News Articles

In the future doctors will be able to find more tumors at an early stage while using a smaller x-ray dose for each examination. Color x-rays offer new possibilities for medical diagnoses. This spring Mid Sweden University is presenting three dissertations in the field of digital color x-rays.
Digital color x-rays are based on the same advanced technology that is used when nuclear physicists look for new elementary particles. The great scientific challenge in constructing a color x-ray camera is to be able to shrink the large-scale detection equipment used by nuclear physicists to the microscopic format.

NASA satellite data have helped scientists solve a decades-old puzzle about how vast blooms of microscopic plants can form in the middle of otherwise barren mid-ocean regions. A research team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Mass., has used the data in its work to show that episodic, swirling current systems known as eddies act to pump nutrients up from the deep ocean to fuel such blooms.

A new study by The George Institute for International Health was designed to determine the risk of a crash associated with passenger carriage compared with that of using a mobile phone while driving.
"Drivers with passengers were almost 60% more likely to have a motor vehicle crash resulting in hospital attendance, irrespective of their age group. The likelihood of a crash was more than doubled in the presence of two or more passengers," noted the study's lead investigator, Dr Suzanne McEvoy.

With the growing number of smoking bans in restaurants and bars driving smokers outside, researchers in Athens, Georgia, are hoping to find out whether secondhand smoke from smokers clustered outside these establishments is posing a health hazard of its own.
They presented findings from a study in which they measured the increase of pollutants from secondhand smoke.

Silicon is the most important material for electronic chips and processors. Yet it has a big drawback: being a so-called indirect semiconductor, it hardly emits any light. Therefore worldwide efforts in the labs of the microelectronics industry are aimed towards developing more efficient light sources based on silicon. Physicists at the Forschungszentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (FZD) now managed to make Silicon shine red and blue in an alternating fashion. This two-color light source could help to produce cheap and compact biosensors.

As the Earth’s temperatures continue to rise, we can expect a signficant change in infectious disease patterns around the globe. Just exactly what those changes will be remains unclear, but scientists agree they will not be for the good.
"Environmental changes have always been associated with the appearance of new diseases or the arrival of old diseases in new places. With more changes, we can expect more surprises," says Stephen Morse of Columbia University.

Scientists have identified yet another risk from a high-salt diet. High concentrations of salt in the stomach appear to induce gene activity in the ulcer-causing bacterium Helicobacter pylori, making it more virulent and increasing the likelihood of an infected person developing a severe gastric disease.
"Apparently the stomach pathogen H. pylori closely monitors the diets of those people whom it infects. Epidemiological evidence has long implied that there is a connection between H. pylori and the composition of the human diet. This is especially true for diets rich in salt," says Hanan Gancz, of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland.

In adults with major depressive disorder, adding aripiprazole to antidepressant therapy (ADT) resulted in significant improvement in the primary endpoint, the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) Total Score.
In this six-week, randomized, placebo-controlled study atypical antipsychotic aripiprazole was added to antidepressants in patients who did not have an adequate response to ADT alone. (1)(Berman, 2007, APA Poster) These findings are from one of two completed studies evaluating adjunctive aripiprazole with ADT.

A new study presented at the American Thoracic Society 2007 International Conference finds that obese people are significantly more likely to have persistent or severe persistent asthma than their thinner counterparts.
The study presented on May 23 looked at 3,059 adults with asthma, who were divided into three groups: non-overweight, overweight and obese, based on their body mass index (BMI). Compared with non-overweight asthma patients, obese patients (BMI=30) were more likely to report having continuous symptoms, have more ER visits, miss more days of work, use more rescue inhaler medications and use inhaled steroids to control asthma.

Ugandan children who received the combination therapy of artemether-lumefantrine experienced a lower rate of treatment failure compared to other combination therapies, according to a study in the May 23/30 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on malaria.
Malaria is one of the leading causes of death in children in Africa. One of the reasons the control of malaria has been difficult is because of increasing resistance to some drugs, leading to changes in antimalarial treatment recommendations, according to background information in the article. Combination therapies have replaced monotherapies as the recommended treatments for uncomplicated malaria. However, it is not clear which treatment regimens are most effective.

Pancreatic cancer is among the deadliest of today's cancers due to limited tools for early diagnosis and few effective treatments. Research presented today takes a closer look at pancreatic cancer and the conditions that may lead to it, such as chronic pancreatitis, to evaluate the progress made to date, as well as the promising new applications of technology that will improve survival rates in the coming years. DDW is the largest international gathering of physicians and researchers in the fields of gastroenterology, hepatology, endoscopy and gastrointestinal surgery.

Scientists have made a breakthrough in understanding how cancers spread in what could lead to new ways of beating the disease.
The University of Manchester study used embryonic stem (ES) cells to investigate how some tumours are able to migrate to other parts of the body, which makes the treatment of cancer much more difficult.
Dr Chris Ward, in the University’s Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences, studied a crucial change that makes cancer cells able to start moving and spread into other tissues.
Normal cells, as well as early cancer cells, are called epithelial cells because they bind tightly to each other forming stable layers of tissue. However, as a tumour becomes more advanced, some of the cells change to become ‘mesenchymal’.