One of astronomy's big questions is why galaxies forming as recently as 1 billion years after the Big Bang contain so much dust. The leading hypothesis is that supernovae, stars that explode at the end of their lives, contain large amounts of metal-enriched material that, in turn, harbors key ingredients of dust, like silicon, iron and carbon.
One reason for the development of allergy may be malfunction of the respiratory epithelium, which allows allergens to bind to, enter and travel through the epithelium. Two studies by Finnish research groups on this subject have recently been published in two international biomedical journals (1) Allergy, and (2) Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
Research on the mechanisms of allergy has focused on the understanding of aberrant immunoresponses. Only lately the role of epithelium as the first line of defense against allergens has been realized. So far, we do not know why and how allergens are transported through the epithelium.
More than 80 undersea volcanoes and a multitude of islands are dotted along the Hawaii-Emperor seamount chain like pearls on a necklace. A sharp bend in the middle is the only blemish. The long-standing explanation for this distinctive feature was a change in direction of the Pacific oceanic plate in its migration over a stationary hotspot – an apparently unmoving volcano deep within the earth.
It has so far not been proven that long-acting insulin analogues (LAIAs) have an advantage over conventional human insulin in the treatment of patients with type 2 diabetes. Even though the results of a 5-year study are available for one of the two LAIAs assessed (insulin glargine), the potential long-term benefits and harms of this drug class have still not been sufficiently investigated. This is the conclusion of a report by the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG), Cologne, which was published in March 2009 and for which an English-language summary is now available.
Mothers with many negative thoughts and feelings are more likely to give their children unhealthy food. This is shown in a study from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) in collaboration with the University of Oslo.
This is the first research project in the world that analyses children's diets combined with both psychological and sociodemographic variables in the mother. As part of the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study, a total of 27 763 mothers were asked how often and how much their 18 month old child ate of 36 types of food and drink. By this age, children learn to prefer sweet and fatty food over healthy food.
Integral has captured one of the brightest gamma-ray bursts ever seen. A meticulous analysis of the data has allowed astronomers to investigate the initial phases of this giant stellar explosion, which led to the ejection of matter at velocities close to the speed of light. In particular, the astronomers believe that the explosion lifted a piece of the central engine's magnetic field into space.
On 19 December 2004, the blast from an exploding star arrived at Earth. ESA's Integral satellite, an orbiting gamma-ray observatory, recorded the entire event, providing information for what may prove to be one of the most important gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) seen in recent years. As the data was collected, astronomers saw the 500-second-long burst rise to extraordinary brilliance.
Only every second patient with colorectal carcinoma had taken part in an early detection program within the last ten years. This is the result, at least for a group of 212 colorectal cancer patients whose screening behavior is examined in the current edition of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2009; 106[12]: 195�) by Konrad Schoppmeyer and his colleagues from Leipzig University Hospital.
The authors have performed a retrospective analysis of the data on screening examinations for the ten years before the diagnosis of colorectal cancer.
That sinking feeling when your hard disk starts screeching and you haven't backed up your holiday photos is a step closer to becoming a thing of the past thanks to research into a new kind of computer memory.
Physicists at the University of Leeds and scientists at IBM Research's Zurich lab have made new advances in researching a new kind of memory, called 'racetrack' memory, which could become the standard method of storing information on home computers.
Your hard drive is a metal disc made up of millions of tiny spaces, called domains, in which all the atoms are magnetised in one direction or the other to represent binary data. Much like a record player, the disc spins around until the 'head' finds and reads the information.
AUSTIN, Texas-Banishing a fear-inducing memory might be a matter of the right timing, according to new research.
Marie Monfils, an assistant professor of psychology at The University of Texas at Austin, has taken advantage of a key time when memories are ripe for change to substantially modify memories of fear into benign memories and to keep them that way.
The finding is a significant advance in learning how memory can be manipulated in rodents. It also could indicate a potential treatment for humans suffering from anxiety-related disorders.
Current treatments are not dependably long lasting and some of the treatments include drugs, many of which would be hard to administer locally in humans and have harmful side effects.
As we look at the world around us, images flicker into our brains
like so many disparate pixels on a computer screen that change every
time our eyes move, which is several times a second. Yet we don't
perceive the world as a constantly flashing computer display.
Why not?
McGill University researchers have successfully amplified light with so-called "colloidal quantum dots," a technology that had been written off by many as a dead-end.
Over the last 15 years, repeated quantum dot research efforts failed to deliver on expected improvements in amplification, and many researchers started to believe that an unknown but insurmountable law of physics was blocking their path. Essentially, they said, quantum dots would simply never work well for one of their primary applications.
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have figured out the orientation of a protein in the antenna complex to its neighboring membrane in a photosynthetic bacterium, a key find in the process of energy transfer in photosynthesis.
Robert Blankenship, Ph.D., Markey Distinguished Professor of biology and chemistry in Arts & Sciences, led a team that for the first time combined chemical labeling with mass spectroscopy to verify the orientation. The team also included Michael Gross, Ph.D., Washington University professor of chemistry, immunology and medicine, and chemistry graduate students Jianzhong Wen and Hao Zhang. A paper describing this work appeared recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.
NEW YORK (April 2, 2009) -- Getting your teenager to drink a chocolate milkshake isn't something most parents need to worry about. But this is just the approach used in one treatment for anorexia nervosa. Known as Behavioral Family Therapy, or the Maudsley Approach, parents are called up on to supervise the eating habits of their anorexic child, feeding them high-calorie meals like milkshakes and macaroni and cheese until they regain a healthy weight.
