Life Sciences and Chemistry

The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, funded by the National Science Foundation and the State of Florida, has achieved another world record in magnet development with the successful testing of its 21.1 Tesla, superconducting, ultra-wide bore, NMR magnet. The magnet reached full field on July 21, 2004, and will remain at field for years — and even decades — to come. A team of engineers headed by Denis Markiewicz, Tom Painter, Iain Dixon, and Jim Ferner at the NHMFL developed, designed, manuf

Researchers have discovered a possible inherited component for lung cancer, a disease normally associated with external causes, such as cigarette smoking. An interdisciplinary consortium consisting of 12 research institutions and universities, including the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), both part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), identified a major lung cancer susceptibility region on a segment of chromosome 6. The findings appear

Competing theories about why brain cells die in Huntington’s disease may not be competitors after all, according to a report published July 23, 2004, in the early online edition of the Annals of Neurology.

Researchers report finding minor molecular abnormalities of the sort proposed by these different theories in cells throughout the brain and even in the skin. Yet only select groups of cells in a few movement centers of the brain are so vulnerable to these disruptions that they degener

A research study published this week has for the first time identified the specific precursor stem cell that gives rise not only to the important cells lining our blood vessels but also the blood itself.

Dr. Mick Bhatia and his colleagues at Robarts Research Institute in London, Ontario, had demonstrated last year that human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) can make blood cells; and they and others have known for some time that there is a connection between the development of the blood an

For many years, engineers have worked to efficiently filter valuable bio-process products on an industrial economic scale. The challenge has been to push rates up without incurring high shear rates and resultant cell lysis, which would cause loss of yield. High shear can destroy delicate and valuable biological materials such as proteins, blood, algae and yeasts, and also brings with it a requirement for higher flow rates, which in turn raises pumping costs.

Inventors at the University of Ox

Obscure mathematical ideas developed back in the 1980s could solve current problems of mixing fluids at the microscale, and revolutionise the technology, reports an article in Science.

The need to mix fluids at the microscale affects a whole range of developing technologies – from inkjet printers to DNA analysis – and finding ways to do it is becoming big business. Millions of dollars have already been poured into ‘lab-on-a-chip’ projects, but making miniature labs is not just a question o