News Articles

A Bonn-based company is launching a virtual TV studio accessible to everyone via http://make.tv. The new service will be presented for the first time at photokina in Cologne on 23rd September, at Booth B054 in Hall 9, and they say it will revolutionize live TV.
Making an appearance at both the world's biggest imaging exhibition and on the internet, after a year in development, http://make.tv is being introduced as a new 'virtual' TV studio for the production of their own live transmissions, without having to invest in traditional TV transmission technology.
The virtual studio is controlled from a computer, is easy to use and requires no installation, since it works through an internet browser. As a result, it is possible to basically transmit for free from anywhere in the world.

Controlling weight may as simple as finding immature, or “baby,” fat cells that lurk in the walls of the blood vessels that nourish fatty tissue, waiting for excess calories to help them grow into the adult monsters that pack on extra pounds.
In addition, say researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center, their mice studies may lead to using these immature cells for such clinical treatments as filling in a woman’s breast after a lumpectomy.
Researchers have believed such cells were located near blood vessels but they didn’t know exactly where. Discovering their existence, their identity and their lair may direct future research to find ways to stop these cells from creating undesired fat.

Smart fabrics and intelligent textiles – material that incorporates cunning molecules or clever electronics – is thriving and European research efforts are tackling some of the sector’s toughest challenges. Clothes that monitor your heart, measure the chemical composition of your body fluids or keep track of you and your local environment promise to revolutionise healthcare and emergency response, but they present tough research challenges, too.

A study in northern China indicates that genetically modified cotton, altered to express the insecticide Bt, not only reduces pest populations among those crops, but also reduces pests among other nearby crops that have not been modified with Bt. These findings could offer promising new ideas for controlling pests and maximizing crop yields in the future.
Bt is an insecticide derived from the spores and toxic crystals of the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis, and has been sold commercially since 1960. It is considered non-toxic to humans, animals, fish, plants, micro-organisms, and most insects. However, it is highly selective and lethal to caterpillars of moths and butterflies. Bt is currently registered and marketed for use as an insecticide in more than 50 countries worldwide. It does not contaminate groundwater because it degrades so rapidly.
Dr. Kong-Ming Wu from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing and colleagues analyzed data from 1997 to 2007 about the agriculture of Bt cotton in six provinces in northern China, covering 38 million hectares of farmland cultivated by 10 million resource-poor farmers. They compared that information with data on pest populations in the region, focusing on the cotton bollworm, a serious pest for Chinese farmers.

Netlog, a European social networking site that also allows almost instant translation into 23 languages, has opened its translation and localization capabilities to third-party developers. They also announced they will give developers access to their "credits economy", offering developers an alternative for advertising revenues.
Netlog joined the OpenSocial initiative three months ago to allow developers to use a common set of programming interfaces on a variety of social sites across the web, also including Orkut, MySpace, Yahoo!, Hi5 and Friendster. OpenSocial makes it easier for developers to build social applications and for websites to add more social features quickly.

Researchers say they have found evidence that supports the idea that the emergence of agriculture in prehistory took much longer than originally thought.
Until recently researchers say the story of the origin of agriculture was one of a relatively sudden appearance of plant cultivation in the Near East around 10,000 years ago, spreading quickly into Europe and dovetailing conveniently with ideas about how quickly language and population genes spread from the Near East to Europe. Initially, genetics appeared to support this idea but now there are questions about the evidence underpinning that model
A team led by Dr Robin Allaby from the University of Warwick's plant research arm, Warwick HRI, have developed a new mathematical model that shows how plant agriculture actually began much earlier than first thought, well before the Younger Dryas (the last "big freeze" with glacial conditions in the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere). It also shows that useful gene types could have actually taken thousands of years to become stable.

Manipulating embryo-derived stem cells before transplanting them may hold the key to optimizing stem cell technologies for repairing spinal cord injuries in humans, according to research published in the Journal of Biology. They say it may lead to cell based therapies for victims of paralysis to recover the use of their bodies without the risk of transplant induced pain syndromes.
Dr. Stephen Davies, Associate Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine, reported that, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Rochester, his research team has transplanted two types of the major support cells of the brain and spinal cord, cells called astrocytes. These two types of astrocytes, which are both made from the same embryo-derived stem cell-like precursor cell, have remarkably different effects on the spinal repair process.

How you react physically to stimuli can have a great deal of impact on how you perceive the world and therefore how you vote, according to a recent study by researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL).

For example, people who react more strongly to bumps in the night, spiders on a human body or the sight of a shell-shocked victim are more likely to support public policies that emphasize protecting society over preserving individual privacy. The research results appear in the Sept. 19 issue of Science magazine.
The study tested 46 people who identified themselves as having strong political opinions. Researchers showed subjects threatening visual images--pictures of a spider on a person's eyeball, a dazed person with a bloody face and an open wound with maggots in it--and monitored their skin for electrical conductivity, which indicates emotion, arousal and attention. In another physiological measure, the scientists surprised subjects with a sudden, jarring noise and measured how hard they blinked in response to being startled.

Two research teams are announcing this month that they have successfully converted sugar-potentially derived from agricultural waste and non-food plants-into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and a range of other valuable chemicals.
Chemical engineer Randy Cortright and his colleagues at Virent Energy Systems of Madison, Wisc., and researchers led by NSF-supported chemical engineer James Dumesic of the University of Wisconsin at Madison are now announcing that sugars and carbohydrates can be processed like petroleum into the full suite of products that drive the fuel, pharmaceutical and chemical industries.

MIT researchers have shown that cells from different people don't all react the same way when exposed to the same DNA-damaging agent, a finding that could help clinicians predict how patients will respond to chemotherapy.
The research team from MIT's Center for Environmental Health Sciences (CEHS) and the Departments of Biological Engineering and Biology, identified a group of 48 genes that can predict how susceptible an individual is to the toxic compound, known as MNNG. The work appears in Genes and Development.
MNNG, a DNA-damaging compound similar to toxic chemicals found in tobacco smoke and in common chemotherapy agents, usually kills cells by inducing irreparable DNA damage. However, the researchers found a wide range of susceptibility among cells taken from healthy people.

Vital components of modern medicine such as major surgery, organ transplantation, and cancer chemotherapy will be threatened if antibiotic resistance is not tackled urgently, warn experts on bmj.com today.
A global response is needed to address rising rates of bacterial resistance caused by the use and abuse of antibiotics or "we will return to the pre-antibiotic era", write Professor Otto Cars and colleagues in an editorial.
All antibiotic use "uses up" some of the effectiveness of that antibiotic, diminishing the ability to use it in the future, write the authors, and antibiotics can no longer be considered as a renewable source.

In the inaugural Big Ten Battleground Poll taken as the nation's financial crisis worsened this week, John McCain and Barack Obama were in a statistical dead heat in seven of the eight Midwest states included in the survey.
The individual surveys of 600 randomly selected registered voters in each of the states were conducted by phone from Sept. 14-17 and were co-directed by University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientists Charles Franklin and Ken Goldstein and colleagues from participating universities. The polls each have a margin of error of 4 percentage points. The states included in the poll were Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota.