News Articles

Did you know that Norwegian trees require only a few minutes to replace the timber used to produce the first edition of Aftenposten - equivalent to the time we spend making our morning coffee.
Norway is full of forests and the trees are growing. With just one-third of the growth logged, there is plenty of growth each year. In fact, since sheep and other domestic animals no longer graze the scrub, the landscape is actually starting to be overgrown.
Meanwhile, paper production is less and less profitable, hurting the forestry industry. But that won't last, say a group of experts. In fact, the value of Norwegian wood is going to go up.
The reason, they say, is second generation biodiesel and bioethanol. First generation production of fuel from rapeseed(Brassica napus) and maize has faced strong criticism. Producing fuel on valuable topsoil in the face of greater worldwide food demand is unpopular.
But as much criticism as biofuels have taken, there is no question the world has huge areas that can be better utilized, and timber from agriculture and forestry can produce more useful growth.
Mimmi Throne-Holst, research scientist at SINTEF in Norway, is one of those who believe that Norwegian forests can provide the fuels of the future and that Norway should prioritize this because of considerable experience with bio refinery (Borregaard, Norske Skog) and large-scale production.

A 'cloud computing', applications and services provided seamlessly on the Internet, approach to malicious software detection developed at the University of Michigan could make old antivirus software techniques a relic of the past.
Traditional antivirus software is installed on millions of individual computers around the world but according to researchers, antivirus software from popular vendors is increasingly ineffective.

Yesterday, newspapers were telling us half of apes and monkeys face extinction and today we find out we could be overwhelmed by them.
The Wildlife Conservation Society released a census showing massive numbers of these great apes alive and well in the Republic of Congo.
Western lowland gorillas are one of four recognized gorilla sub-species, which also include mountain gorillas, eastern lowland gorillas, and Cross River gorillas. All are classified as "critically endangered" by the IUCN, except eastern lowland gorillas, which are endangered.

When Yale astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski and colleagues at Oxford University enlisted public support in cataloguing galaxies, they never envisioned the strange object Hanny van Arkel found in archived images of the night sky.
The Dutch school teacher, a volunteer in the Galaxy Zoo project that allows members of the public to take part in astronomy research online, discovered a mysterious and unique object some observers are calling a "cosmic ghost."
When van Arkel posted about the image that quickly became known as "Hanny's Voorwerp" ( Dutch for "object") on the Galaxy Zoo forum, astronomers who run the site began to investigate and soon realized van Arkel might have found a new class of astronomical object.

A new Carnegie Mellon University brain imaging study of dyslexic students and other poor readers shows that the brain can permanently rewire itself and overcome reading deficits, if students are given 100 hours of intensive remedial instruction.
The study, published in the August issue of the journal Neuropsychologia, shows that the remedial instruction resulted in an increase in brain activity in several cortical regions associated with reading, and that neural gains became further solidified during the year following instruction.
"This study demonstrates how remedial instruction can use the plasticity of the human brain to gain an educational improvement," said neuroscientist Marcel Just, director of Carnegie Mellon's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging (CCBI) and senior author of the study. "Focused instruction can help underperforming brain areas to increase their proficiency."

Despite concerns that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 would increase intolerance toward Muslims, the opposite is true, according to new research by University of British Columbia (UBC) and Stanford University researchers published this week in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Paul Davies, a professor of psychology at UBC's Okanagan campus, and co-investigators Claude Steele and Hazel Rose Markus from Stanford University created a research program to examine the relationship between foreign threats, national identity and citizens' endorsement of models for both foreign and domestic intergroup relations.

New research from The University of Western Ontario reveals how the brain processes the 'rewarding' and addictive properties of nicotine, providing a better understanding of why some people seemingly become hooked with their first smoke. The research, led by Steven Laviolette of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry could lead to new therapies to prevent nicotine dependence and to treat nicotine withdrawal when smokers try to quit.
The researchers found one brain pathway in particular uses the neurotransmitter 'dopamine' to transmit signals related to nicotine's rewarding properties. This pathway is called the 'mesolimbic' dopamine system and is involved in the addictive properties of many drugs of abuse, including cocaine, alcohol and nicotine.

University of Minnesota researchers have answered a key question as to why antiretroviral therapy isn't effective in restoring immunity in HIV-infected patients.
Once a person is infected with the virus, fibrosis, or scarring, occurs in the lymph nodes – the home of T cells that fight infection. And once fibrosis occurs, T cells can't repopulate the lymph nodes when HIV therapy begins, said Timothy Schacker, M.D., professor of medicine and principal investigator on the study.

Globular star clusters, dense bunches of hundreds of thousands of stars, contain some of the oldest surviving stars in the Universe. A new international study of globular clusters outside our Milky Way Galaxy has found evidence that these hardy pioneers are more likely to form in dense areas, where star birth occurs at a rapid rate, instead of uniformly from galaxy to galaxy.
Astronomers used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to identify over 11 000 globular clusters in the Virgo cluster of galaxies, most of which are more than 5 billion years old. Comprised of over 2 000 galaxies, the Virgo cluster is located about 54 million light-years away and is the nearest large galaxy cluster to Earth. Along with Virgo, the sharp vision of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) resolved the star clusters in 100 galaxies of various sizes, shapes, and brightness – even in faint, dwarf galaxies.

You may have laughed when you read in history books that in years gone by maggots were used to cure disease.
Laugh no more. It’s not uncommon for someone to suffer from chronic infected wounds for 18 months, despite all sorts of conventional treatment, but when maggots are applied to the same wound they can often begin to clear infection in just a few days. They have even been known to save people from having limbs amputated.
MRSA infections cause suffering, amputations and death, not to mention the estimated £1 billion cost to the NHS. Between 2002 and 2006, 6,201 deaths in England and Wales involved MRSA and 15,683 deaths in England and Wales involved C. difficile. The rapid rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria means that scientists urgently need to find a solution.

A study published in the International Journal of Obesity says that eating two eggs for breakfast, as part of an overall reduced-calorie diet, helps overweight adults lose more weight and feel more energetic than those who eat a bagel breakfast of equal calories.(1) This study supports previous research, published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, which showed that people who ate eggs for breakfast felt more satisfied and ate fewer calories at the following meal. (2)

Metabolic changes responsible for the evolution of our unique cognitive abilities indicate that the brain may have been pushed to the limit of its capabilities, according to research published today in Genome Biology.
This adds weight to the theory that schizophrenia is a costly by-product of human brain evolution.
Philipp Khaitovich, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led a collaboration of researchers from Cambridge, Leipzig and Shanghai who investigated brains from healthy and schizophrenic humans and compared them with chimpanzee and rhesus macaque brains.