A new approach to building an “artificial nose” — using fluorescent compounds and DNA — could accelerate the use of sniffing sensors into the realm of mass production and widespread use, say Stanford chemists. If their method lives up to its p…
WASHINGTON — A new simulation of oil and methane leaked into the Gulf of Mexico suggests that deep hypoxic zones or “dead zones” could form near the source of the pollution. The research investigates five scenarios of oil and methane plumes at dif…
TEMPE, Ariz. — If you have ever felt that your children are your life’s work, then you may in fact be recognizing a high-level psychological need. Caring for your children, feeding them, nurturing them, educating them and making sure they get…
The epidemic of HIV/AIDS in India is following the same pattern as that of sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s, and it could become just as devastating unless preventive action is taken now, according to researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, in a paper to be published Saturday (June 21) in the British Medical Journal. “In hindsight, opportunities were missed to stem the explosive growth of AIDS in Africa,” says Dr. Malcolm Potts, professor of population and family planning at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and lead author of the paper. “It would be a tragedy if we don’t apply the lessons learned from the failure to control the spread of HIV in Africa to the current situation in India. It is very painful to watch history repeating itself.”
Doctors are far more wary of pharmaceutical companies’ aggressive marketing than generally believed and don’t easily yield to pressure to switch prescriptions, according to a paper being presented at a conference of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. “Are physicians easy marks?” ask Natalie Mizik of Columbia University and Robert Jacobson of the University of Washington in a paper of the same name. “To the contrary, our results show that physicians are “tough sells” in that sales force activity has modest to very small influence on prescribing behavior.”
A remarkable range of antibiotics under development may compromise our natural defences against infection, warns McGill evolutionary biologist Graham Bell. His paper, entitled Arming the Enemy: the evolution of resistance to self-proteins and co-authored by Pierre-Henri Gouyon, was published in the journal Microbiology this week.
Researchers have invented a new technique for producing “Ultra High Density Nanowire Lattices and Circuits.” The method, for which a patent is pending, is akin to intaglio printmaking processes in which printing is done from ink below the surface of the plate. Intaglio processes emboss paper into the plate’s incised lines. The CNSI nanowires are like the embossed ink on a paper substrate, except that the nanowires are much, much smaller than ink lines. Take, for instance, a grid of crossed nanowires. Each cross represents the element of a simple circuit. The nanowire junction density reported in the “Science Express” article is in excess of 1011 per square centimeter.
The ecological importance of phytoplankton, microscopic plants that free-float through the world’s oceans, is well known. Among their key roles, the one-celled organisms are the major source of sustenance for animal life in the seas. Now, researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego say that phytoplankton exert a significant and previously uncalculated influence on Earth’s climate.