Authors of an article in this week’s issue of THE LANCET-the first of a series of four articles assessing the role of the pharmaceutical industry in medicine-are critical of the way in which multinational pharmaceutical companies manipulate the provision of information, and say that this contributes to a distortion of medical research.
Joe Collier and Ike Iheanacho from Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin, London, UK, comment on how the pharmaceutical industry spends more time and resources o
Just as matter can be converted into energy, so too can energy become matter. That’s what five-dozen Jefferson Lab researchers were counting on for an experiment in Hall A
Albert Einstein figured it out by 1905, as he was formulating his special theory of relativity: while you can’t exactly get something from nothing, you can come close. His famous formula, E=MC 2 , works both ways. Just as matter can be converted into energy, so too can energy become matter.
That’s
Nitric oxide is a natural part of the body’s immune defense. Linköping University researcher Thomas Schön has studied this compound in connection with the skin disease leprosy and the lung disease tuberculosis. The Swedish researcher has found that nitric oxide probably contributes to the disease in the case of leprosy but, on the other hand, plays a positive role in protecting against tuberculosis. This role can be reinforced by adding a supplement of arginine, which is found in peanuts, for example
As cable companies and Internet access providers compete for customers by offering broadband service, cable modems and digital subscriber lines (DSLs) as faster access to the Web, slower download speeds sometimes prompt greater user response than faster download speeds, a study says.
Dr. S. Shyam Sundar, associate professor of communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State, and Carson Wagner, assistant professor of advertising at the University of Texa
Extreme cold and high heat help optimize the metal’s microstructure
Combining old-fashioned metal-working techniques with modern nanotechnology, engineers at The Johns Hopkins University have produced a form of pure copper metal that is six times stronger than normal, with no significant loss of ductility.
The achievement, reported in the Oct. 31 issue of the journal “Nature,” is important because earlier attempts to strengthen a pure metal such as copper have almost always
VLT UVES Observes Most Metal-Deficient Star Known [1]
A faint star in the southern Milky Way, designated HE 0107-5240, has been found to consist virtually only of hydrogen and helium. It has the lowest abundance of heavier elements ever observed, only 1/200,000 of that of the Sun – 20 times less than the previous record-holding star.
This is the result of a major ongoing research project by an international team of astronomers [2] . It is based on a decade-lon