News Articles

A new study shows that use of antipsychotic drugs is associated with an early and sustained increase in risk of death when used to treat disruptive behavior of older adults with dementia.
The study suggests that both newer “atypical” antipsychotics and older conventional antipsychotics are associated with increased mortality. The highest risk appears to involve use of the older conventional drugs.

Ghost pains, it seems. Why do some people still feel discomfort long after their injuries have healed?
The definitive answer -- and an effective treatment -- has long eluded scientists. Traditional analgesic drugs, such as aspirin and morphine derivatives, haven’t worked very well.
A Northwestern University researcher has found a key source of chronic pain appears to be an old memory trace that essentially gets stuck in the prefrontal cortex, the site of emotion and learning. The brain seems to remember the injury as if it were fresh and can’t forget it.

University of Utah physicists developed small devices that turn heat into sound and then into electricity. The technology holds promise for changing waste heat into electricity, harnessing solar energy and cooling computers and radars.
"We are converting waste heat to electricity in an efficient, simple way by using sound," says Orest Symko, a University of Utah physics professor who leads the effort. "It is a new source of renewable energy from waste heat."

University of Utah physicist Orest Symko holds a match to a small heat engine that produces a high-pitched tone by converting heat into sound.

Southeastern Brazil, South America’s largest and most populous country, is highlighted in this 26 May 2007 Envisat image.
Brazil consists of one federal district and twenty-six states, four of which comprise the southeastern region – Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Sao Paolo (all visible) and Espirito Santo.

CLICK ABOVE FOR HIGH RES. Credits: ESA

The huge potential of agricultural soils to reduce greenhouse gases and increase production at the same time has been reinforced by new research findings at NSW Department of Primary Industries' (DPI) Wollongbar Agricultural Institute.
Trials of agrichar - a product hailed as a saviour of Australia's carbon-depleted soils and the environment - have doubled and, in one case, tripled crop growth when applied at the rate of 10 tonnes per hectare.

Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity has fascinated physicists and generated debate about the origin of the universe and the structure of objects like black holes and complex stars called quasars. A major focus has been on confirming the existence of the gravitomagnetic field, as well as gravitational waves.
A physicist at the University of Missouri-Columbia recently argued in a paper that the interpretation of the results of Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR), which is being used to detect the gravitomagnetic field, is incorrect because LLR is not currently sensitive to gravitomagnetism and not effective in measuring it.

The discovery of how some abnormal cells can avoid a biochemical program of self-destruction by increasing their energy level and repairing the damage, is giving investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital insights into a key strategy cancer cells use to survive and thrive.
The finding offers an explanation of how abnormal cells that have cheated death once by disabling the main suicide pathway called apoptosis can also foil a backup self-destruct program, which allows them to survive and become cancerous.

The basic Keller explant is a rectangle of dorsal mesendoderm and ectoderm from an early-gastrula-stage Xenopus laevis embryo. It is ~60° to 90° wide, extending from the bottle cells to the animal pole. This protocol describes how to dissect, assemble, and cultivate Keller explants. The purpose of Keller explants was initially to allow observation of gastrulation movements, particularly convergent extension, in culture. This is difficult to do when explants curl up, but in Keller sandwiches, the explants are cultured flat, either as a single sheet (open-face explant) or more frequently as two sheets sandwiched together with their inner surfaces apposed (closed sandwich).

People who suffer from anxiety tend to interpret ambiguous situations, situations that could potentially be dangerous but not necessarily so, as threatening. Researchers from the Mouse Biology Unit of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Italy have now uncovered the neural basis for such anxiety behaviour in mice. They state that a receptor for the messenger serotonin and a neural circuit involving a brain region called the hippocampus play crucial roles in mediating fear responses in ambiguous situations.

Rats with erectile dysfunction, or ED, that were injected with a gene therapy vector containing either of two nerve growth factors were able to regain normal function after four weeks, according to a study conducted by University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers.

A unique examination of one treatment center’s use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in new breast cancer patients has found MRI to be superior to mammography in finding additional tumors in a breast in which cancer has already been diagnosed, and in detecting new tumors in a patient’s supposedly healthy breast.

In the first scientific study of its kind, shark cartilage extract, AE-941 or Neovastat, has shown no benefit as a therapeutic agent when combined with chemotherapy and radiation for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer, according to researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.
Lung cancer is the leading cancer killer in both men and women; according to the American Cancer Society, more than 213,380 will be diagnosed in 2007 and more than 160,390 will die from the disease. Non-small cell is the most common type of the disease, accounting for about 80 percent of all lung cancers, says Charles Lu, M.D., associate professor in M. D. Anderson's Department of Thoracic/Head and Neck Medical Oncology.