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Tiny particles could solve billion-dollar problem

New research from Rice University's Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology finds that nanoparticles of gold and palladium are the most effective catalysts yet identified for remediation of one of the nation's most pervasive and troublesome groundwater pollutants, trichloroethene or TCE. The research, conducted by engineers at Rice and the Georgia Institute of Technology, w...

A comprehensive response to HIV could prevent 10 million AIDS deaths in Africa by 2020

Based on successful animal studies, a novelvaccine that uses immune cells as factories to produce Her2/neu proteinmay offer a way to treat some human breast cancers, say researchers atThe University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. [Ed : is a protein often present / surexpressed in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/...

UCLA launches $20 million stem cell institute to investigate HIV, cancer and neurological disorders

Experts in bioengineering, imaging, molecular genetics, immunology, ethics, hematology/oncology and cellular biology to collaborate on Proposition 71 research Drawing together experts from fields as diverse as engineering to molecular biology, UCLA officials announced March 16 the formation of the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine to conduct embryonic and adult stem cell resear...

Agilent Technologies new genome analysis technology set to accelerate Australia fight against mesothelioma

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) today announced that its breakthrough Human Genome CGH Microarray technology will be used by researchers at Melbourne's Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in a three-year study designed to better understand mesothelioma, a cancer found in the lining of the chest, the abdominal cavity and around the heart, usually caused by exposure to asbestos. Due to its act...

Six million Africans face famine because of locusts, drought

With locusts and drought having destroyed crops and stripped grazing land for six million people across West Africa, small farmers have started selling livestock cheaply and eating the seed corn they should plant during next month's expected rains, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said today. "The combined effect of drought and locust attack, pa...

Retrovirus struck ancestors of chimpanzees and gorillas millions of years ago, but did not affect ancestral humans

The ancestors of chimpanzees and gorillas were infected with a deadly retrovirus about three to four million years ago, but there is no evidence it infected ancestors of modern-day humans, according to research by genome scientists. The virus struck after humans had split off the evolutionary tree from primates, researchers said. The infection may have played a role in the evolution of such great...

Evidence of 600-million-year old fungi-algae symbiosis discovered in marine fossils

Researchers from China and the United States have found evidence of lichen-like symbiosis in 600-million-year-old fossils from South China. The previous earliest evidence of lichen was 400 million years old, discovered in Scotland. The discovery also adds to the scarce fossil record of fungi and raises new questions about lichen evolution. Xunlai Yuan, a paleontologist with the Nanjing Ins...

$5.1 billion would save 6 million children

Six million children could be saved if $5.1 billion in new resources for preventive and therapeutic interventions were provided each year, according to researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and other institutions. Approximately 90 percent of all child deaths occur in 42 countries around the world. In those countries, the average cost per child saved would be $887 or...

Health costs soar as 60 million Americans classed as obese

A new method for manipulating macromolecules has been developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The technique uses double-stranded DNA to direct the behavior of other molecules. In previous DNA nanotechnology efforts, duplex DNA has been used as a static lattice to construct geometrical objects in three dimensions. Instead of manipulating DNA alone into s...

UN pours polio vaccine into Yemen amid outbreak

As Yemen geared up for an end-of-month nationwide campaign to immunize all children under 5 against a fast-moving paralytic poliovirus outbreak, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said it was shipping in 6 million doses of polio vaccine. In addition, 10 experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) are working with national coordinators and helping to train vaccinators and sup...

New Vaccine To Be Used For First Time In Polio Outbreak Response

Eighteen new cases of polio have today been announced in Yemen, bringing the reported total number associated with an outbreak in the country to 22. Yemen had been polio-free since disease surveillance began in 1996 - a genetic investigation is ongoing to determine the precise origin of the outbreak. Experts fear that the number of cases will rise in the immediate future. Teams of WHO and...

Malaria killing a million a year

The prevention and treatment of malaria has made progress since 2000, but an annual death toll of 1 million people presents challenges as the mosquito-borne parasitic disease makes a comeback, the first joint malaria report from the UN World Health Organization (WHO) and UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) says. The report on the disease that claims three times as many African children's lives as...

$6.5 Million Grant for Microarray Center at Yale School of Medicine

In 1909, while harvesting a typical corn crop (Zea mays) in Illinois, a field worker noticed a plant so unusual that it was initially believed to be a new species. Its "peculiarly shaped ear" was "laid aside as a curiosity" and the specimen was designated Zea ramosa (from the Latin ramosus, "having many branches"). Due to the alteration of a single gene, later named ramosa1, both the ear and the...

