World

RNA project to create language for scientists worldwide

Research into ribonucleic acids (RNA)--the building blocks of life--is exploding as scientists worldwide discover the roles of RNA in genetics, health, disease and the development of organisms. The rapidly growing body of knowledge has created the need for researchers to develop a shared vocabulary and system for describing, cataloging and comparing their findings. An international team of...

World's largest rainforest drying experiment completes first phase

Scientists with The Woods Hole Research Center are analyzing the surprising results of the first phase of a drydown experiment occurring in the Amazonian rainforest. From January 2000 to July 2004, rainfall was excluded from a one-hectare (2.2 acre) plot in the middle of the Tapajós National Forest, in Brazil. A total of 6 feet of rainfall was diverted with six thousand 2' by 6' clear plas...

PCRM develops world's first cruelty-free insulin assay

If you're an organization dedicated to humane alternatives to the use of animals in research and you want to conduct research of your own that requires using animals as part of the testing, what do you do? In the case of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, you invent your own test. PCRM president Neal Barnard, M.D., announced today that PCRM has developed the world's first...

Harnessing microbes, one by one, to build a better nanoworld

Applied Biosystems (NYSE:ABI), an Applera Corporation business, today announced the introduction of the Applied Biosystems Advanced Gene Expression Service Provider Program, a new program for service providers who are interested in accessing Applied Biosystems comprehensive solution for gene expression analysis, including the highly sensitive Expression Array System for whole genome analysis and...

World-first Living Donor Islet Cell Transplant A Success; Procedure Offers Promise For Diabetics

A University of Alberta and Capital Health surgeon, well known for his pioneering work in developing the Edmonton Protocol treatment for diabetes, has taken another important step in the fight against diabetes. On January 19, at Kyoto University Hospital, Dr. Koichi Tanaka and Dr. James Shapiro, along with a team of Japanese surgeons, removed part of a 56-year-old woman's pancreas. Dr. Sh...

New Estimates For The Causes Of Child Deaths Worldwide

The most accurate estimates of the causes of child deaths to date, published in the March 26, 2005 of THE LANCET, reveal that worldwide more than 70% of the 10.6 million child deaths that occur annually are attributable to six causes: pneumonia (19%), diarrhoea (18%), malaria (8%), neonatal sepsis or pneumonia (10%), preterm delivery (10%), and asphyxia at birth (8%). Robert Black (Johns H...

Scientists journey to southern Africa to unravel the secret world of elephant communication

It's a cloudless July afternoon in Etosha National Park in northern Namibia, and ecologist Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell is scanning the horizon for elephants. "It's so fantastic here," she says. "We're constantly seeing elephants, rhinos, zebras, ostriches--it's the Garden of Eden." A research associate in the Stanford University School of Medicine, O'Connell-Rodwell has come to one of Afric...

New World founders small in number

About 14,000 years ago - a few hundred thousand years after our putative modern forebears spread out from Africa - descendants of archaic humans crossed the Bering land bridge from Siberia to North America. Several lines of evidence support this model, but that's where the consensus ends and the details are hotly debated. In a paper published in the premier open-access journal PLoS Biology, Jody...

OneWorld Health drug receives 'Orphan' designation from U.S. and European regulatory agencies

The Institute for OneWorld Health, the first nonprofit pharmaceutical company in the U.S., announced today it has received Orphan Drug Designation from the two leading regulatory agencies in the world, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products (EMEA), for paromomycin to treat visceral leishmaniasis (VL). VL, also known as kala a...

Measles Deaths Worldwide Drop By Nearly 40% Over Five Years

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) today announced that countries are on target to halve deaths from measles, a leading vaccine-preventable killer, by the end of this year. Global measles deaths have plummeted by 39%, from 873 000 in 1999 to an estimated 530 000 in 2003. The largest reduction occurred in Africa, the region with the highest...

Scientists map the world for nature conservation

For years, experts have been calling for an improved database that would enable them to develop more effective global nature conservation strategies. Botanists at the University of Bonn have now taken a major step in this direction with the publication, in the Journal of Biogeography, of a world map of plant biodiversity. The atlas is arranged in 867 zones, known as ecoregions. "This makes...

Ancient DNA helps clarify the origins of two extinct New World horse species

The Patagonian Hippidion horse genus and North American stilt-legged horses have found a new place on the evolutionary tree, according to a new article in the open access journal PLoS Biology. In the paper, Jaco Weinstock, Alan Cooper, and colleagues use ancient DNA to argue that the Hippidion genus is younger than previously thought and that American stilt-legged horses were American endemics, n...

