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.
Washington, D.C.—March 18, 2009—In the last three decades, research across the social sciences has made great advances in the political economy of technological change (also called innovation or R&D). There exists a better understanding how domestic institutions shape R&D and innovation rates. However, the global system of production is rapidly changing, so there is a need to review the impacts of the international system on technological changes across many countries.
March 18, 2009 – (BRONX, NY) – Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have identified genetic markers that signal poor outcomes for patients with head and neck cancer. These findings could one day lead to a genetic test that could help select or predict successful treatment options for patients with this type of cancer. The results were published in the American Journal of Pathology.
Toronto – Agencies selling marketing services are often faced with the dilemma of whether to sell a service exclusively to a single firm in a given market category or to work with more than one.
Using a mathematical model, a new study by a professor from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management shows that choice should depend on how different the firms and products potentially being marketed are from each other; how much of their target customer market they are already capturing and; how much more of that market a marketing service company can reach for a firm. The study was recently published In the International Journal of Research in Marketing.
Epilepsy is a common medical condition characterized by convulsions and short periods of confusion. It affects more than 50 million people worldwide. But intractable epilepsy, which affects more than 1 million Americans and is often resistant to drug treatment and surgery, is arguably worse.
But in a just completed clinical trial, a unique nerve-stimulation treatment for intractable epilepsy reduced the number of seizures by more than 50 percent. In the March edition of the journal Neurology, UCLA neurology professor Christopher M. DeGiorgio and colleagues report the results of the long-term pilot trial, which demonstrated the effectiveness of the new treatment, called trigeminal nerve stimulation (TNS).
New treatments for infertility could be closer to reality, thanks to a discovery from scientists at the Université de Montréal and Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital Research Centre.
According to a study published in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction, the researchers have become the first to clone, produce and purify a protein important for sperm maturation, termed Binder of Sperm (BSP), which may have implications for both fertility treatments and new methods of male contraception.
CLEVELAND—Creating a family life incorporating the care needs of a child dependent on technology is a daunting task. Much of this task seems to fall upon mothers to help everyone in the family adjust. However, mothers often need help of their own to cope with the challenges of raising these children, a research study from Case Western Reserve University has found.
"The family takes its cues from me," one mother told Valerie Toly, PhD, R.N., C.P.N.P., an Instructor of Nursing at the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University.
New Haven, Conn.—Even in the midst of a growing economic crisis last fall, over 90 percent of Americans said that the United States should act to reduce global warming, according to a national survey released today by researchers at Yale and George Mason Universities. The results included 34 percent who said the United States should make a large-scale effort, even if it has large economic costs.
Two-thirds of Americans said that the United States should reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases regardless of what other countries do, while only seven percent said the nation should act only if other industrialized and developing countries reduce their emissions as well.
New research carried out at the University of Leicester suggests that Barack Obama has become a 'glorious mascot' for biethnic people seeking to achieve in the workplace.
The US president is seen to give inspiration and new impetus to biethnic people who seek to achieve 'against the odds.'
Postgraduate researcher Rana Sinha has studied if a biethnic background provides any advantage to a biethnic adult in adapting to the modern international workplace. The study has been carried out at the University of Leicester Centre for Labour Market Studies.
MP3 players and digital cameras fill home computers with a data flood of images and music. The sector association BITKOM estimated that the number of music downloads in 2008 would exceed 38 million in Germany. Until now, anyone wishing to maintain an overview of their favorite music and photos had to laboriously assign keywords to everything using cumbersome administration software.
Characteristic changes in the DNA of medulloblastoma, the most frequent malignant brain tumor in childhood, indicate precisely how aggressively the tumor will continue to spread and what the chances of disease relapse are. Researchers at the Center for Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine at the Heidelberg University Hospital and the German Cancer Research Center have discovered this correlation. With this new set of tumor markers, the intensity of treatment can be adjusted individually and the potentially damaging effects reduced. The results have now been published online in the prestigious Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Medulloblastoma is the most frequent childhood brain tumor
Scientists at The University of Nottingham have uncovered a vital new biological clue that could lead to more effective treatments for a children's brain tumour that currently kills more than 60 per cent of young sufferers.
Clinician –scientists at the University's Children's Brain Tumour Research Centre, working on behalf of the Children's Cancer and Leukaemia Group (CCLG), have studied the role of the WNT biological pathway in central nervous system primitive neuroectodermal tumours (CNS PNET), a type of brain tumour that predominantly occurs in children and presently has a very poor prognosis.
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – An X-ray-guided spinal tap procedure fails more than half of the time in young infants and should be used sparingly, if at all, for those patients, according to a new study done by researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
The study also shows that the X-ray-guided form of spinal tap, called fluoroscopy-guided lumbar puncture, causes a doubling in risk of bleeding for patients older than 80 compared to younger patients and that the risk of bleeding caused by the procedure can be reduced by doing the puncture at the middle of the lower back rather than at the lowest levels of the spine.