TGen awarded $7.1 million to accelerate brain disease research

The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) today announced the receipt of a $7.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue a project designed to uncover the genetic causes of neurological and mental health disorders using sophisticated genetic scanning technologies. This award is part of a greater $25 million grant that TGen will share with three other micro...

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: Many of 2 billion dryland dwellers at risk as land degrades

Growing desertification worldwide threatens to swell by millions the number of poor forced to seek new homes and livelihoods. And a rising number of large, intense dust storms plaguing many areas menace the health of people even continents away, international experts warn in a new report. Thick storms rising out of the Gobi Desert affect much of China, Korea and Japan and even reduce air q...

MSU researchers receive $4 million grant to uncover gene functions

A collaboration of Michigan State University researchers will use a $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation to uncover the functions of genes in a plant - research which may ultimately lead to improvements in human health and agriculture. In a collaborative effort spanning several departments, MSU scientists will determine the functions of roughly 4,400 nuclear genes from the...

UCLA scientists strengthen case for life more than 3.8 billion years ago

Ten years ago, an international team of scientists reported evidence, in a controversial cover story in the journal Nature, that life on Earth began more than 3.8 billion years ago--400 million years earlier than previously thought. A UCLA professor who was not part of that team and two of the original authors will report in late July that the evidence is stronger than ever. Craig E. Mann...

Spider blood found in 20 million year old fossil

A scientist from the University of Manchester has discovered the first identified droplets of spider blood in a piece of amber up to 20 million years old. The droplets are the first ident...

South Africa still debating how to tackle HIV/AIDS when 5 million are infected

A national conference in South Africa was dominated this week by the continuing debate over HIV/AIDS drugs. Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang repeated yet again that drugs were not the only way to fight HIV/AIDS, and that eating habits were also important. After previously denying links between HIV and AIDS, the South African government began providing AIDS drugs in clinics last ye...

Researchers propose measures to curb lion attacks in Tanzania

A breakthrough in human stem cell research, producing embryonic-like cells from umbilical cord blood may substantially speed up the development of treatments for life-threatening illnesses, injuries and disabilities. The discovery made during a project undertaken with experts from the University of Texas Medical Branch and the Synthecon Corporation in the United States provides medical researcher...

Virginia Tech, Nanjing Institute researchers discover half-billion year-old fossils

Scientists interested in ancient life have a wealth of fossils and impressions frozen in rocks that they can study from as far back as 540 million years ago ?when animals with shells and bones began to become plentiful. But evidence of complex life older than 540 million years is scant and difficult to study. Now, a research team from Virginia Tech in the United States and Nanjing Institut...

MWG Biotech expands siMAX?siRNA portfolio with new scales, lengths and design tools

University of Utah researchers showed that a fruit fly gene is crucial for determining when juveniles begin to mature into adults, and how the transformation initially proceeds. Understanding this process in humans may help explain how adorable children become surly teenagers. When the DHR4 gene is disabled, fruit flies prematurely begin metamorphosis ?maturation from an immature larva to...

Rutgers to lead $52.7 million protein research program

Rutgers University will lead a new $52.7 million research program that will help reveal the roles that proteins play in life's most fundamental processes and point the way to designing new medicines. Under the direction of Rutgers Professor Gaetano Montelione, the Northeast Structural Genomics Consortium (NESG) will conduct the five-year undertaking. "This grant, one of the largest in Rutg...

Number Of Babies Born Prematurely Nears Historic Half Million Mark In U.S.

Some 12.3 percent of all babies -- 499,008 infants -- were born prematurely (less than 37 weeks gestation) in 2003, according to the report released by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). That's up from 12.1 percent (or about 480,000 babies) in 2002 -- and an increase of more than 30 percent since the government began tracking premature births in 1981. The prematurity rate was 9.4 i...

Research team receives $7.5 million to study cassava

Ohio State University will lead an interdisciplinary team of scientists in a multi-million dollar project to help improve one of the most important food crops in Africa, cassava. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation selected the BioCassava Plus project as a recipient of one of the foundation's "Grand Challenges in Global Health" program grants. Created two years ago, the goal of the $450...

Polio vaccination strategies assessed as eradication nears

Polio is on track to become only the second disease ever eradicated. In two studies in the Dec. 15 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online, scientists are working to ensure that once it is gone, it stays gone. One study reduces concerns that people whose immune systems were weakened by HIV would re-introduce poliovirus into the community. The other study looks at the ho...

Birth defects: 8 million annually worldwide

Every year an estimated 8 million children -- about 6 percent of total births worldwide -- are born with a serious birth defect of genetic or partially genetic origin, according to a new report from the March of Dimes. Additionally, hundreds of thousands more are born with serious birth defects of post-conception origin due to maternal exposure to environmental agents, such as alcohol, rub...

