Efforts to mitigate patient discomfort during and after medical treatments has focused on making procedures less invasive. For instance, laparoscopic surgery, using specially designed tools which allow much smaller incisions, has been used when possible to greatly reduce recovery and healing times. Now physicians are developing a therapy that may one day cut healing time by helping the body to heal wounds faster.
Fat may have finally met its match: laser light. Researchers have shown, for the first time, that a laser can preferentially heat lipid-rich tissues, or fat, in the body without harming the overlying skin. Laser therapies based on the new research could treat a variety of health conditions, including severe acne, atherosclerotic plaque, and unwanted cellulite.
A bacterium that lives in rivers, streams and human aqueducts uses nature’s strongest glue to stay in one place, according to new research by Indiana University Bloomington and Brown University scientists reported in next week’s (April 11) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
By injecting human stem cells into laboratory mice and creating various human tissues, researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed a way to conduct “human” drug trials on animals. Conducting trials on the human cell tissue carried by the mice gives scientists an indication of whether to even proceed with human trials — and what to expect when they are undertaken.
Anyone who has ever been told by their doctor to steer clear of certain foods, lower their calorie intake or cut down on salt knows just how hard it can be to avoid temptation and stay motivated. A virtual healthcare assistant is being developed to offer a guiding hand.
Researchers supported by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, part of the National Institutes of Health, report today their initial success using a customized optical device that allows dentists to visualize in a completely new way whether a patient might have a developing oral cancer.
Researchers said they have achieved near-frictionless motion in water by using lasers to spin a molecule like a propeller. Free rotation can occur in gases, where molecules are far apart. This is the first known demonstration of friction turning off in a room temperature liquid, the authors report in the March 31 issue of Science.
Hanging above the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) – one of our closest galaxies – in what some describe as a frightening sight, the Tarantula nebula is worth looking at in detail. Also designated 30 Doradus or NGC 2070, the nebula owes its name to the arrangement of its brightest patches of nebulosity that somewhat resemble the legs of a spider. This name, of the biggest spiders on Earth, is also very fitting in view of the gigantic proportions of the celestial nebula — it measures nearly 1,000 light years across!
How do we process numbers? A new project from the Austrian Science Fund – FWF hopes to find the complex answer to this seemingly simple question by building on the recent findings of a team from Innsbruck. These show that while children and adults are equally good at processing numbers, they actually use different regions of the brain to do so. The new project is now comparing the cerebral activity of children with and without numeracy deficits in order to arrive at a deeper knowledge of children’s numerical and spatial magnitude processing.
Hypomagnesemia, oxidative stress, inflammation, and metabolic syndrome.
Guerrero-Romero F, Rodriguez-Moran M.
Medical Research Unit in Clinical Epidemiology, Mexican Social Security Institute, Research Group on Diabetes and Chronic Illnesses, Durango, Mexico.
Who says scientists don’t have a sense of humor? Imke de Pater, Heidi B. Hammel, Seran G. Gibbard, and Mark R. Showalter published an article about the color of the outermost rings of Uranus in the 7 April 2006 issue of Science, one of the world’s most widely-read and important scientific journals, and they gave it a subtitle drawn from Dr. Seuss.
Fully open access scientific journals will not exist until the full review process is made available to the readership and reviewers are identified.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has announced the approval of a device for the treatment of fetuses with twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. TTTS is a rare disorder of the placenta that sometimes occurs when women are pregnant with identical twins. In it, one twin receives too much blood, and the other too little.