five in Biological News

McGill University receives almost $63 million under CFI program to support five research projects

This release is available in French . Dr. Denis Thrien, Vice-Principal (Research and International Relations) of McGill University today welcomed the Canada Foundation for Innovation's (CFI) investment of $32,649,184 supporting five projects led by Dr. David Plant, Dr. Paul Lasko, Dr. Davi...

TECNALIA leads five projects within the VII Framework Program

The TECNALIA Technological Corporation is leading five projects within the VII Framework Programme with regard to the simulation of cement materials, nanomaterials for building safer aircraft, communications and mobility services, efficient management of fisheries resources and new models of produ...

Allergy battle could be won in five years, says scientist

Researchers, working with colleagues at St George's, University of London, are developing drugs designed to stop allergens from entering the body, so rendering them harmless. Professor David Garrod said the research ?recently shortlisted for the Northwest Regional Development Agency's Bionow Pro...

Hunger in America rises by 43 percent over last five years

Hunger in American households has risen by 43 percent over the last five years, according to an analysis of US Department of Agriculture (USDA) data released today. The analysis, completed by the Center on Hunger and Poverty at Brandeis University, shows that more than 7 million people have joined ...

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 estim...

Increased risk of osteoporosis associated with gene that one in five people have

About nineteen percent of people have a genetic variation that may increase susceptibility to osteoporosis, a new study reveals. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis demonstrated that in women the variant gene speeds up the breakdown of estrogen and is associated wit...

Ophthalmologists implant five patients with artificial silicon retina microchip

Ophthalmologists at Rush University Medical Center implanted Artificial Silicon Retina (ASR) microchips in the eyes of five patients to treat vision loss caused by retinitis pigmentosa (RP). The implant is a silicon microchip 2mm in diameter and one-thousandth of an inch thick, less than the thickn...

NIH stimulus funding supports Emory biomedical scientists

...d epilepsy. In addition to research grants, NIH provided funding for Emory scientists to hire eight high school students, 22 college students, and five teachers for summer research positions. Emory's stimulus grant funding is highlighted at http://www.emory.edu/home/research/stimulus/ The NIH ...

Mary had a lot of lambs: Researchers identify way to accelerate sheep breeding

...No. 8), may be a boon for the sheep industry worldwide, especially when combined with the Sheep Program's STAR system a method to manage ewes to lamb five times in three years rather than once a year. "The primary biological limit for sheep production worldwide is the seasonality of breeding, but the ...

Climbing to new heights in the forest canopy

...in to be answered. Climbing plants vary in their mode of attachment to their supporting structures. They have traditionally been classified into five categories based on their mode of attachment: twining plants like morning glories, leaf-climbers like clematis, tendril-bearers like grapevines, root-...

University of Hawaii at Manoa researchers reveal ocean acidification at Station ALOHA

... the atmosphere. However, that rate of change varied considerably on seasonal and inter-annual timescales, and even reversed for one period of nearly five years. The year-to-year changes appear to be driven by climate-induced changes in ocean mixing and attendant biological responses to mixing events. ...

'Green' energy from algae

..., this is not their only advantage: "Compared to land plants, algae produce five times as much biomass per hectare and contain 30 to 40% oil usable for ener...entist. "Our plants convert solar energy into biomass, the efficiency being five times higher than that in open ponds." The plates in usual photo-bioreactor...

Understanding how weeds are resistant to herbicides

...a relatively cheaply and quickly, so it's worthwhile doing in some of these non-model species like weeds. We're able to start generating data now that five years ago would have been cost-prohibitive." Tranel believes waterhemp is the first weed to be partially sequenced using this technology. The pyrose...

Plankton Power and RTDC announce proposed algae-to-biofuels pilot facility on Cape Cod

...xisting petroleum- and vegetable-based fuels, with improved performance characteristics. The planned biorefinery is proposed for construction on five acres of land on the Massachusetts Military Reservation (MMR) in Bourne, Massachusetts, supported by the Massachusetts National Guard pending legal an...

Hybrid vehicle rebates produce scant environmental benefits, high cost

... Hybrid rebate programs are currently offered by the governments of the U.S. and 13 states, including Washington, Oregon, Illinois and Colorado, and five Canadian provinces, including B.C., Ontario, Quebec, PEI and Manitoba. The Canadian government offered hybrid rebates during 2007-2008. Researchers...

Race/ethnicity, family income and education associated with sugar consumption

...---the first such analysis with US national data. In addition, it was possible to examine factors within subpopulations defined by race/ethnicity. The five subpopulations analyzed differ from each other in many respects, several of which are related to added sugars intake. Thus, the ability to disentangle...

New hope for fisheries

... University of Washington and including an international team of 19 co-authors, shows that steps taken to curb overfishing are beginning to succeed in five of the ten large marine ecosystems that they examined. The paper, which appears in the July 31 issue of the journal Science , provides new hope for r...

August 2009 Geology and GSA Today media highlights

...e avulsion location can be predicted by finding the location on the levee that has experienced the greatest stress for the longest period of time. For five different experimental deltas, they were able to predict the avulsion location with 93% accuracy. These results represent the first mechanistic unders...

Global curbs on overfishing are beginning to work

...sie University and Dr Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington. The study shows that steps taken to curb overfishing are beginning to succeed in five of the 10 large marine ecosystems they examined. The paper, which appears in the 31 July issue of the journal Science , provides new hope for rebuild...

U of M study identifies risk factors of disordered eating in overweight youth

...c year. Youth were surveyed at two time points; the first occurring when participants were in middle school and high school, and the second occurring five years later. Researchers found that disordered eating habits among overweight youth are linked to specific tendencies for both males and females, b...