UN: World in big ecological mess

The emergence of new diseases, sudden changes in water quality, creation of coastal "dead zones," the collapse of fisheries and shifts in regional climate are just some of the potential consequences of humankind's degradation of the planet's ecosystems, according to a new United Nations-backed report launched today. Humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively in the last 50...

IMF Launches World’s First DNA Database for Myeloma Patients

A biologist at Washington University in St. Louis has shown that for some fish species, females prefer males with larger sexual organs, and actually choose them for mating. That does not exclude males with an average-sized sex organ, called a gonopodium. These fish out-compete the larger-endowed males in a predator-laden environment because they have a faster burst speed than the males with large...

ORNL, UC Berkeley unravel real-world clues to Earth's mysteries

A microbial community thriving under bizarre natural conditions in California could be a gold mine to researchers in their quest to understand the complex biological relationships and how these inner workings might apply on a grander scale. In a paper to appear today on Science Online, researchers from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Californi...

Breakthrough: Scientists create world's tiniest organic particles

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill chemists have developed what they believe is a breakthrough method of creating the world's tiniest manufactured particles for delivering drugs and other organic materials into the human body.Adapting technology pioneered by the electronics industry in fabricating transistors, the team has figured out for the first time how to create particles for carryi...

Helping in a selfish world

Billions of people tuned into recent Live 8 concert broadcasts, some just for the music, others to support the altruistic cause spearheaded by former Boomtown Rat, Sir Bob Geldof. In today's rat-race climate, what makes some of us look out for each other, while others look out for themselves? According to evolutionary theory, natural selection has designed individuals to behave selfishishl...

World-first technology enables study of ancient bacteria

Experts at Cardiff University, UK, have designed world-first technology to investigate sustainable energy sources from the ocean bed by isolating ancient high-pressure bacteria from deep sediments. Scientists and engineers at Cardiff University are investigating bacteria from deep sediments which despite high pressures (greater than 1,000 atmospheres), gradually increasing temperatures (fr...

Results of world's first gene therapy trial for arthritis show approach safe, feasible

Gene therapy for arthritis and other non-terminal, debilitating conditions and diseases is both feasible and safe, report researchers who conducted the world's first such test on the approach in patients with advanced rheumatoid arthritis. The results, published in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), indicate that introducing a new gene has th...

Researchers report breakthrough against world’s deadliest viruses

Scientists from the Public Health Agency of Canada - with assistance from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases - have developed vaccines against the Ebola and Marburg viruses that have been shown to be effective in non-human primates. In a study published in this month's Nature Medicine, Canadian researchers Dr. Heinz Feldmann and Dr. Steven Jones of PHAC's Nati...

Environmental lessons from tsunami as world's coastal population doubles

Coastal populations and ecosystems are more likely to bounce back from extreme coastal disasters by protecting local environments and building on local knowledge, according to a report published in Science. And the aftermath of the Asian tsunami has given valuable insight into handling extreme coastal disasters - inevitable as the world's coastal population is set to double by 2030 and glo...

New plant DNA libraries provides massive boost to world's plant researchers

Researchers at the University of Warwick's horticultural research arm Warwick HRI have created an extensive new range of libraries of plant DNA that will provide a massive boost to the world's plant researchers. The new collection of DNA libraries is the largest of its type in the world and will provide researchers with a unique resource. The Warwick researchers have set up a new spin out...

Biologist Discovers What May Be World’s ‘Pickiest?Mates

A study conducted by a biologist at the University of California, San Diego that appears in the August issue of the journal Animal Behaviour found that females of the species Uca crenulata may check out 100 or more male fiddler crabs and their burrows before finally deciding on a mate. “As far as I know, no other species has been observed sampling nearly as many candidates as the Californi...

Scientists must offer solutions for conserving tropical forests in a rapidly changing world

As the future of the tropics unfolds, scientists must explain the dimensions and mechanisms of forest responses to rapid human-population increase and environmental changesAs human populations and their impacts on the world increase, tropical forests are changing in many different ways. Forests are being cleared, burned, logged, fragmented, and overhunted and an unprecedented pace, and they are...

HIV drug resistance increasing in UK and among highest in the world

Those infected with HIV in the UK have one of the highest rates of resistance to anti-HIV drugs of anywhere in the world, prompting fears of a second wave epidemic of resistant virus, a new study claims in this week's BMJ. The study authors are concerned that the large reductions in deaths and improvements to health since people with HIV were given combinations of drugs (combination antire...

Ancient trans-Atlantic swarm brought locusts to the New World

Somewhere between three and five million years ago, a massive swarm of locusts took off from the west coast of Africa and made an unlikely voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to colonize the New World, says an international team of researchers. Using genetic evidence from more than 20 species of locusts, scientists from the Universities of Toronto, Arizona, Maryland, Cornell University and th...

