human time.    And increasing levels of nitrogen deposition that are associated with industry and agriculture are driving soils toward a toxic level of acidification, reducing plant growth and polluting surface waters, according to a new study published online in Nature Geoscience. 

A new approach to calibrating quantum mechanical measurement has been developed with particular applications in optics and super-secure quantum communication.Scientists have used the approach to directly calibrate a detector that can sense the presence of multiple individual photons, it is revealed in research published today in Nature Physics.Being able to sense the presence of individual photons is an important requirement for the development of future long-distance quantum communication devices and networks. One of the potential applications of this new detector is in devices for secret communications, which could allow information to be exchanged in total security guaranteed by the laws of physics, with no possibility of interception, or eavesdropping.

One of the most important developments in human civilization was the practice of sustainable agriculture, but we were not the first - ants have been doing it for over 50 million years. Just as farming helped humans become a dominant species, it has also helped leaf-cutter ants become dominant herbivores, and one of the most successful social insects in nature. According to an article in the November issue of Microbiology Today, leaf-cutter ants have developed a system to try and keep their gardens pest-free; an impressive feat which has evaded even human agriculturalists.

A new class of exceptionally effective catalysts that promote the powerful olefin metathesis reaction has been discovered by a team of Boston College and MIT scientists, opening up a vast new scientific platform to researchers in medicine, biology and materials.The new catalysts can be easily prepared and possess unique features never before utilized by chemists, according to findings from a team led by Boston College Prof. Amir H. Hoveyda and MIT Prof. and Nobel laureate Richard Schrock, who shared the 2005 prize in Chemistry for early discoveries of catalytic olefin metathesis. The team's findings are reported in the current online edition of the journal Nature.