News Articles

Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura have been award the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources". Using blue LEDs, white light can be created in a new way and that means LED lamps, which are longer-lasting and more efficient than incandescent sources.

Sodium is back in the health concern cycle and an analysis of data in the federal nationwide dietary intake survey known as "What We Eat in America NHANES 2009-2010," has led a team of Department of Agriculture (USDA) to conclude that, on any given day 49 percent of U.S. adults eat at least one sandwich, and sandwiches account for 20 percent of total daily sodium intake. 

No one is seriously expecting to overturn Einstein's idea of time dilation, and instead the goal is often to find the possible limits. That means looking for deviations in experiments with increasing precision or under extreme conditions. 

Seven Swedish women have had embryos reintroduced after receiving wombs from living donors and now one has delivered a healthy and normally developed boy, reveals the case study in The Lancet.
The uterus transplantation research project at the University of Gothenburg started in 1999 and the goal has been to enable women who were born without a womb or who have lost their wombs in cancer surgery to give birth to their own children.
Nine women in the project have received a womb from live donors – in most cases the recipient's mother but also other family members and close friends. The transplanted uterus was removed in two cases, in one case due to a serious infection and in the other due to blood clots in the transplanted blood vessels.

Cerebral palsy is the most common motor disability in childhood, afflicting between between 1 and 4 per 1,000 kids born worldwide. It's more common among boys than girls and only about half of adolescents with it can walk independently but regardless of that, kids with cerbral palsy rate their quality of life pretty high.
Either adolescents with cerebral palsy are doing pretty well or able-bodied adolescents in general invent problems when they have none. 

Researchers are investigating a possible association between breast implants and a form of lymphoma that may develop tumors at a later stage. The researchers conclude that breast implants can cause a new subtype of the rare yet malignant lymphoma known as anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL).Worldwide there have been 71 documented cases of patients with ALCL in which researchers suspected breast implants to be the cause. ALCL is normally found in the lymph nodes, as well as in skin, lung, liver and soft tissue, but not usually in the breast. 

Clinicians are just like anyone else. As the days goes on, they wear down a little. Numerous patient care decisions each day, and the cumulative demand of those decisions, take their toll.
In primary care, doctors often prescribe unnecessary antibiotics for acute respiratory infections (ARI) and now scholars at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in Boston found that antibiotic prescribing rates increased as the days got later.     

A few years ago there was concern that poor people did not have access to the best health care because of high cost, but two new papers find that spending is actually too high.
The first study examines recent trends in spending and use of oral cancer drugs. They find that average spending on the 47 available oral oncolytics — cancer medication taken specifically by mouth — increased from $940 million in the first quarter of 2006 to $1.4 billion by the third quarter of 2011. 

Our fat contains a variety of cells with the potential to become bone, cartilage, or more fat if properly prompted. This makes adipose tissue a key potential resource for regenerative therapies such as bone healing if doctors can get enough of those cells and compel them to produce bone.
In a new study, scientists at Brown University demonstrate a new method for extracting a wide variety of potential bone-producing cells from human fat. They developed a fluorescent tag that could find and identify cells expressing a gene called ALPL. Expression of the gene is an indicator of bone-making potential.

By studying identical twins, researchers from Lund University in Sweden have identified mechanisms that could be behind the development of type 2 diabetes. This may explain cases where one identical twin develops type 2 diabetes while the other remains healthy.
The study involved 14 pairs of identical twins in Sweden and Denmark. One twin had type 2 diabetes and the other was healthy. Fat tissue can release hormones and regulate metabolism in different organs in the body. The question the researchers posed was whether epigenetic changes in the DNA lead to changes in the fat tissue that in turn can lead to the development of type 2 diabetes. 

The way neurons are interconnected in the brain is very complicated. This holds especially true for the cells of the hippocampus. It is one of the oldest brain regions and its form resembles a see horse (hippocampus in Latin).
The hippocampus enables us to navigate space securely and to form personal memories. So far, the anatomic knowledge of the networks inside the hippocampus and its connection to the rest of the brain has left scientists guessing which information arrived where and when.

Signals spread through the brain

The director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, is worried about the lack of reproducibility and 'secret sauce' in a large number of studies funded by their $30 billion government agency. 
Fraud happens everywhere, as does cherry-picking of results, but the more scientific the field, the less it happens. It's hard to get 2,000 people to be fraudulent about an experimental physics result while a lone psychologist writing about surveys of college students is difficult to catch.
Carnegie-Mellon and Stanford scholars say they have a solution for Dr. Collins, at least - use