Cure for cancer worth $50 trillion

A new study, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Political Economy, calculates the prospective gains that could be obtained from further progress against major diseases. Kevin M. Murphy and Robert H. Topel, two University of Chicago researchers, estimate that even modest advancements against major diseases would have a significant impact ?a 1 percent reduction in mortality fr...

Mobile phone use not linked to increased risk of glioma brain tumours

Mobile phones are not associated with an increased risk of the most common type of brain tumour, finds the first UK study of the relationship between mobile phone use and risk of glioma. The results are published online by the BMJ today. The four year study by the Universities of Leeds, Nottingham and Manchester and the Institute of Cancer Research, London found those who had regularly use...

The Amazon in 2050: Implementing the law could save a million square kilometers of rainforest

Economic and political forces are rapidly transforming the forests of the Amazon basin, precipitating one of the world's greatest environmental crises. Through an inter-discplinary modeling project known as Amazon Scenarios, scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center, the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil), and the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (Brazil), with col...

Carbon cycle was already disrupted millions of years ago

Dutch researcher Yvonne van Breugel analysed rocks from seabeds millions of years old. Carbon occurs naturally in two stable forms; atomic mass 12 (99 percent) and atomic mass 13 (1 percent). Episodes in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods were characterised by a relatively strong increase in 12C. The analyses have shown that this was caused by a sudden large-scale release of carbon from stocks s...

Multi-million pound UK Biobank underway

UK Biobank, a visionary medical project aimed at improving the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and many other serious conditions is launched this week after several years of meticulous planning. Up to three thousand people living in the south Manchester area are being given the opportunity to trailblaze the project before it goes nationwide later this...

Exposure to volcanic mineral associated with increased mesothelioma incidence in Turkey

High exposure to a fibrous volcanic mineral called erionite was associated with a high incidence of a type of cancer called mesothelioma, according to a study in the March 15 issue of the Many cases of environment-related mesothelioma have been reported in the Cappadocia region or Anatolian plateau of Turkey. Blocks of erionite from volcani...

'Dead zone' summer killed billions of ocean state mussels

Fish kills, foul odors and closed beaches hit Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay during the summer of 2001. The culprit was hypoxia, or oxygen depletion, which literally suffocates sea life. While some evidence of this "dead zone" could be seen on the bay's surface, Brown University ecologists went underwater and discovered a massive mussel die-off. In a survey of nine mussel reefs located in...

Ancient ants arose 140-168 million years ago

Scientists have used mass spectrometry for decades to determine the chemical composition of samples but rarely has it been used to identify viruses, and never in complex environmental samples. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health recently demonstrated that proteomic mass spectrometry has the potential to be applied for this purpose. Using a two-step process,...

Amber reveals ecology of 30 million year old spiders

Scientists at The University of Manchester and the Manchester Metropolitan University have carried out the first comparative scientific study of ancient spiders trapped in amber more than 30 millions years ago. The study of fossilised spiders from the Baltic (Poland) and the Dominican (Caribbean) regions has revealed new insights into the ecologies of spiders dating back to the Cenozoic pe...

Value of services performed by insects tops $57 billion in US

Think twice before you blithely swat, stomp, curse or ignore insects, says Cornell University entomologist John Losey, who co-authored a study that shows the dollar value of some of those insect services is more than $57 billion in the United States annually. The research appears in the journal BioScience today (April 1). "Most insects tirelessly perform functions that improve our environm...

Survivors of childhood polio do well decades later as they age

Mayo Clinic researchers have found that years after experiencing childhood polio, most survivors do not experience declines greater than expected in their elderly counterparts, but rather experience only modest increased weakness which may be commensurate with normal aging. "Other researchers have suggested that polio is a more aggressive condition later in life, but we've actually found...

New study calculates millions of years saved in lives of AIDS patients

This year, the U.S. federal government will spend $21 billion for HIV/AIDS research, treatment, prevention, and related activities. Is this enormous expenditure paying off? A study published in the July 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online, indicates that it is--and more so than previously thought. The study, by Rochelle P. Walensky, MD, MPH, Kenneth Freedber...

Scientists resuscitate a 5 million-year-old retrovirus

A team of scientists has reconstructed the DNA sequence of a 5-million-year-old retrovirus and shown that it is able to produce infectious particles. The retrovirus--named Phoenix--is the ancestor of a large family of mobile DNA elements, some of which may play a role in cancer. The study, which is the first to generate an infectious retrovirus from a mobile element in the human genome, is cons...