A new cancer vaccine platform works by enhancing the ability of the immune system to recognize cancer by leveraging anti-viral memories it already has - due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst outbreak of the last 70 years.
The voyage of NASA’s Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft through the Jupiter system earlier this year provided a bird’s-eye view of a dynamic planet that has changed since the last close-up looks by NASA spacecraft.
New Horizons passed Jupiter on Feb. 28, riding the planet’s gravity to boost its speed and shave three years off its trip to Pluto.
An estimated 6.6 million people in Europe suffer from schizophrenia:(1) a serious mental illness characterized by disturbances in the thoughts, perceptions, emotions and behavior of a person.
A large majority of families who care for someone with schizophrenia are confident that many people with the disease can lead independent, fulfilling lives with the ability to have a part-time job when having optimal control over their symptoms.
These results announced today on World Mental Health Day, are findings from a European survey of over 320 families and carers of people with schizophrenia conducted between July and September 2007 by EUFAMI (European Federation of Associations of Families of People with Mental Illness).
Recent observations from NASA and Japanese X-ray observatories have helped clarify one of the long-standing mysteries in astronomy -- the origin of cosmic rays.
Outer space is a vast shooting gallery of cosmic rays. Discovered in 1912, cosmic rays are not actually rays at all; they are subatomic particles and ions (such as protons and electrons) that zip through space in all directions at near-light speed, with energies tens of thousands of times greater than particles produced in Earth’s largest particle accelerators.
A research team combining high-energy physicists from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and neuroscientists from the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., has discovered a type of retinal cell that may help monkeys, apes, and humans see motion.
The cell type has very similar properties to so-called Y retinal ganglion cells, which were first described in cats in 1966. Upon the Y-cell's discovery, scientists began a decades-long search for its counterpart in primates.
Researchers conducting a clinical trial state that the drug topiramate may be effective in curbing alcohol dependence.
“Topiramate has emerged as a promising treatment for people with alcohol dependence,” says the lead author, Professor Bankole Johnson, D.Sc., M.D., Ph.D., M.Phil., FRCPsych., who is chairman of the University of Virginia Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences. “Our finding in this national study was that topiramate is a safe and highly efficacious medicine that can be paired with a 15-minute brief intervention by health practitioners who are not addiction specialists.
A new study reveals that even married men who are considered aloof spouses and provide minimal parenting have much lower testosterone levels than single, unmarried men.
In the October issue of Current Anthropology, Peter B. Gray (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), Peter T. Ellison (Harvard University), and Benjamin C. Campbell (Boston University) investigated the links between male testosterone levels and marital status among modern-day pastoralists in northern Kenya – of whom less than 1.5 percent consider their wives a source of emotional support.
The Ariaal males serve as herd boys until they reach puberty, at which point they are initiated, become warriors, and accumulate livestock.
A group of scientists, led by mathematicians, has taken on the challenge of building a common model of immune responses. Their work will radically improve our understanding of the human immune system by allowing all the scientific disciplines working on it to have a common reference point and language.
The mathematicians will investigate how the different cellular components of the immune system work together and devise a theoretical and computational model that can be used by immunologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists and engineers.
The model promises to help a multi-disciplinary research community work together to bring about medical advances for patients.
A diet low in fat could reduce the risk of ovarian cancer in healthy postmenopausal women, according to new results from the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) Dietary Modification Trial.
Researchers found that after four years, women who decreased the amount of dietary fat they consumed were 40 percent less likely to develop ovarian cancer than women who followed normal dietary patterns. As expected, no effect was found during the first four years because preventive benefits on cancer often take many years to develop. Ovarian cancer affects about 1 in 60 U.S.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2007 jointly to Albert Fert, Unité Mixte de Physique CNRS/THALES, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France, and Peter Grünberg, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany, "for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance".
Nanotechnology gives sensitive read-out heads for compact hard disks
This year's physics prize is awarded for the technology that is used to read data on hard disks. It is thanks to this technology that it has been possible to miniaturize hard disks so radically in recent years. Sensitive read-out heads are needed to be able to read data from the compact hard disks used in laptops and some music players, for instance.
Tilapia, a fish that originates from southern regions, has been introduced in over 100 countries. It is the second most commonly produced fish in aquaculture in the world after carp. 99% is produced and consumed in China.
Raising tilapia is easy and inexpensive. It adapts well to fresh or salt water and fattens fast. Unlike most salmoniforms in aquaculture (salmon, trout, perch, bream), for which fishmeal and fish oil constitute an essential part of their diet, tilapia is lower down in the trophic or food chain and feeds on algae, plankton or small animals. In extensive and semi-extensive production systems, tilapia is largely fed on vegetable waste (rice, cotton, etc.).
Thomson Scientific today announced the results of a study analyzing Australian institutions' research influence and scientific output.
In the September/October issue of Science Watch, Thomson Scientific analyzes data from its Australian University Indicators 1981-2006 to evaluate universities and research institutions based on total citations and impact -- the average number of citations per paper.
The study ranks institutions by impact and total citations across 21 fields as well as overall output and impact.
From 135,000 to 90,000 years ago tropical Africa had megadroughts more extreme and widespread than any previously known for that region, according to new research.
Learning that now-lush tropical Africa was an arid scrubland during the early Late Pleistocene provides new insights into humans' migration out of Africa and the evolution of fishes in Africa's Great Lakes.
"Lake Malawi, one of the deepest lakes in the world, acts as a rain gauge," said lead scientist Andrew S. Cohen of The University of Arizona in Tucson. "The lake level dropped at least 600 meters (1,968 feet) -- an extraordinary amount of water lost from the lake.
