News Articles

Using artificial cell-like particles, Yale biomedical engineers have devised a way to produce a 45-fold enhancement of T cell activation and expansion, an immune response important for a patient’s ability to fight cancer and infectious diseases.
The artificial cells, developed by Tarek Fahmy, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Yale and his graduate student Erin Steenblock, are made of a material commonly used for biodegradable sutures. The authors say that the new method is the first “off-the-shelf” antigen-presenting artificial cell that can be tuned to target a specific disease or infection.
“This procedure is likely to make it to the clinic rapidly,” said senior author Fahmy. “All of the materials we use are natural, biodegradable already have FDA approval.”

The type of robot chosen as a personal companion by participants at the University of Hertfordshire Science and Technology Research Institute’s (STRI) Showcase next week will very much depend on their personality type.
This is a recent finding from Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn’s team at the university’s School of Computer Science, who took the robot out of the laboratory last year and had it living in a house nearby so that they could observe how it interacted with humans.
People with extroverted personalities will choose more human-looking robots with facial features and a human-like voice, results say, while introverted people tend to prefer mechanical-looking robots, more like a box on wheels with a metal head.

University of Utah scientists developed a new crime-fighting tool by showing that human hair reveals the general location where a person drank water, helping police track past movements of criminal suspects or unidentified murder victims.
“You are what you eat and drink – and that is recorded in your hair,” says geochemist Thure Cerling, who led the research effort with ecologist Jim Ehleringer. The new hair analysis method also may prove useful to anthropologists, archaeologists and medical doctors in addition to police.
“We have found significant variations in hydrogen and oxygen isotopes in hair and water that relate to where a person lives in the United States,” Ehleringer says.

There are currently no objective clinical laboratory blood tests for mood disorders. The current reliance on patient self-report of symptom severity and on the clinicians’ impression is a rate limiting step in effective treatment and new drug development.
Investigators from Indiana propose, and provide proof of principle for, an approach to help identify blood biomarkers for mood state. They measured whole-genome gene expression differences in blood samples from subjects with bipolar disorder that had low mood vs. those that had high mood at the time of the blood draw, and separately, changes in gene expression in brain and blood of a mouse pharmacogenomic model.

The rise of oxygen and the oxidation of deep oceans between 635 and 551 million years ago had an impact on the increase and spread of the earliest complex life, including animals, according to a study in PNAS.
The atmosphere had almost no oxygen until 2.5 billion years ago and it was not until about 600 million years ago that the atmospheric oxygen level rose to a fraction of modern levels. Geologists and evolutionary biologists have speculated that the rise of the breathing gas and subsequent oxygenation of the deep oceans are intimately tied to the evolution of modern biological systems.

A new tool called "Carbon Hero" was regional prize winner in the 2007 European Satellite Navigation Competition, sponsored by ESA’s Technology Transfer Programme. It uses satellite navigation technology to track journeys and tells people their carbon footprint.
“With Carbon Hero calculating your carbon footprint is easy,” explains Andreas Zachariah, a graduate student from the Royal College of Art in London and inventor of Carbon Hero. “This easy-to-use mobile system uses satellite navigation data to calculate the environmental impact of travel. With its specialist database and algorithm, it can determine the mode of transport and its environmental impact with almost no user input.”

The United States is the world's top corn grower, producing 44 percent of the global crop. In 2007, U.S. farmers produced a record 13.1 billion bushels of corn, an increase of nearly 25 percent over the previous year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The 2007 production value of corn was estimated at more than $3 billion. Favorable prices, a growing demand for ethanol and strong export sales have fueled an increase in farmland acreage devoted to corn production.
A team of scientists have completed a working draft of the corn genome, an accomplishment that should accelerate efforts to develop better crop varieties to meet society's growing demands for food, livestock feed and fuel.
Corn, also known as maize, underlies myriads of products, from breakfast cereal, meat and milk to toothpaste, shoe polish and ethanol.

The pea is an important crop species but it is unsuited to the Agrobacterium-based genetic modification techniques that are commonly used to work with crops. Researchers have now discovered the first high-throughput forward and reverse genetics tool for the pea (Pisum sativum) and it could have major benefits for crop breeders around the world.
Researchers from the INRA Plant Genomics Research Unit at Evry, and the INRA Grain Legumes Research Unit at Bretenières, both in France, developed a high-quality genetic reference collection of Pisum sativum mutants within the European Grain Legumes Integrated Project.
Abdelhafid Bendahmane and colleagues used plants from an early-flowering garden pea cultivar, Caméor, to create a mutant population, which they then systematically phenotyped for use in both forward and reverse genetics studies.

An intrepid archaeologist is well on her way to dislodging the prevailing assumptions of scholars about the people who built and used Maya temples.
From the grueling work of analyzing the “attributes,” the nitty-gritty physical details of six temples in Yalbac, a Maya center in the jungle of central Belize – and a popular target for antiquities looters – primary investigator Lisa Lucero is building her own theories about the politics of temple construction that began nearly two millennia ago.
Her findings from the fill, the mortar and other remnants of jungle-wrapped structures lead her to believe that kings weren’t the only people building or sponsoring Late Classic period temples (from about 550 to 850), the stepped pyramids that rose like beacons out of the southern lowlands as ea

Scientists have discovered Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba), a shrimp-like crustacean thought to live only in the upper ocean, are living and feeding down to depths of 3000 metres in the waters around the Antarctic Peninsula. The discovery completely changes scientists’ understanding of the major food source for fish, squid, penguins, seals and whales.
Antarctic krill feed on phytoplankton and are in turn eaten by a wide range of animals including fish, penguins, seals and whales. Phytoplankon are the starting point for the marine food chain and use photosynthesis to extract carbon from carbon dioxide.

Researchers writing in PMC Physics B have found that the rate at which electrons lose energy to carbon monoxide is greater than that to carbon dioxide at higher levels in the atmospheres of both Mars and Venus.
This finding contributes to the body of knowledge required for modelling of the atmospheres of Mars and Venus, which in turn provides an opportunity to validate the techniques used in modelling of more complicated atmospheres such as that of Earth.
Solar energy is both absorbed in atmospheres and eventually emitted to space by processes at the atomic level. These complicated processes need to be parameterised so that huge numbers of individual interactions can be included in models. Modelling of the atmospheres of other planets is useful because the techniques can be developed and tested on different environments, which are not complicated by biological or human activity.

Vivid colors, flowing silk ribbons, and glittering bits of mirrors - the Vikings dressed with considerably more panache than we previously thought. The men were especially vain, and the women dressed provocatively, but with the advent of Christianity, fashions changed, according to Swedish archeologist Annika Larsson.
"They combined oriental features with Nordic styles. Their clothing was designed to be shown off indoors around the fire," says textile researcher Annika Larsson, whose research at Uppsala University presents a new picture of the Viking Age.
She has studied textile finds from the Lake Mälaren Valley, the area that includes Stockholm and Uppsala and was one of the central regions in Scandinavia during the Viking Age.