News Articles

Patient safety incidents cost the federal Medicare program $8.8 billion and resulted in 238,337 potentially preventable deaths during 2004 through 2006, according to HealthGrades' fifth annual Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study.
HealthGrades' analysis of 41 million Medicare patient records found that patients treated at top-performing hospitals had, on average, a 43 percent lower chance of experiencing one or more medical errors compared to the poorest-performing hospitals.
The overall incident rate was approximately three percent of all Medicare admissions evaluated, accounting for 1.1 million patient safety incidents during the three years studied. With the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services scheduled to stop reimbursing hospitals for the treatment of eight major preventable errors, including objects left in the body after surgery and certain post-surgical infections, starting October 1, the financial implications for hospitals are substantial.

The Texas Petawatt laser reached greater than one petawatt of laser power on Monday morning, March 31, making it the highest powered laser in the world, Todd Ditmire, a physicist at The University of Texas at Austin, said.
When the laser is turned on, it has the power output of more than 2,000 times the output of all power plants in the United States. (A petawatt is one quadrillion watts.) The laser is brighter than sunlight on the surface of the sun, but it only lasts for an instant, a 10th of a trillionth of a second (0.0000000000001 second).

140 milliseconds. So in less time than it took you to read those two words a rat knew everything he needed to know about what his nose detected.
Daniel Wesson and colleagues from Boston University write that rats are able to discriminate odors much more quickly than previously thought.
Odor perception in mammals begins when olfactory sensory neurons in the animal's nose detect an odor molecule and then transmit that information to the brain. The first brain area to receive these signals is the olfactory bulb, where the sensory neurons end in small structures called glomeruli. Olfactory cues trigger complex patterns of activity both in the olfactory sensory neurons and in the glomeruli within the brain.

Fungi processing audio signals. E. Coli storing images. DNA acting as logic circuits. It’s not only possible, in some cases it’s already happened.
Performing digital signal processing using organic and chemical materials without electrical currents could be the wave of the future, according to Sotirios Tsaftaris, Northwestern University research professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and Aggelos Katsaggelos, Ameritech Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, in their recently published “point of view” piece in the Proceedings of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.)
Digital signal processing uses mathematics and other techniques to manipulate signals like visual images and sound waves after those signals have been converted to a digital form. This processing can enhance images and compress data for storage and transmission, and such processing chips are found in cell phones, iPods, and HD TVs.

An interactive map of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels says we still have things to learn about where it's coming from - and where the worst offenders are.
The maps and system, called Vulcan, show CO2 emissions at more than 100 times more detail than was available before. Until now, data on carbon dioxide emissions were reported, in the best cases, monthly at the level of an entire state. The Vulcan model examines CO2 emissions at local levels on an hourly basis.
Researchers say the maps also are more accurate than previous data because they are based on greenhouse gas emissions instead of estimates based on population in areas of the United States.

Even with oil prices at $100 a barrel, it could take 10 or more years of intensive research and development to reduce the cost of solar energy to levels competitive with petroleum, according to Harry Gray, Ph.D., the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry and Founding Director of the Beckman Institute at the California Institute of Technology. He is the principal investigator in an NSF funded Phase I Chemical Bonding Center (CBC) – a Caltech/MIT collaboration – and a principal investigator at the Caltech Center for Sustainable Energy Research (CCSER).
The single biggest challenge, Gray said, is reducing costs so that a large-scale shift away from coal, natural gas and other non-renewable sources of electricity makes economic sense. Gray estimated the average cost of photovoltaic energy at 35 to 50 cents per kilowatt-hour. By comparison, other sources are considerably less expensive, with coal and natural gas hovering around 5-6 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Researchers have confirmed the first case of a frog without lungs - the aquatic frog Barbourula kalimantanensis apparently gets all the oxygen it needs through its skin. Previously known from only two specimens, two new populations of the aquatic frog were found during a recent expedition to Indonesian Borneo.
Of all tetrapods (animals with four limbs), lunglessness is only known to occur in amphibians. There are many lungless salamanders and a single species of caecilian, a limbless amphibian resembling an earthworm, known to science. The complete loss of lungs is a particularly rare evolutionary event that has probably only occurred three times.

One thing that would make the cultural transition to cleaner fuels easier would be gasoline that works with current engine technology. Reporting in Chemistry & Sustainability, Energy & Materials, a group of researchers have made a breakthrough in the development of this "green gasoline" - a liquid identical to standard gasoline yet created from sustainable biomass sources like switchgrass and poplar trees.
It may be five to 10 years before green gasoline arrives at the pump or finds its way into a fighter jet but the breakthrough by George Huber of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMass) and graduate students Torren Carlson and Tushar Vispute of the first direct conversion of plant cellulose into gasoline components is a big step.

A rare type of galax with a higher number of X-rays than thought possible has been detected.
Quasars are cosmic 'engines' that pump energy into their surroundings - theorists speculate that an enormous black hole drives each one. As matter falls into the black hole, it collects in a swirling reservoir called the accretion disc, which heats up. Computer simulations suggest that powerful radiation and magnetic fields present in the region eject some of gas from the gravitational clutches of the black hole, throwing it back into space.

You may never have heard of the Perkins high-speed diesel engine but the system is still used in numerous buses, taxis, ambulances, fire engines and ships of today.
Autobiographical notes written by the Lancashire inventor of the engine have been recovered from a garage in Manchester after lying forgotten for 25 years. University of Manchester historian Dr. Yaakov Wise -- who made the discovery -- says the Charles Chapman manuscript gives a unique insight into that 1932 "world beater."
Dr Wise, who worked at the legendary Perkins Engines where Chapman was based was given the document in 1983 - four years after the inventor died aged 82- but rediscovered it after clearing out a garage 25 years later.

‘Mother cells’ which produce the neurons affected by Parkinson’s disease have been identified by scientists, according to new research published in the journal Glia.
The new discovery could pave the way for future treatments for the disease, including the possibility of growing new neurons, and the cells which support them, in the lab. Scientists hope these could then be transplanted into patients to counteract the damage caused by Parkinson’s.
The new study focuses on dopaminergic neurons – brain cells which produce and use the chemical dopamine to communicate with surrounding neurons. The researchers found that these important neurons are created when a particular type of cell in the embryonic brain divides during the early stages of brain development in the womb.

Green tea is high in the antioxidant EGCG (epigallocatechin-3- gallate) which helps prevent the body’s cells from becoming damaged and prematurely aged.
Studies have suggested that the combination of green tea and EGCG may also be beneficial by providing protection against certain types of cancers, including breast cancer.
A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Mississippi researchers now finds that consuming EGCG significantly inhibits breast tumor growth in female mice. These results bring us one step closer to better understanding the disease and potentially new and naturally occurring therapies.