A New Era of Hope for the World's Most Neglected Diseases

International health agencies have designated a group of 13 tropical infections as neglected diseases (Kala-azar (leishmaniasis), African Sleeping Sickness (African trypanosomiasis), Chagas Disease (American trypanosomiasis), Schistosomiasis, Lymphatic Filariasis (elephantiasis), Onchocerciasis (river blindness), Drancunculiasis (guinea worm), Soil-transmitted Helminthiases, Leprosy, Buruli Ulcer...

New book highlights world's borderless conservation areas

Publication emphasizes global focus on protecting Earth's ecosystems across national boundariesNature knows no borders, according to a new book released today by CEMEX, Conservation International, and Agrupacion Sierra Madre. "Transboundary Conservation: A New Vision for Protected Areas," describes in detail new strategies of shared environmental responsibility for keeping important wilde...

Some good news for the world's poor

Millions of poor rice farmers and consumers in Asia have received a little good news just in time for Christmas. While the world's trading nations remain deadlocked on how to move ahead with agricultural reforms that could benefit the poor farmers of the developing world, research just published has confirmed details of a proven strategy to reduce poverty in the planet's two most populous...

New study of the world's smallest elephant

The world's smallest elephant species, the newly described Bornean elephant, will be the focus of a Cardiff University study in Sabah, Malaysia for the next three years. The Bornean elephant has recently been confirmed as a separate sub-species, dramatically increasing its importance for biodiversity. Bornean elephants are the world's most endangered member of the elephant family with an...

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...

Predators keep the world green, ecologists find

Predators are, ironically, the key to keeping the world green, because they keep the numbers of plant-eating herbivores under control, reports a research team lead by John Terborgh, a professor of environmental science at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences. Their findings confirm the answer to one of ecology's oldest and thorniest questions: why is the...

Sustainable farm practices improve Third World food production

Crop yields on farms in developing countries that used sustainable agriculture rose nearly 80 percent in four years, according to a study scheduled for publication in the Feb. 15 issue of the American Chemical Society journal . The study, the largest of its kind to date -- 286 farm projects in 57 countries -- concludes that sustainable agriculture p...

World faces challenge as life expectancies lengthen, scientist says

In the 21st century, state-of-the-art anti-aging technologies may extend human lifespans at an unprecedented rate, bringing with them a host of social and economic challenges, says biologist Shripad Tuljapurkar of Stanford University. The combined impact of these medical advances would have major implications for the global community in the new century. Tuljapurkar, the Dean and Virginia M...

Nano machine switches between biological and silicon worlds

"Frankly, some researchers didn't think what we were attempting was possible," says Dr Keith Firman, at Portsmouth University and Mol-Switch project coordinator, funded under the European Commission's Future and Emerging Technologies initiative. "However, we got our molecular switch to work." The upshot is that the Mol-Switch project was far more successful than expected. The team's switch...

The world's deepest dinosaur finding - 2256 metres below the seabed

While most nations excavate their skeletons using a toothbrush, the Norwegians found one using a drill. The somewhat rough uncovering of Norway's first dinosaur happened in the North Sea, at an entire 2256 metres below the seabed. It had been there for nearly 200 million years, ever since the time the North Sea wasn't a sea at all, but an enormous alluvial plane. It is merely a coincidence...

Scientists a step closer to protecting world's most important crop

Fighting the fungus that wipes out rice - scientists a step closer to protecting world's most important crop Rice is the globe's most important crop but its production is constantly threatened by disease.Now scientists at the University of Exeter have shown for the first time, in a paper in the prestigious journal Nature, how the world's most destructive rice-killer hijacks its plant prey....

World's pledge to halve hunger by 2015 looks like empty promise

Almost 200 countries agreed in 1990 to cut worldwide hunger in half by 2015. That commitment is now looking like an empty promise -- all talk and no action -- according to a Cornell University expert on world hunger. If business proceeds as usual, just as many people will be hungry in the world -- 800 million -- in 2015 as there were 16 years ago, said Per Pinstrup-Andersen, Cornell's Babc...

Laos ?a lost world for frogs

Frogs and lots of them are being discovered in the Southeast Asia nation of Lao PDR, according to the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society, which says that six new frog species have been found by scientists over a two-year period. Working in conjunction with the WCS Laos Program, scientists describe the latest three species in the recent issue of Copeia, the journal of the Americ...

World first research to speed up cure for ear infections

Fast tracking the healing process for common ear infections will be the focus of ground-breaking research by WA's Lions Ear and Hearing Institute (LEHI). According to the Wo...