Recovery act-funded research projects aid communities across the country

... In the five months since passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), thousands of research-related awards have been made, supporting imp...

Reducing risk of hospitalization in the elderly

...non-disabled adults between the ages of 70 and 80, for an average of almost five years. They measured their physical function in a number of ways including ...economic burden associated with hospitalization of the elderly." One in five Americans over the age of 65 suffers from sarcopenia. In 2000 the direct he...

University of Toronto helps to 'barcode' the world's plants

...diversity is crucial to long-term human existence on the planet." DNA barcoding has been widely used to identify animal species since its invention five years ago. But its use for plants was delayed because of the complex nature of plant genetics and disagreements over the appropriate DNA regions to us...

Study shows cancer vaccines led to long-term survival for patients with metastatic melanoma

... (dendritic cells) and 500 micrograms of granulocyte-colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF), an immune stimulator, three times a week and then monthly for five months for a total of up to eight injections. The patient's dendritic cells were obtained from their peripheral blood and mixed with a cell culture of...

Biologists rediscover endangered frog population

... of California, Berkeley. During that expedition, which covered all elevations and faces of the San Jacinto Mountain region, the frog was collected at five sites. The San Diego Natural History Museum's team is searching for all species of vertebrates animals with a backbone in a study of biological chan...

Researchers team up to provide new hope for childhood hunger

...vels of iron have been increased 4X. Led by GHA scientists, teams will field-test improved cassava varieties in Kenya and Nigeria during the next five years. Through the efforts of the Danforth Center and its collaborators, the improved varieties could potentially be widely available in Africa within...

All-in-1 nanoparticle: A Swiss Army knife for nanomedicine

...o attach biological molecules that target particular cells, such as tumor cells. Gold could also potentially amplify the quantum dot's fluorescence by five to 10 times, as it has in other cases. The gold sphere offers one further benefit. Gold is biocompatible, is medically approved and does not biodegr...

Smaller than expected, but severe, dead zone in Gulf of Mexico

...educe nutrient runoff." The average size of the dead zone over the past five years, including this cruise, is now 6,000 square miles. The interagency Gu...d zone average to 2,000 square miles or less by 2015. The Task Force uses a five year average due to relatively high interannual variability. The dead zo...

URI researcher sheds light on 'man-eating' squid; finds them timid, nonthreatening

...ve, he turned off the light. When he turned it back on again 30 seconds later, he was surrounded by what seemed like hundreds of the squid, many just five or six feet away from him. Most were in the 3-4 foot size range, while larger ones were sometimes visible in deeper waters. But the light appeared t...

DOE-funded research projects win 46 R&D 100 Awards for 2009

...ke conventional wires, which lowers heat loss and eliminates energy loss, making longer transmission lengths possible. Superconducting wires can carry five times more power than copper cables and are capable of long-distance power transmission, interconnecting entire continents and providing local energy ...

URI researcher sheds light on 'man-eating' squid; finds them timid, non-threatening

...ve, he turned off the light. When he turned it back on again 30 seconds later, he was surrounded by what seemed like hundreds of the squid, many just five or six feet away from him. Most were in the 3-4 foot size range, while larger ones were sometimes visible in deeper waters. But the light appeared t...

$2 million grant aids study of lung cancer in people who never smoked

...'s Nancy B. and Jake L. Hamon Center for Therapeutic Oncology Research, is the principal investigator for the EDRN project, which will be conducted at five sites across the country. "We know that smoking-related cancers are heavily dependent on how much one smokes. The more you smoke, the greater the ...

UK bioscience sparkles with new Diamond fellowship

...le the major challenges we face." The Fellowships, lasting from three to five years, allow researchers to concentrate exclusively on conducting world-cla... Institute and will be carrying out research relevant to food security. five Research Development Fellows - a scheme that allows world-class UK research...

Negligible impact on public safety from shark cage diving operations

... A study by five university researchersincluding four from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoaconcludes that existing shark cage diving enterprises in Hawai'i have...

Reviews of microbial gene language published in special issue of Trends in Microbiology

...s of the many genes discovered by these initiatives. The Human Microbiome Project (HMP), for example, plans to extensively sequence the metagenomes of five human body sites and look for correlations between microbial communities and human health. Dr. Michelle Giglio, Assistant Professor at the Institute f...

Study explains potential failure of oral contraceptives with obese women

...ght eventually were about the same, but it took longer to achieve that level in very overweight women. The study showed it took an average of about five days for the drugs to achieve their maximum concentration in women of normal weight, an average of 10 days for obese women, and even longer than that ...

Early-life experience linked to chronic diseases later in life: UBC research

...rticipated in the study were either low or high in early-life socioeconomic circumstances related to income, education and occupation during the first five years of life. But the two groups were similar in socioeconomic status (SES) at the time the genome assessment was performed and also had similar life...

$20 million NIH grant to transform clinical research at UIC

... The National Institutes of Health has awarded a five year $20 million grant to the University of Illinois at Chicago's Center for Clinical and Translational Science. The grant is the largest in UIC's ...

Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology increases impact, international reach

... FAIRFAX, Va.The Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology 's quality and influence has remained consistently high over the past five years, and the increase in its impact factor to 2.217 in 2008 ranks JVIR in the top half of 90 radiology, nuclear medicine and medical imaging journal...

A 'heart healthy' diet and ongoing, moderate physical activity may protect against cognitive decline

...s -- fruit, vegetables, nut/legumes, whole grains, low-fat dairy, sodium, sweets, non-fish meat, and fish. Participants were ranked by DASH score into five groups, or quintiles. The researchers found that higher DASH scores were associated with higher scores for cognitive functioning at the beginning o...