Prolactin, a naturally occurring peptide hormone needed for milk production following pregnancy, has been found to play a major role in the development and spread of breast cancer. More recently, Dr. Charles Clevenger, the same researcher who first demonstrated the scope and mechanism of prolactins role in cancer, has discovered that prolactin functions directly inside the cell, not merely by sending signals across the cell membrane as had been assumed for it and all other peptide hormones.
Dutch epidemiologists have calculated that partial vaccination can stop outbreaks of swine fever. What’’s more, mother sows do not need to be vaccinated. The research was carried out at the Institute for Animal Science and Health, Lelystad, and Utrecht University.
PhD student Don Klinkenberg calculated that partial vaccinations do not exceed the limit for the outbreak of an epidemic. If the mother sows are not vaccinated, the spread of the swine fever is limited to transfer to less than on
Scientists have uncovered a supermassive black hole at the core of a svelte, spiral galaxy, a finding that questions a recently devised rule of thumb in which only galaxies with bulging cores have such black holes.
Dr. Alex Filippenko, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and Dr. Luis Ho, an astronomer at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, in Pasadena, discuss these results in the May 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
A new technique may allow physicians to monitor patients responses to molecularly targeted drugs, according to researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) *. The finding was one of three advances in proteomics – the study of proteins within cells – scheduled to be announced by researchers from the NCI-FDA Clinical Proteomics Program in a press briefing at the 94th Annual American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting, which was
In the May 2003 issue of EMBO reports, researchers from the German Robert Koch Institute in Berlin report finding the pathological prion protein PrPSc in a wide range of skeletal muscles after feeding hamsters with prion-infected food. PrPSc is believed to be an essential – if not the sole – constituent of the agent that causes BSE in cattle, scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.
The researchers fed Syrian hamsters with food pellets that contained mashed-up brain tissue f
Nanowires and carbon nanotubes, each with their pluses and minuses, are advertised as the next-generation building blocks for electronic circuits a thousand times smaller than today’s semiconductor circuits.
Peidong Yang, a University of California, Berkeley, chemist, has now fabricated a new type of nanotube, made of gallium nitride, that, he says, “captures some of the great properties from nanowires and carbon nanotubes, and eliminates the not-so-good characteristics of both.
“E