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.
BLACKSBURG, Va., March 30, 2009 –– Cancer and its therapies, including chemotherapy and radiotherapy, may directly alter and damage taste and odor perception, possibly leading to patient malnutrition, and in severe cases, significant morbidity, according to a Virginia Tech – Wake Forest University Comprehensive Cancer Center compilation of various existing studies. Their review appears in the March/April 2009 Journal of Supportive Oncology.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — More than 100,000 people in the U.S. are waiting for an organ transplant, and an average of 17 die waiting each day, according to University of Illinois communication professor Brian Quick.
But you'll rarely hear those facts in organ donation stories on TV network news, says Quick, the lead author of a study published this month in the journal Health Communication.
You'll also rarely hear about the simple steps required to become a potential donor, he said.
"We found that the networks didn't spend a whole lot of time talking about the need, and they didn't spend a lot of time talking about how to register," Quick said.
Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. – Being able to accurately predict how a given cancer will respond to chemotherapy would spare patients with non-responsive tumors the burden of undergoing toxic and ultimately unhelpful treatment. Just as important, knowing which of a patient's cancer-causing genetic lesions are contributing to drug resistance might help doctors redesign therapy for maximum benefit.
Researchers led by Professor Scott Lowe, Ph.D., of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), have come closer to achieving these critical goals for human cancer therapy by developing new mouse models for human acute myeloid leukemia (AML), an aggressive and devastating cancer of white blood cells.
Researchers at the University of Illinois report that IDO, an enzyme found throughout the body and long suspected of playing a role in depression, is in fact essential to the onset of depressive symptoms sparked by chronic inflammation.
Their study, just published online in the Journal of Immunology, is the first to identify IDO (indoleamine 2,3 dioxygenase) as a molecular switch that induces depressive symptoms in some cases of chronic inflammation.
DURHAM, N.C. -- The power of magnetism may address a major problem facing bioengineers as they try to create new tissue -- getting human cells to not only form structures, but to stimulate the growth of blood vessels to nourish that growth.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — As school districts across the nation revamped curricula to meet requirements of the federal "No Child Left Behind" Act, opportunities for children to be physically active during the school day diminished significantly.
You've probably been there. In a doctor's office, being advised to do what you dread – exercise. You get that feeling in your gut, acknowledging that, indeed, you should exercise but probably won't. Now imagine that the doctor is your optometrist.
Don't clean your glasses. You read that right. Eye exercises are used to treat a variety of vision disorders, according to Dr. Janice Wensveen, clinical associate professor at the University of Houston's College of Optometry.
The atomic dynamics of the hole in graphene was simulated via a kinetic Monte Carlo method. Probabilities for atomic migration, insertion and ejection were determined by ab-initio calculation. The simulation starts with a predefined hole in a graphene sheet. As it proceeds, the hole grows and the atoms along the edge rearrange themselves. The zigzag configuration is found to dominate the armchair one.
(Photo Credit: National Center for Electron Microscopy)
This story is, literally, stone age meets digital age: University of Washington researchers are combining the ancient art of ceramics and the new technology of 3-D printing. Along the way, they are making 3-D printing dramatically cheaper.
GAITHERSBURG, Md.—Researchers at the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Cornell University have capitalized on a process for manufacturing integrated circuits at the nanometer (billionth of a meter) level and used it to develop a method for engineering the first-ever nanoscale fluidic (nanofluidic) device with complex three-dimensional surfaces.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 31, 2009 – Formerly depressed women show patterns of brain activity when they are criticized by their mothers that are distinctly different from the patterns shown by never depressed controls, according to a new study from Harvard University. The participants reported being completely well and fully recovered, yet their neural activity resembled that which has been observed in depressed individuals in other studies.
Nurses in the maternity ward often say that a difficult labor is a sign of a baby boy. Now, a Tel Aviv University study provides scientific proof that a male baby comes with a bigger package of associated risks than his female counterparts.
